Executive Council asks for comment on current Anglican covenant draft
Episcopal News Service. July 2, 2009 [070209-02]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
The Episcopal Church's Executive Council has asked General Convention deputations and their bishops to study and comment on the latest draft of a proposed Anglican covenant.
In May, the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) postponed an expected request that the Anglican Communion's 38 provinces consider adopting the Ridley Cambridge draft. The council said instead that it wanted the draft's Section 4, which contains a dispute-resolution process, to get more scrutiny and possibly be revised.
The Archbishop of Canterbury appointed a small working group to do that work. The members, all of whom served on the original Covenant Design Group, have solicited provincial responses by November 13, 2009. The working group will meet November 20-21 in London and report to the Standing Committee meeting December 15-18. The Standing Committee is a group of elected representatives of the ACC and the Primates Meeting.
A letter from Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson and Rosalie Ballentine, the Executive Council member who chairs the council's task force on the Anglican covenant, asks that responses must be turned in by September 1. The task force and the council will use the comments to formulate a response during its October meeting.
"We believe that this work will best be accomplished in light of work and resolutions passed at the 2009 General Convention, so we are asking that deputations make their responses following convention," they wrote in the letter.
Deputations and their bishops are being asked to pay particular attention to the draft's fourth section, "along with other thoughts and reactions to the draft as a whole."
The Rev. Canon Kenneth Kearon, secretary general of the Anglican Communion, said in a May 28 letter to the communion's provinces that the ACC was concerned "that Section 4 of that text had not been subject to the same degree of consultation with the provinces as the other three sections had."
"Accordingly the ACC requested that the text be referred to the provinces asking that Section 4 of the text be considered by each province to identify issues of unclarity or ambiguity in the text," he wrote.
The 2006 General Convention asked (via Resolution A166) the Executive Council to follow the development process of an Anglican covenant. The council has noted repeatedly that following the development process and offering feedback on draft texts does not imply the Episcopal Church will bind itself to the covenant in its final version.
The task force facilitated the church’s response to both the Nassau and St. Andrew's drafts of the Anglican covenant. The response to the first draft is available here. The response to the second draft second draft is here.
To guide the requested diocesan study on the Ridley Cambridge draft, the council's task force has developed a four-question study guide.
It is available in English here and in Spanish here.
The letters from Jefferts Schori, Anderson and Ballentine, and from Kearon are also available via those links, as is the ACC resolution asking for more study and a link to the covenant text online.