Has the covenant already sunk?

Simon Sarmiento, keeper of Thinking Anglicans, has written as essay asking the question “Has the covenant already sunk?” The article appears in the LGCM Anglican Matters newsletter, a paid advertising supplement to the Church Times.

In the essay he outlines how two trends show significant strains on the concept of an Anglican covenant as a means to hold the Anglican Communion together. On the one hand, the so-called Global South churches have gone out of their way to establish competing bishoprics in the USA against the words and intent of the Windsor Report. They are also planning a substitute conference for bishops not going to Lambeth, including on their invitation list breakaway bishops who would not be invited by Canterbury anyway.

On the other side, is the lukewarm to negative response to the first draft of the Covenant in the Anglican Churches of Canada, Scotland, Ireland, New Zealand, as well as the USA.

Here is Simon Sarmiento’s list of books and useful links to get a quick background on the controversy to date:

Sarmiento’s Selection

There are three books that are indispensable for a study of Anglican events in the past decade:

A Church at War by Stephen Bates, published by Hodder and Stoughton in 2005, which contains significant additional material to that in the original hardback version.

Last year, Anglican in Communion in Crisis by Miranda K. Hassett was published by Princeton University Press. This deals primarily with the earlier period from before 1998 until about 2003, from the perspective of a professional anthropologist. The original doctoral thesis is available online here.

Another key document is Following the Money by Jim Naughton, available only electronically, which deals exhaustively with the financial support that conservative Anglicans have received from wealthy American donors.

Read: LGCM Anglican Matters newsletter

See the essay in HTML version here.

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