The Church Times has an article summarizing the presentations made at the conference on the proposed Anglican Covenant in New York last week. The article especially features the words of Jenny Te Paa of New Zealand and a member of the Windsor Commission. In her presentation Te Paa talked about the reasons she has since backed away from her initial support of the call for a Covenant’s design.
According to the article
“Among the events she cited was the behaviour at the Primates’ Meetings, which had gone from being a gathering for ‘leisurely thought [and] prayer’ to being a ‘quasi-governance body universally perceived as inappropriate, unbidden, and unhelpful’.
Covenant drafts served to ‘protect and enhance . . . dominant male leadership, privilege, and power’, she said. In her view, the ‘fussing with and about one another’ needed to stop, in order to reaffirm the bonds that already exist within the Communion.”
By contrast, the proposed Covenant was defended by the Archishop of the West Indies, the Most Revd Drexel Gomez. “If we can covenant with our ecumenical partners . . . it seems to me to be a pretty pass indeed if we Anglicans decide we cannot covenant with each other.”
And the deputy secretary of the Anglican Communion, Canon Gregory Cameron, said: “In time of distrust, when people feel that boundaries are being manipulated and moved, covenant can be a restatement of where the true roots of Anglicanism lie.”
Read the rest here.