ADOPT, ACCEDE, ENDORSE, OR SUBSCRIBE TO THE ANGLICAN COVENANT?

The letter below is from Jonathan Clatworthy, General Secretary to Modern Church in England. The missive was sent to the Church Times but was not published in the newspaper. I thought the letter deserved wider readership, and, when I asked, Jonathan gave me permission to publish the letter here at Wounded Bird. My wee blog is not the Church Times, but the letter follows, unedited:

So neither Ireland nor South-East Asia decided to adopt the proposed Anglican Covenant – but neither felt able to just say no. Ireland voted to ‘subscribe’ to it, South-East Asia to ‘accede’ to it. As both provinces know, these are meaningless expressions; the Covenant will only come into force if the provinces sign on the dotted line to adopt it. Why are they pussyfooting about?

There is a good reason. Provincial leaders are under immense pressure to sign the Covenant, but few of them like it. It was originally conceived as a way of threatening the USA with expulsion over gay bishops. The present text makes two changes to that aim. Firstly, instead of directly threatening to expel, it sets up an international system which could respond to complaints by expelling but could decide not to; we wouldn’t know the result until after it had been set up. So GAFCON have decided this is not discipline enough and have gone their own way, leaving the rest of us wondering who still wants it.

The second change is that the Covenant makes no mention of same-sex partnerships. It would be possible for one province to object to any initiative by another and demand a judgement from the newly empowered central authorities. Anglicanism would become a confessional sect where we were told what to believe.

So what do provinces do? If they refuse to sign, they may find themselves effectively expelled. If they do sign, they will no longer be able to run their own affairs without constantly checking whether someone in another part of the world objects. So they opt for a third alternative. There isn’t one, but they act as though there is. Whether ‘subscribe’ and ‘accede’ end up counting as ‘adopt’ will no doubt depend on which side has the cleverer political manipulators.


Jonathan Clatworthy
General Secretary
Modern Church
Liverpool, UK


gensec@modernchurch.org.uk

www.modernchurch.org.uk

www.clatworthy.org

Provinces who adopt the covenant could still be expelled, so whether to adopt or not puts a province in somewhat of a double bind situation. Jonathan makes an important point about any province being able to report any initiative by another province. What a tangle of tasks the new bureaucracy could be faced with in having to judge the complaints. I can't help but imagine the future operations of the standing committee, or whatever group will judge whether the complaints are worthy of consideration or action, as similar to a teacher having to deal with a stream of tattling children and finally saying, "Enough!"

My guess is that the Anglican Communion Office, or whichever body has decision-making power, will conclude that if the term used by a province remotely suggests adoption, the province will be considered to have adopted the Anglican Covenant.

IF YOU'RE WONDERING...

A tug boat pushes a barge up the Mississippi River near New Orleans Tuesday May 24, 2011.

From NOLA.com:

Based on a drop in the level of the swollen Mississippi River, the National Weather Service on Friday canceled its weeks-long flood warning for New Orleans and points downriver.

Despite this development for south Louisiana, the weather service’s flood warning remains in effect for points upriver, including Baton Rouge, where levee seepage has led the state Office of Transportation and Development to close River Road’s southbound lane from North Third Street to State Capitol Drive.
....

Although the threat to south Louisiana may seem to be abating, the Corps of Engineers declared the Bonnet Carre Spillway closed to recreation, including boating, until June 26.
....

Going into that area is dangerous because of the swift current — water is flowing toward Lake Pontchartrain at 293,000 cubic feet per second — and the debris that can get carried along in the torrent.

The damage that this combination can inflict was seen on the railroad bridge in the Bonnet Carre Spillway, where a supporting pier was dislodged. As a result, the legendary City of New Orleans train could get no closer than Hammond to its namesake city, with buses carrying passengers between that city and New Orleans.

The bridge has been repaired.

Water from the Mississippi River washes out part of the railroad bridge that crosses the Bonnet CarrÈ Spillway Tuesday, May 24, 2011.

