Presiding Officers appoint covenant-response group
Episcopal News Service. July 11, 2007 [071107-01]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
Nine members of the Episcopal Church's Executive Council have been appointed to draft the Church's response to the first version of an Anglican covenant.
Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson made the appointments as called for in Executive Council Resolution INC021, passed at the council's June meeting in Parsippany, New Jersey.
The group is charged with writing a proposed response of the Executive Council to the draft Anglican covenant for the council, to be considered at its October 2007 meeting in Dearborn, Michigan.
Part of the material the members of the Covenant Response Drafting Group will consider as they work are the more than 400 comments the council received by way of a covenant study guide it published in mid-April. Although the deadline for comments based on the Council's covenant study guide has passed, the group's chair, Rosalie Simmonds Ballentine of the Diocese of the Virgin Islands, said responses are still coming into the General Convention office and will be considered. While the group is not actively soliciting more comment, she said "we would still be open to receiving [any additional comments]."
"I am grateful to the members of the drafting group for their willingness to continue this challenging work," Jefferts Schori said July 11. "Together we look for a thoughtful and well-reasoned response that reflects the diversity of opinion in the Episcopal Church."
Anderson said that the drafting group will also "design a process for continuing to gather input from the entire Episcopal Church to aid the Executive Council in its response to subsequent covenant drafts."
Ballentine said the drafting group members reflect "quite a cross section of our Church as represented on the Executive Council." Because of the church's diversity, she said, the group will do all it can to ensure that all voices are heard.
The group will work throughout the triennium as a primary resource to the International Concerns Standing Committee of the Executive Council and the Episcopal Church's members of the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) as they monitor the covenant process. Resolution A166, passed by the 75th General Convention in June 2006, called for such monitoring.
The resolution also said that the Episcopal Church supports the process of developing a covenant "that underscores our unity in faith, order, and common life in the service of God's mission." During the March meeting of the Executive Council, the members said that "responding to the draft covenant does not presuppose agreement with the terms and principles advanced in the draft."
The Windsor Report, released in October 2004, proposed an Anglican covenant as a possible way for the Anglican Communion to maintain unity amid differing viewpoints. The communion's Primates released the first draft during their February meeting in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, asking for comment from the communion's 38 provinces by January 1, 2008.
The drafting group's proposed response for the October Executive Council session is meant to meet the January 1 comment deadline "so that the voice of our Church will be heard in this process," Ballentine said.
It is expected that a revised version of the covenant will be presented to the 2008 Lambeth Conference of Bishops, to be followed by a final text that would be proposed to the 2009 meeting of the ACC. If the ACC adopts the text, it would offer it to the provinces for consideration.
The members of the Covenant Response Drafting Group are:
Ballentine, Kim Byham (Newark), the Rev. Dr. Lee Alison Crawford (Vermont), the Rev. Dr. Ian T. Douglas (Massachusetts), Canon Victoria L. Garvey (Chicago), the Rev. Canon Mark Harris (Delaware), the Rev. Winnie S. Varghese (New York), Ted M. Yumoto (San Joaquin) and Belton T. Zeigler (Upper South Carolina).
In related news this week, the Church of England's governing General Synod agreed July 8 to support the drawing up of a draft of an Anglican covenant.
The twice-yearly meeting of the synod approved by an estimated two-thirds majority a resolution that also noted that "such a process will only be concluded when any definitive text has been duly considered through the synodical processes of the provinces of the Communion."