Snippets from the other two keynoters on the Anglican Covenant

Jenny Te Paa said she started out being in favour of a covenant but when she saw how the Windsor Report and this process was going, she thought less of it. She said: 'What I have been bothered by is a feeling of being spiritually overwhelmed by too many words and angst, delimiting purpose and bounds of covenant with such urgency and intensity as if what we have always had and understood either never existed or was insufficient.' Hence, the whole process feels 'cold' to her. 'Here is a process concerned with promoting right relationships among all God’s people as compassionate, who are loving and hating, generous and mean-spirited but fully alive human beings. I have found so much of the covenant language devoid of humanity. Its language is esoteric, dense, aloof, punitive, disconnected, intellectual.' She questioned why with global poverty the consecration of the Bishop of NH was the galvanising issue behind the drive for a covenant. She questions these priorities. And she put the desire for a covenant at the feet of a desire to maintain male power and hegemony thereof. As an indigenous person, she asks: Who is able to insist that the issue of human sexuality is of such fundamental necessity to all Anglicans in the globe? She then said: With the first draft that I realized what a chasm there was between the good-humoured faithful discourse in which I had willingly participated at Lambeth and first draft in which appeared recommendations for punitive clauses targeting those Anglicans deemed errant, deemed by whom? The primates. So, for her, the baptismal covenant was more than sufficient for the common ordering of our life together as Anglicans.

She said: I realize now at the time of the Lambeth Commission I didn’t appreciate power politics at stake. This current covenant proposal arising in such a reactionary and inflammatory ecclesial context was always going to be constrained by being representative in its intent, evolution. My support for a covenant was borne out of sense of trusting that tensions were genuinely rooted in differences that hadn’t been accounted for that pointed for need for dialogue on missiology, partnership relationships, ecclesiology and what it means to be globally autonomous provinces bound together. What has changed for me since 2004 that the deep unease as I have witnessed first-hand too many contradictions bet rhetoric of covenant and ensuing bad behaviour of those who want institutional power. A core group of primates used their institutional power and using post-colonial race politics to raise preoccupation with homosexuality to the hegemonic proportions it has reached.

She estimated (truly estimated in a somewhat playful way) that 75% of the communion does not need such a thing (they being: youth, women, indigenous people and LGBT folks). She would rather we stop our fussing with and about one another and recover our pride of who we are as Anglicans.

If we do go with a covenant, it should be based on friendship, fidelity, freedom, forgiveness and faith.

The current covenant cannot protect these tenets. She said: Only in our capacity and willingess to let go of despair, to hold onto memories of wrong-doing, we can effect grace. We need to find our proper selves in God's love and when we do, we can exercise our God-given capacity for acts of grace.

So her response was in terms of a covenant, 'sometimes, maybe.'

Gregory Cameron said that a covenant could be a good idea but it won't solve the current problems. He said he was speaking from the fringe, as a member of the Church of Wales and as the Secretary General to the Anglican Communion. He regrets that neither the Anglican Communion nor the Instruments of Communion are trusted or seen positively. He underlined that Lambeth cannot take action. Nor can the primates; they are the senior bishops of 38 provinces but no more or less than that. They can speak collectively but not corporately. He still feels that this document speaks to relationships and not canon law or a contract. (One of the panelist's main points was that the problem lay in the understanding of the secular and spiritual understanding of the word, 'covenant.') So GC's hope is that the covenant could be the grounds for fellowship that would be in the true spirit of Anglicanism.

I did find it interesting that the appendix to the St A's draft was not included in the papers distributed at the conference. While it is merely an appendix and not part of the covenant, its words certainly cast a shadow on the rest of the document and participants at the conference did raise questions about it.

You can listen to the presentations by going here.

The only proponents for the Covenant were Drexel Gomez, Leeander Harding (Trinity Episcopal School for Ministry) and Christopher Seitz (Wycliffe, Toronto)... none of which is surprising.

The others were collectively of a mind that 1) something like this should take far more time to be created -- there is not the sense of urgency as perceived by the above three; 2) there are other theologies we should be considering, such as the nature of the episcopacy and authority of scripture, 3) the current covenant does not nearly focus enough on our shared sacramental life; 4) if there is a covenant, there should be more emphasis on shared mission of God, and so forth.

More on the remarks from the panelists to come.