The folks in New Orleans can breathe a sigh of relief, if not relax completely, about levee failure and flooding from the Mississippi River. The seepage in the levee upriver is worrying. As we saw the other day when we walked along the river in New Orleans, the Mississippi is a mighty river, and she wants to go her own way. Whether man-made controls will work, always involves a degree of uncertainty.

At the link to the Times-Picayune is a fine series of aerial photographs of the Mississippi, the control structures, and other areas near the river.

BRING THEM HOME

From the Los Angeles Times:

An explosion in southern Afghanistan on Thursday killed eight U.S. troops, officials said, an unusually large toll for a single incident.

Earlier in the day, NATO's International Security Assistance Force, or ISAF, announced the death of a service member in a helicopter crash in Afghanistan's east. The cause of the crash was under investigation, the coalition said.

A Pentagon official confirmed that the eight killed in the south were U.S. soldiers. Most of the troops in the south and the east are Americans. U.S. troops make up about two-thirds of the overall NATO force.

Coalition fatalities stand at 2482. We are not going to win the war in Afghanistan. What is the coalition accomplishing now? Are they even holding the line? Our departure will be a negotiated departure. With whom will we negotiate? The greater number of insurgents are Taliban. Unfortunately, that is the reality, and it is likely that we will negotiate with the Taliban. Whomever it is that we will negotiate with, why not now, rather than later before more troops are killed or wounded, before more Afghan civilians are killed or wounded? Why not now before we spend more billions which could be put to far better use than making war?

It's time to bring the troops home.

Shown above is the faded bumper sticker which I placed on my car at the beginning of the Iraq War. I no longer have the car, so the bumper sticker is gone, too. Originally, the colors were bright yellow, red, and blue. The photo of my old bumper sticker still serves to make my point.

May the troops who died rest in peace and rise in glory.

May God give comfort, consolation, and the peace that surpasses understanding to all who love the fallen.

May the God of peace fill our hearts with such a longing for peace that we do all in our power to settle differences with choices other than war.

NO REST YET ON THE CHURCH OF ENGLAND

Don't blame me. Leonardo made me do it. The plaque is borrowed. From Eruptions at the Foot of the Volcano:

Rowan Williams has proven to be a deceitful, snide and punishing leader to heterosexual women and to our LGBTI sisters and brothers throughout the Anglican Communion. His ¨nuanced¨ (sneaky and blatant) despotic leadership continues to demean, marginalize and discriminate against other Anglicans. He often discriminates against minority ¨marginalized¨ human beings– he has a cowardly, and codependent ¨working relationship¨ with Anglicans at the Global South and panders to the Gafcon schismatics-- pandering to religiouslike bigots who harm tens of thousands of LGBTI Anglicans on the ground in Jamaica, Uganda, Nigeria, the Middle East and even in the United Kingdom (as with Jeffrey John and many others we can now openly witness ). Anglican David Kato in Uganda has been murdered along with many Anglican/other lesbian ¨rape cure¨ victims because, in part, of poor episcopal stewardship at The Anglican Communion.

Remember: I didn't say that. However, I did think Leonardo's post and plaque were worth sharing.

UPDATE: IT has a splendid post on Rowan Williams and the closeted gay bishops in the Church of England at The Friends of Jake titled "Coming Out as a Leader", which includes a wonderful snazzy cartoon.

CHURCH OF ENGLAND - NO GAY BISHOPS

From the Church Times:

In England, the equality laws make it unlawful to discriminate against a person because of their sexual orientation...

Nevertheless, exemptions written into the Act accept that the C of E “does not draw the same distinction as most secular employers between a person’s work life and his or her private life”.

The key factor is the requirement of a bishop to act as a focus of unity. The advice states: “Where someone is in a civil partnership and/or is known to have been in a same-sex relationship, even though now celibate, it is for the CNC . . . to come to a view whether the person concerned can act as a focus for unity because of these matters.”

So. The church is exempted from the practice of equality under the law because the bishop must be a focus of unity. That's absurd. No bishop can possibly be a focus of unity for every single person in the diocese. After all, several bishops left the Church of England to join the Roman Catholic ordinariates. They were hardly a focus of unity, because members of their flock stayed behind in the Church of England. The "focus of unity" reasoning appears to be trumped up for the very purpose of excluding gay persons from the episcopacy.

