Andrew Plus: The Covenant is dead, but can we get back to square one?

I believe this to be an accurate and balanced account of where the Covenant proposal has got to (October 2007):

Andrew Plus: The Covenant is dead, but can we get back to square one?

There are a couple of outstanding questions about the Covenant if we grant, as would seem to be the case, that it is dead as a regulatory scheme.

1) Given the public endorsements it has had, can it really be allowed to die?
2) Those who want a regulatory framework are unlikely to be satisfied. Even if its main proponents leave the fold, will not those who are left continue to worry at this bone and look for other ways to get to the same goal? There always seem to be people who want to order the church in their own image.

I would guess that, when some of the dust has settled and the membership of the Anglican Communion (Provinces, Dioceses and people) becomes clearer, the issue of a regulatory framework will be revisited. Watch out for those who seek to delegate powers to some innocuous sounding but high-powered international committee.

Wounderful Church

I received an email today that was evidently written in a rush. It was full of mistypings including the phrase: 'wounderful church'.

I think this is brilliant.

The church full of wonder: in worship at its best and in ordinary, in its care for its members and shared prayer, in its ability to nurture holiness in pragmatic loving ways and to offer real service to the people it is set amongst.

It is also a deeply wounded church, and often wounding. Its worship can be banal and off-putting, members and visitors alike can easily be hurt and often are, and prayer can be absent or even used against people. It sometimes seems as though holiness is nurtured despite, or in defiance of, church structures and the ordinary priorities of local church life. And service may be an excuse for arrogantly telling other people how to live or, conversely, it goes unnoticed and unacknowledged.

Perhaps this is the way it has to be. Churches are made up of ordinary people and always have been. Reality and aspiration have never matched. People are mixtures of wounds and creativity, of love and callousness, of ambition, bitterness, generosity and carelessness: why should the church be any different?

And yet I cling to the idea - contradicted by almost all my experience - that it is possible the bend or push or entice the church towards the more positive end of its range: to nurture faith and holiness (in the broadest sense), to care for one another and for strangers, to give in ways that echo God's generosity, to love and be loved.

All these years, all these bruises, and still a romantic dreamer.

The Seminar on Conflict Ecclesiology

I have been invited to join the blog Seminar on Conflict Ecclesiology. I feel quite chuffed.

It's rules are firm: start with a question without expressing one's own opinions. This is a hard discipline. I'm keen to tell, rather than to ask, it's why I'm such a bad teacher. And on the whole a blog is about telling the world - or the invisible unknowable other - who I am and what I think. It will be good to learn.

Bounced by the Bishop

I've been bounced off Bishop Alan Wilson's blog.

Correction: no I haven't. A misunderstanding based on my hypersensitivity to the cryptic comments of bishops.

And he very kindly enquired and cleared up my misapprehension. For which I am grateful, and my apologies to Bishop Alan for ever suggesting such a thing.

The word from Clonmacnoise

The Archbishop of Armagh, the Most Reverend Alan Harper, preached at Clonmacnoise on the Feast Day of St Mary Magdalene 2007:

I have somewhat to say on the present madness of the Anglican Communion and the Christian quest to appropriate and to live the life of resurrection. All here.

He identified two 'boulders' to the resurrection life: bibliolatry and division and disunity in the Church.

While both are undoubtedly boulders the first is historically specific; the second is endemic.

He regards as simplistic the notion the thesis that unity may be sought at the cost of truth, arguing that no single group can hold all truth while division actively discourages us from seeing the mote in our own eye.

It is not then the case that unity is maintained at the expense of truth, but rather that disunity guarantees that access to a fuller knowledge of the truth is consciously inhibited.

I might want to ask he understands truth and our perception of it, and also how truth is apprehended if our disunity and division are not ephemeral to Christian faith but inherent and integral to it.

On his observation of the Covenant, however, I am with him all the way (emphasis added):

Archbishop Drexel Gomez, addressing the General Synod of the Church of England on the issue of an Anglican Covenant, [full speech here] said recently:

Anglican leaders are seriously wondering whether they can recognize in each other the faithfulness to Christ that is the cornerstone of our common life and cooperation. While some feel there will be inevitable separation, others are trying to deny that there is a crisis at all. That is hardly a meeting of minds. Unless we can make a fresh statement clearly and basically of what holds us together we are destined to grow apart.

I doubt if anyone believes that there is no crisis. Rather, in the context of Archbishop Drexel’s key test, that is, recognizing in each other the faithfulness to Christ that is the cornerstone of our common life and cooperation, a spirit of arrogance on both sides is causing people of genuine faith and undoubted love for the Lord Jesus to bypass the requirement for patience and for making every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace.

I have yet to meet any “leader” who does not treat with the utmost respect and indeed reverence the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testament. I have heard no one in this crisis deny the fundamental tenets of the faith as Anglicans have received them. Yet I have heard believing Christians attack other Christians for not believing precisely as they themselves believe. Equally, I have heard believing Christians attack other Christians for not attaching the weight they themselves attach to this biblical text compared with that.

This is not the way of Christ; it is the way of fallen humanity. It is a boulder of our own creation and I do not know who will help us to roll it away.

Some fear, and I am among them, that an Anglican Covenant, unless it is open and generous and broad, may simply become a further means of obstruction: a boulder, rather than a lever to remove what obscures and impedes our access to the truth that sets us free.

Weeping ash in a churchyard

Weeping ash in a churchyard

A century keeping vigil over

those who need no vigilance, concealing

the sweeping shadows, the day’s declension,

the tolling year’s irrecoverable

loss from Easter through a bitter Friday,

one leafless limb yearning sunwards with no

expectation, one arm consoling the stones –

their names uninscribed, loving memories

invalidated – slowly curling down

to the patient, all-embracing earth.

I slip in step with the dying and dead

in sad processions, like tides which reach no

further than the edge and turn away, and,

for the short, wordy, retrospective path,

my forehead smeared with penitential ash.

After a long gap:

The Draft Anglican Covenant is still wandering around the world. Critical comments (in some detail as well as summaries) are on the MCU site: http://www.modchurchunion.org/Covenant.htm. Progress in the General Synod can be followed through Thinking Anglicans.

There's also a paper on the way in which the Powers That Be are trying to bounce the decision through Communion by giving no-one a public voice on its contents (and therefore enabling a few people - whoever they are - to draft versions in private).

I believe this is wrong in principle and ineffective in practice. It will simply create a legal system which no-one cares for and, possibly, will ignore as soon as it makes a decision that is disliked.