Please, Covenant people, tell us what you think your pet project will achieve and how. We know it’s fallout from the Windsor process, and I’ve seen the text endlessy, but still do not understand exactly what problem it will address and how.
Bishop Alan Wilson continues to write brilliantly about the proposed Anglican Covenant, and its significant shortcomings.
It may be that the Anglican Communion needs an Anglican Covenant, but the troops are as yet unconvinced and all I seem to be hearing from its proponents, I’m very sorry to say, are rather testy responses to criticism, blaming everybody else for misunderstanding it, whilst everybody else seems to think they understand it only too well.
He is on to something there. The first move to the Fulcrum crowd in the United Kingdom and the Anglican Communion Institute in Canada and the U. S. is to assume the voice of intellectual superiority, as though they were grading student papers rather than participating in a debate with equals. Not exactly a winning strategy in most instances, although, as the bishop points out, it may work in the Church of England.
Because the Church of England has only a limited ability to listen to the Holy Spirit speaking through the non-elite faithful, it may be that habitual deference, lack of moral courage, infantilism and amateur inexperience can sail such a thing through the General Synod with less than 20% of the punters actually believing in it. The kindest thing that may end up being said was that it seemed like a good idea at the time of the Windsor report, whose child it is, but it represents a rational/legal solution to something that wasn’t essentially a rational/ legal problem, and never mind because everybody has now moved on.
I very much doubt that places where they are less into deference, infantilism and amateur inexperience than England will buy the covenant wholesale on this basis.
His essay is funny, to boot, so have a look.