A CHECKLIST has been drawn up that makes it virtually impossible for an openly gay person to become a bishop in the Church of England.

“[F]actors that can properly be taken into account:

• whether the candidate had always complied with the Church’s teachings on same-sex sexual activity;

• whether he was in a civil partnership;

• whether he was in a continuing civil partnership with a person with whom he had had an earlier same-sex relationship;

• whether he had expressed repent­ance for any previous same-sex sexual activity; and

• whether (and to what extent) the appointment of the candidate would cause division and disunity within the diocese in question, the Church of England and the wider Anglican Communion.”

The checklist leave me speechless, because it evidences such intrusiveness and discrimination against gay persons as to be truly shocking.

Are you bored yet with posts on the Church of England? I'll give you a rest after this one, unless....

HYMN NO. 365

A minister was completing a temperance sermon. With great emphasis he said, "If I had all the beer in the world, I'd take it and pour it into the river."

With even greater emphasis he said, " And if I had all the wine in the world, I'd take it and pour it into the river."

And then finally, shaking his fist in the air, he said, " And if I had all the whiskey in the world, I'd take it and pour it into the river."

Sermon complete, he sat down.


The song leader stood very cautiously and announced With a smile, nearly laughing:

"For our closing song, Let us sing Hymn #365, 'Shall We Gather at the River.'"


Smile, life is too short not to!
Pass this on with a smile
Keep spreading the cheer.
See you at the river!

Thanks to Doug.

MORE FROM THE COLIN SLEE MEMO

There's more from the Colin Slee memo, and it's not pretty. Jim Naughton at The Lead has further commentary on the redactions in the memo. What I've read convinces me further that transparency is the way to go whenever possible, but I do understand that confidentiality is sometimes in order.

Colin Slee carried a heavy burden away from the meetings, but, he did not advocate an electoral system for choosing bishops in the Church of England. It's difficult to see how electing bishops would be worse than the process Slee describes.

UPDATE: John Chilton provides links to even less redacted versions of Colin Slee's memo at The Lead. The newly revealed material is absolutely appalling to read.

HYMN BOOKS V DATA PROJECTORS

Click on the cartoon for the larger view.

From The Cartoon Church.

TRY LEADING BY EXAMPLE

What do I want to say about the temper tantrums of Archbishops Rowan Williams and John Sentamu that I have not already said elsewhere? Not much.

As the Guardian reveals in a leak from the notes of the late dean of Southwark Cathedral, Colin Slee, who was present at the meeting to choose a bishop for the Diocese of Southwark:

The document reveals shouting matches and arm-twisting by the archbishops to keep out the diocese's preferred choices as bishop: Jeffrey John, the gay dean of St Albans, and Nicholas Holtam, rector of St Martin-in-the-Fields in central London, whose wife was divorced many years ago. Eventually Christopher Chessun, then an assistant bishop, was chosen.

As I've already said, I'd like to have smacked the two archbishops, but that's resorting to violence. On second thought, I'd send them to their rooms without their supper to contemplate their bad behavior.

Unfortunately, the two men are not toddlers, but rather "mature" men in positions of power and influence, and their actions have consequences, grave consequences.

Slee described Williams shouting and losing his temper in last year's Southwark meeting, which left several members of the crown nomination committee, responsible for the selection of bishops, in tears.

Slee also in effect charges the church with hypocrisy, stating that there are several gay bishops "who have been less than candid about their domestic arrangements and who, in a conspiracy of silence, have been appointed to senior positions". The memo warns: "This situation cannot endure. Exposure of the reality would be nuclear."

How the Church of England continues to function in such a vast and hypocritical conspiracy of silence, remains a mystery to me. And that the Archbishop of Canterbury has the chutzpah to lecture our bishops in TEC on how to run a church is beyond my understanding. Perhaps he should try leading by example.

MADPRIEST HAD IT FIRST

The Guardian published a blockbuster of a revelation by Colin Slee from beyond the grave. MadPriest had the link first, and I believe he'd want you to comment over at OCICBW. Of course, I could be wrong.