Mary Frances Schjonberg writes:
[Episcopal News Service] The Episcopal Church’s Executive Council has asked General Convention deputations and their bishops to study and comment on the latest draft of a proposed Anglican covenant.
In May, the Anglican Consultative Council (ACC) postponed an expected request that the Anglican Communion’s 38 provinces consider adopting the Ridley Cambridge draft. The council said instead that it wanted the draft’s Section 4, which contains a dispute-resolution process, to get more scrutiny and possibly be revised.The Archbishop of Canterbury appointed a small working group to do that work. The members, all of whom served on the original Covenant Design Group, have solicited provincial responses by November 13, 2009. The working group will meet November 20-21 in London and report to the Standing Committee meeting December 15-18. The Standing Committee is a group of elected representatives of the ACC and the Primates Meeting.
A letter from Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori, House of Deputies President Bonnie Anderson and Rosalie Ballentine, the Executive Council member who chairs the council’s task force on the Anglican covenant, asks that responses must be turned in by September 1. The task force and the council will use the comments to formulate a response during its October meeting.
“We believe that this work will best be accomplished in light of work and resolutions passed at the 2009 General Convention, so we are asking that deputations make their responses following convention,” they wrote in the letter.