The Pluralist doesn’t much care for the Archbishop of Canterbury or his Covenant:
It represents centralisation and conformity and conservation with conservatism. Anything a Church does can be referred up by any other element of Anglicanism. A Church should already have consulted others widely (so a reference up may already be a black mark, or a disagreement). The Standing Committee itself doesn’t take the final decision for ‘relational consequences’, but it does all the reasoning and so carries that form of authority.
Does the dispersed nature of Anglicanism and its autonomy, its cultural connections and sensitivity, really wish to take on something that would be impossible – wide and unending talk before anything was done in a geographical area? This process may be Rowan Williams looking down a deep well and seeing his own face, but it is not Anglicanism in its decentralised nature. It is an innovation, to produce a centralised Catholicised Rowan Williams Anglicanism long after he has gone.
Update
Mark Harris doesn’t like it either:
So the Anglican Communion ought to support, not repress, local conditions in which the universal birth-right takes specific form. The Anglican Communion ought to support life long committed relations between and among people, ought to support sexual expression within such relationships. It ought to promote and encourage baptized members of the Church to consider God’s call to them to various ministries in the Church. At the same time the Anglican Communion ought to speak with some clarity about situations that arise locally which would categorically deny basic human rights to individuals in this or that place. In order to do this the Anglican Communion voices – the voices of the “Instruments of Communion” – need to be supple and nimble.
Instead the Anglican Communion, if it adopts this Covenant, will become less supple, less nimble, less able to act locally and think globally, more bloated and without the ability to act swiftly except by employing this new engine, the Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion. As seen in its communique several days ago, the Standing Committee has acted swiftly concerning Bishop Elect Glasspool. At the same time it said nothing about the situation in Uganda. What gives?