By Jered Weber-Johnson
The Anglican Covenant Conference closed Saturday in New York City following two full days of intense discussion, deep analysis, and passionate exchange from a diverse range of perspectives, all related to the St. Andrew’s draft of the Anglican Covenant. What began Thursday evening, at the Desmond Tutu Conference Center with the provocative comments of the first keynote speaker, Archbishop Drexel Gomez (see Friday’s post), continued in the ensuing day and a half with presentations by lay and ordained representatives from several seminaries and Anglican bodies from across the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada, as well as a few representatives from organizations within the wider Anglican Communion (over 40 contributors in all). Within that diversity, a few similar themes were echoed in both the papers presented and the questions posed in response.
Not surprisingly, a few of the presented papers rejected the idea that a covenant was “necessary” in order for the communion to stay together, as asserted in the opening remarks of the conference by Archbishop Gomez. While rejecting this notion of necessity, there did emerge consistently a sense among speakers and responders alike that an Anglican Covenant was probable if not inevitable. Many of the comments thus assumed the character of advice, pointing toward what a beneficial covenant might include in, and excise from, its content in future drafts.
In his comments Friday afternoon, titled “The Covenant, the Quadrilateral, and Balance” the Reverend Dr. Robert Hughes, professor at School of Theology at the University of the South, argued that in its present draft the Anglican Covenant gives too little weight to the Chicago-Lambeth Quadrilateral, a statement, he said, that has been used primarily for outlining what was essential to forming communion with our ecumenical partners. The current draft said Hughes “is both less and more than the Quadrilateral.”
Hughes claimed that it was ‘less’ because it deemphasized or undervalued the role of the sacraments and creeds as essential to communion. The current draft is ‘more’ than the Quadrilateral argued Hughes, by “placing sources of secondary authority, at best, on the same level as essentials, and thus burdening the free consciences of Christian people beyond what our reformed Catholic tradition allows.”
Dr. Daniel Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, professor at the Church Divinity School of the Pacific, addressed the conference from his paper “Whose Covenant? The Anglican Covenant, the People of God and History from Below”. He also echoed the sentiment that the current St. Andrew’s draft was lacking. Professor Joslyn-Siemiatkoski’s contention was that the ethos of the current draft and the whole process leading up to it seemed to reflect a top-down ecclesiology which emphasized the needs of the institutional Anglican Church to the detriment and neglect of the contextual needs of local churches.
Said Joslyn-Siemiatkoski, “If the drafters of the Anglican Covenant can come up with a way to frame the importance of this document for those people of God who experience the church ‘from below’ they will go a long way to making this text relevant to their lived contexts.”
In a similar vein, the second keynote speaker of the conference, Canon Dr. Jenny Te Paa, a member of the Lambeth Commission on Communion that produced the Windsor Report in 2004, addressed the concept of a potential Anglican Covenant from the perspective of indigenous peoples, the poor, women, and young people. Canon Te Paa found “the galvanizing of the entire leadership of the Anglican Communion into responding, into reacting in a very intentional, sustained and extraordinarily costly manner” to the issue of homosexuality to be troubling when compared with the disproportionate reaction of the same leadership to the reality of global poverty, war, and the abuse of the environment.
Te Paa went on to argue that it seemed to her that “institutionalized dominant male power has been and still is being exercised in an exceedingly unjust manner” particularly in placing the issue of sexuality over all other issues facing the church. Further, she argued that same power is being used to “concentrate precious communion wide resources in the form of people and money to advance a proposal which essentially, at least in its first draft, served to protect and enhance that same dominant male leadership.”
This, for Te Paa, was tantamount to “the establishment of hegemony”. She said “I am speaking here of the Primates Meeting”. Canon Te Paa noted that rather than being a communion-wide issue of paramount concern for the entirety of Anglicanism, the issue of sexuality, particularly homosexuality, is an issue of “potentially schismatic proportions” only for this small group of the powerful elite within the communion.
While Te Paa had been supportive of the concept of an Anglican Covenant in her time on the Lambeth Commission on Communion, she claimed that because of what she saw as a move toward hegemony among the Primates particularly in the process of creating a covenant, that in the end she had changed her original position.
“I believe the current Covenant proposal while not without much longer term potential merit is inevitably seriously negatively affected by all of this”, said Canon Te Paa. She continued, saying “it is becoming increasingly difficult for us ordinary Anglicans to take seriously even the very good rhetoric of Covenant when the very real reality of some very bad leadership behavior is still so pervasive, thus making the whole exercise so utterly contradictory and inexcusably, unjustifiably expensive.”
Ultimately, Te Paa argued that either a “moratorium” or a “slowing down” of the current Covenant process needed to occur, that input in that process needed to be intentionally sought among a broader diversity representative of the whole communion, that new avenues of reconciliation be explored outside the context of Covenant, and that ultimately there needed to be “an intentional focus upon reclaiming, re-strengthening and re-affirming the already existing and strongly regarded covenantally bound relationships that the majority of Anglicans already hold to with profound commitment and with unbreakable confidence.”
One of the primary responders from the floor of the conference to Te Paa’s remarks was Archbishop Gomez. He wished to respond to add a point of what he felt was necessary correction to Te Paa’s comments about the Primates alleged hegemony. Gomez categorically denied that there was any move toward consolidation of power by the Primates, and that any assertion to that end “is a lie” he said. Gomez further argued that so far the process of Covenant design has in fact been very inclusive, and, he said of Te Paa’s talk, “I don’t think you were fair in your account of the Primates.”
When asked if she would like to respond to Archbishop Gomez’s rebuttal, Canon Te Paa declined, thanked the conference, and went to sit with Gomez.
Picking up on a thread that had continued throughout the conference in several speakers’ comments about the relationship between mission and covenant, the Reverend Dr. Titus Presler, Sub-Dean of the General Theological Seminary, in his remarks Saturday, affirmed the potential benefit of a covenant to the shared mission of Anglicans wherever it sought to strengthen relationships and reconcile member churches.
However, he cautioned that wherever mission and unity “become matters of quasi-legal adjudication, especially across differences of culture and language, we may find ourselves not only crippling the affirmations and aspirations of a covenant, but sinning against the Holy Spirit, that Spirit who is the source and animator of the mission of God.”
For more about the conference and to read papers from all the speakers as they are posted, go to www.tutucenter.org.
Jered Weber-Johnson, a candidate for Holy Orders from the Diocese of Olympia, is a student at the General Theological Seminary.