Executive Council commits Episcopal Church to more Anglican covenant dialogue
Episcopal News Service. October 28, 2007 [102807-03]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
Members of the Episcopal Church’s Executive Council on October 28 committed the Episcopal Church to the effort to perfect the current draft Anglican covenant “so that the resulting Covenant can be a beacon of hope for our common future.”
That commitment came in a roughly 5,200-word response available here.
The response says that the Episcopal Church is “prepared to consider a covenant that says who we are, what we wish to be for the world, and how we will model mutual responsibility and interdependence in the body of Christ. We believe we must be open to God’s doing a new thing among us; therefore, we remain open to explore such new possibilities in our common life while honoring established understandings.”
The response notes that “there are great differences of opinion about the draft Anglican Covenant in our church” and says that the intent of Episcopal Church’s response “is to set these various opinions before the Covenant Design Group and the Communion generally in a fair and open manner so that the many concerns and perspectives in The Episcopal Church can be understood and considered.”
The Windsor Report, released in October 2004, proposed a covenant as a way for the Anglican Communion to maintain unity amid differing viewpoints. The Primates received and discussed the draft during their February meeting in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. They then released both it and an accompanying report to the entire Communion, asking for comment from the 38 Anglican provinces by January 1.
Responses received thus far are available here.
The Council’s response acknowledges that “the recent actions of The Episcopal Church have been among the precipitating factors in the current movement to consider a covenant for the Anglican Communion.”
The Council response says that the Episcopal Church “deeply desires to maintain and strengthen the Anglican Communion.”
“Our hope is to achieve this end in a way that is consistent with our understanding of our identity and the identity of Anglicanism,” the response continues. “The Episcopal Church, as with the Executive Council, is not of one mind as to the efficacy of this particular Draft Covenant in either form or content. Furthermore, some parts of the Covenant have received broad endorsement within The Episcopal Church, whereas other parts have engendered vigorous debate and opposition.”
The concluding portion of the Council’s response notes that “some of our members consider the draft adequate as it stands,” but says that “the majority believe that we must work in the hope that the final form of this document will provide a better means of engaging one another respectfully and with mutual regard, as we seek to agree on essential matters of faith and order while celebrating our differences.”
Section-by-section discussion
After two-and-a-half pages of opening remarks, the Council’s response is organized according to the structure of the draft covenant itself and notes where there are differences of opinion in the Episcopal Church about the statements made in each section of the covenant.
Some of the stronger differences of opinion involved the covenant’s third section, titled Our Commitment to Confession of the Faith, which the response says has an “extra-creedal confessional nature” which “seems out of place and inconsistent with the larger document.”
“While the commitments contained in Section 3 are commendable, the language used for some of them is subject to various interpretations and misinterpretations,” the Council response says. “It seems to many of us unwise to place language of this sort within the Covenant without having a clear and agreed-upon definition of what these terms mean.”
Those terms include the phrases the phrase “biblically derived moral values” and “the vision of humanity received by and developed in the communion of member Churches.”
The response suggest that “it is disputes over concepts like these that have led to some of the current challenges before the Anglican Communion.”
“We doubt that using such terms in the body of the covenant without further definition would advance the interest of unity or a common understanding of what the terms mean and how they should be applied,” the response continues.
Much concern is noted in the covenant’s fifth section, titled Our Unity and Common Life, because “it focuses our unity almost entirely on the office of bishop.” The response notes that in the Episcopal Church “the exercise of episcope is always in relationship to the role and authority of the baptized” and that decisions are made by bishops, priests, deacons and lay people in a structured process.
“One of the principal defects in the Draft Covenant as perceived by many in The Episcopal Church is its failure to recognize effectively the voices of lay people, deacons and priests in the councils of the Anglican Communion,” the response notes. “In fact, even for those who accept the idea of a covenant, many reject the proposal of the increased role of primates alone as presented in this section.”
Most Episcopalians “would strongly prefer communion as based on relationships and shared participation in service to God’s mission” the response says, noting that “communion and unity are both gifts of God, not something that we create.”
The response says that the prospect of a loss of full status in the Communion outlined in the draft covenant “appears to be punitive and offers little opportunity for reconciliation.”
An Anglican covenant “can move the churches of the Anglican Communion to renew the sense of mutual responsibility and interdependence in the Body of Christ” and “make explicit the discipline of consultation, consensus and forbearance that has typified the Communion at its finest,” the response says. At the same time, it “might become the beginnings of a constitutional structure that would remake the plurality of churches of the world-wide Anglican Communion into a singular global church whose provinces are bound to as yet undisclosed limitations on autonomous action.”
Council members received the draft response during private conversation the afternoon of October 26. The response was accepted without debate during an open plenary session on October 28 on the final day of its three-day meeting at the Hyatt Regency in Dearborn, Michigan.
On October 26, Rosalie Ballentine of the Virgin Islands, chair of the work group assigned to draft the response, told the Council’s International Concerns Committee (INC) that the drafting group was representative of the whole Episcopal Church and set a goal “to try to be reflective of the various views within the Episcopal Church.”
Ballentine reminded the committee that the idea of an Anglican covenant is “evolving” and that she understood that “the decision about signing any covenant would have to be General Convention’s.”
In a letter to the Episcopal Church at the close of its March 2-4 meeting in Portland, Oregon, the Executive Council said "responding to the draft covenant does not presuppose agreement with the terms and principles advanced in the draft."
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 Anglican Consultative Council (ACC). If the ACC adopts the text, it would offer it to the provinces for consideration.
The Executive Council carries out the programs and policies adopted by the General Convention, according to Canon I.4 (1)(a). The council is composed of 38 members, 20 of whom (four bishops, four priests or deacons and 12 lay people) are elected by General Convention and 18 (one clergy and one lay) by provincial synods, plus the Presiding Bishop and the president of the House of Deputies.