ANGLICAN COVENANT = A DYSFUNCTIONAL ANGLICAN FAMILY

Graham Kings writes at the Guardian in support of the Anglican Daft Covenant. Dr Kings is Bishop of Sherborne and theological secretary of Fulcrum. Below is my comment at the Guardian:

Dr Kings says:

The model of the covenant is drawn from family ties and kinship and bounded by mutually agreed norms of behaviour which benefit everyone.

From the text of the covenant:

The Standing Committee may request a Church to defer a controversial action. If a Church declines to defer such action, the Standing Committee may recommend to any Instrument of Communion relational consequences which may specify a provisional limitation of participation in, or suspension from, that Instrument until the completion of the process set out below.

So then, once the covenant is adopted, we will all be one happy family. But wait! Family members may suffer relational consequences or even be suspended if they don't follow the straight and narrow as laid out in the covenant. In other words, they may be thrown out of the family! The covenant appears to be a recipe for a seriously dysfunctional family, full of tattlers and busybodies trying to get other family members with whom they disagree excluded.

The author's implication that Armageddon will be upon the Anglican Communion if the covenant is not adopted is sheer nonsense. The negative, if unintended, consequences of adopting the ill-conceived document will boggle the mind. Rather than bringing the member provinces of the Anglican Communion together, the mess of pottage that we call the covenant will result in further splitting apart. Yeats' line, "Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold", is a glimpse of the future of the Anglican Communion with the adoption of the Anglican Covenant.

As posted at the Guardian with minor editing.