Second Question: What do we mean by the Anglican Communion?

The full text of this question asks us to consider this introduction to the Draft Covenant:

God has called us into communion in Jesus Christ (1 Cor. 1:9; 1 Jn. 1:3). This call is established in God’s purposes for creation (Eph. 1:10; 3:9ff.), which have been furthered in God’s covenants with Israel and its representatives such as Abraham and most fully in the life, death, and resurrection of Christ Jesus. We humbly recognize that this calling and gift of communion grants us responsibilities for our common life before God.

Through God’s grace we have been given the Communion of Anglican churches through which to respond to God’s larger calling in Christ (Acts 2:42). This Communion provides us with a special charism and identity among the many followers and servants of Jesus. Recognizing the wonder, beauty and challenge of maintaining communion in this family of churches, and the need for mutual commitment and discipline as a witness to God’s promise in a world and time of instability, conflict, and fragmentation, we covenant together as churches of this Anglican Communion to be faithful to God’s promises through the historic faith we confess, the way we live together and the focus of our mission.
Our faith embodies a coherent testimony to what we have received from God’s Word and the Church’s long-standing witness; our life together reflects the blessings of God in growing our Communion into a truly global body; and the mission we pursue aims at serving the great promises of God in Christ that embrace the world and its peoples, carried out in shared responsibility and stewardship of resources, and in interdependence among ourselves and with the wider Church.

Our prayer is that God will redeem our struggles and weakness, and renew and enrich our common life so that the Anglican Communion may be used to witness effectively in all the world to the new life and hope found in Christ.

and to ask "How closely does this view of communion accord with your understanding of the Development and vocation of the Anglican Communion?"

While I would readily agree that the Anglican Communion bears witness to the "new life and hope found in Christ" and to "the great promises of God in Christ that embrace the world and its peoples" I am not sure that all Anglicans would agree about what that looks like. For Episcopalians, it involves not just unity for unity's sake but striving for justice and peace, upholding the dignity of every human being, proclaiming the Good News and so on. Part of the "special charism" of Anglicanism seems to me to be that we are willing to allow some of us to go out on a limb for what we believe the justice and the Holy Spirit are calling us to.

I see nothing here about the development of the communion. It is described as a gift of God's grace rather than as the unfolding of a process in history, a process in which, of course, the Americans were out front creating a problem and the Brits were trying to make it possible for Americans to be distinctively themselves and still Anglican.

More about the very idea of covenant

One of the problems with the whole covenant process in this time and place is that it seems to be designed to say who is IN and who is OUT and what things we can agree to disagree about and what things we cannot. Now if, one day, during tea break at the 1958 Lambeth Conference someone had said, "I have an idea, chaps, maybe we should have some kind of a covenant among the various provinces" and the other bishops had thought "What a spiffing idea!" and set out to work on it, they might have produced a document a lot like this one minus sections five and six and the Primates Meeting and ACC ... and we might have received it gratefully. We might not have thought "biblical moral values" was a loaded term. We might have thought we all agreed on what that meant or that we could agree to disagree as Anglicans do. They did, in fact, talk a lot about what bases for intercommunion might look like with other faith traditions at that Lambeth Conference. But the whole covenant process in 2007 seems so reactive and as Episcopalians it is tempting to react against the whole process as being deliberately designed to make us second class citizens within the communion or to slap our hands... We can't put the toothpaste back in the tube on this one. But what would it take to create a Covenant that liberal (I am using that word with pride) Episcopalians didn't have a knee jerk reaction to? I can't begin to say how many people I've asked for opinions on the draft covenant whose responses are short angry phrases which are unprintable (by me, anyway).

The First Question: Do you think an Anglican Covenant is necessary?

The full text is Do you think an Anglican Covenant is necessary and/or will help to strengthen the interdependent life of the Anglican Communion? Why or why not?
From one point of view, of course, it sounds helpful. After all, as a colleague of mine points out, we have covenants of agreement with other denominations when we enter into Eucharistic Sharing with them, so it would make sense that we should articulate what we believe that we have in common with other Anglicans. After all, the whole Windsor process seems to have gotten rolling because Episcopalians had one understanding of what it meant to be Anglican and other Anglicans had another understanding drastically at odds with it. So being clear about what our union consists of makes some sense. On the other hand, you could argue that the Chicago/Lambeth Quadrilateral is an expression of what we believe and who we are as Anglicans and that it is un-Anglican to get much more specific than that. Still, at GC 2006 we affirmed our desire to remain part of the communion and our support for the covenant process. So why does this particular draft feel less like a mutual commitment freely entered into, like the covenant of marriage, and more like a list of rules ?

Responding to the Draft Covenant

This is a team blog of the 2006 General Convention Deputation from Missouri. We are using it as a place to write our thoughts in response to the questions posed by the Study Guide sent out by Executive Council. We are to respond to the Study Guide by June 4. I undertook to set up this "virtual meeting" because the time is short and the month of May is very full. We are inviting all clergy and people in the diocese of Missouri to send comments in response to the questions to our deputation chair Jack Fleming who will forward them to the General Convention Office. The deputies are meeting again to formulate, if we can, a group response at 8 a.m. on May 24. We will be trying to make our responses as specific as possible. As the moderator, I'll start us off in the next note, but posters can respond to any question they like. As moderator, I am requesting that Missouri posters identify themselves as such and we'll pass those responses on also. Our goal is to inform the diocese about the draft covenant and to encourage as many people as possible to respond to it, in whatever way they choose.
There will eventually be a list of links, but for now, let me suggest this background reading for joining the discussion:

• The Report of the Drafting Committee and the Draft Covenant itself can be found here.
• The Study Guide for Responding to the Anglican Covenant can be found here .
• Comments on the Covenant Process by the two Episcopal members of the drafting committee. The Rev. Ephraim Radner and the Rev. A. Katherine Grieb

You can google "Draft Anglican Covenant" for yourselves and see the comments of many bloggers, those for and against one or another part of the covenant. This is a place for Missourians to reflect.