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Count them.  First there was the initial proposal from New Orleans:

Eight bishops have accepted Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori's invitation to serve as "episcopal visitors" to dioceses that have requested this provision.

Read the rest of that report.

And to make a round apostolic dozen:

Four additional bishops have accepted Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori's invitation to serve as "episcopal visitors" in dioceses requesting this provision.

Read that report here.

That report doesn't seem to note that no diocese has actually requested "this provision," and it seems unlikely that any diocese will.  Snoop around a bit and you'll discover that, while there are a lot of people who like the episcopal visitor plan, none of them is in one of the affected dioceses, whose requests (along with those of the Primates at Dar-es-Salaam concerning pastoral oversight) have been rejected from the start.  So one has to ask:  Are these flying bishops just for looks? Read full post >>

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Following is the first contribution to Covenant by our (at the moment only) non-Anglican “featured author,� Andreas Westergren, who is a priest in the Lutheran Church of Sweden and a doctoral candidate in theology.

I am especially grateful for this gift as our brother writes in his non-native tongue (he is also married to a German, and I understand that he and his wife regularly converse in that language; and his doctoral work especially demands aptitude in Greek, with some use as well of Syriac and French: may many of us achieve such multi-linguistic heights!). It is a passionate reflection on “communion� in an ascetical and ecumenical key, and graciously engages the Anglican situation from an international perspective.

An excerpt:

It was interesting to see how the Swedish church, after the controversial decision to bless same-sex partnerships (not formal marriages), was criticised by fellow-members of the “Porvoo Agreement,� namely the Church of England and the Church of Finland, for not letting them be more involved in the discussion. Bilateral critique like this follows from the premise of mutual accountability! And unless our agreements take such a shape, they run the risk of being little more than small-talk.

From my point of view there is much at stake in the Anglican Communion’s attempts to reshape itself, since it stands at the crossroad of many traditions. If it manages to find a new form of its own communion, it might be able to act as mediator between different strands in the Church; if not, it will still bear consequences for the whole Church, albeit negative ones. The question, as I understand it, pertains not only to the decisions that will be made but also to how seriously the different churches will take the… Read full post >>

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Dave Sims

Anglican Comprehensiveness in Retrospect: Lost minutes of an 1868 CofE Convocation, edited by Archde

Monday, October 08, 2007 at 5:44 pm

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Recently unearthed, molding and tattered, from an anonymous parishioner's cellar, pressed beneath five cases of expired Tetley's and 17 boxes of Vanity Fair back issues (from which all Spy cartoons had been mysteriously excised), the theological acuity and ecclesiastical compromise in these illuminating discussions from 1868 may perhaps guide us in our current crisis. On doctrine:

DR. EASY rose to propose the question of which he had given notice at the previous sitting of Convocation:--"Would it be considered heresy in the Church of England to deny the existence of God?" It had occurred to him that he should perhaps adopt a form more convenient for the present debate, if he put the question thus:--"Would a clergyman, openly teaching that there was no God, be liable to suspension? "

ARCHDEACON JOLLY thought not. What the Church of England especially prided herself upon was the breadth of her views. No view could be broader than the one just stated, and therefore none more likely to meet with the sanction of the Privy Council, which, he apprehended, was the real point to be kept in view in the discussion of this interesting question. (Hear, hear.)

And on ecumenical relations:

IV. And now I approach the painful question of the Roman Church. With your rector you may tenderly breathe forth the prayer, "Would to God we were one with our sweet sister Rome, through whom we derive our orders, our creeds, and all our Catholicity." You may even assert with him, and a good many other clergymen of his particular school, that they alone are faithful members of the English Church, who claim to hold all Roman doctrine, and openly advocate union both with Rome and Moscow, [20/21] though, probably, with as much expectation of… Read full post >>

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Dave Sims

Simon Mein: Covenants Old and New

Monday, October 08, 2007 at 12:45 pm

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Canon Simon Mein, of the Diocese of Delaware, contrasts the proposed Anglican Covenant with other historic attempts to provide theological definition to the CofE/Anglican Communion. To say the least he isn't bullish, on the Covenant or the Communion itself, but the essay provides some sobering perspective that should be taken to heart, not only by advocates of the Covenant, but also the Common Cause Partners, who will be dealing with no less intractable and historically-rooted divisions. Mein recounts one particular episode of 19th century Catholic/Evangelical controversy:

Evangelicals were not happy with any view of the Sacraments that smacked of ex opere operato, insisting that baptism needed conscious repentance to achieve moral regeneration. The issue was clouded because the B. C. P. and Thirty-nine Articles (XXXIX) are not entirely consistent on the matter, but it was the assertion of State power over Church Doctrine that was at the center of the uproar. It was now the turn of the Tractarians to threaten wholesale departure from an Erastian church. (The Evangelicals had threatened departure should the judgment against Gorham be upheld).

And he quotes Owen Chadwick quoting Lord Aberdeen, whose observation in the 1850s is no less applicable now:

“Your friend is right who says the Church of England is two churches only held together by external forces. This unnatural apparent-union cannot last long, but we may as well defer the separation as long as possible.�

Mein concludes:

Perhaps we might most helpfully see the Anglican Communion as a kind of spiritual analog of the Commonwealth, which emerged, it seems, to perpetuate a shade of the dissolving empire. Having served its purpose, the Commonwealth is hardly seen any longer as a functioning organization; even its symbolic aspects are slowly slipping away. Perhaps the… Read full post >>

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Sam Keyes

Fr. Joshua Whitfield:  The Cruciform Community

Sunday, October 07, 2007 at 1:19 am

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Fr. Joshua Whitfield has given us an essay celebrating parochial fidelity as a sine qua non of ecclesial life. Rather than giving you a reductive summary (as I have already done), I offer an excerpt:

This new rhythm of parochial life (of daily prayer and regular eucharistic celebration) is also the primary mode of catechesis, the socializing of the eucharistic gift. For instance, the Psalter, which is the beating heart of the office, is that which gradually molds the mind and the body not only in the virtues of Christ but in the emotions of Christ. Christ emerges as a mirror in our midst in daily prayer, one that reflects and changes those who see him. This is Christian discipleship and formation such that all are included across ideologies. Disarmed by the timing of praise and brought together before the very voice of Christ, the parish becomes not a fortress on the frontier of a humiliating ecclesial war; rather, it is rendered a church of Jesus Christ, of peace and waiting silent before God and each other.

Read it all here. (If you prefer, there is a pdf here.) Read full post >>

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Sam Keyes

The Cruciform Community:  Our Gifted Possession (Whitfield)

Sunday, October 07, 2007 at 1:05 am

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By Fr. Josh Whitfield

Part I

A few years ago I attended a seminar with about twenty priests and I, then just a seminarian. The seminar offered us a chance to think and discuss ways in which we could one, grow our parishes and two, work to save the Episcopal Church from the heresy and paganism with which it was riddled. On both points, the seminar was little to write home about, but the attitude and mentality that characterized most of the priests in regard to saving the Episcopal Church was, for me at least, very saddening. Toward the end of the weeklong seminar we had what can only be described as a little pep-rally for those of us heading back into our parishes or the larger church in order to save them. The priests were simply sharing excited encouragement with each other before heading back home, but what was interesting was their choice of biblical imagery and their use of it. The group began to use the “full armor of God� imagery from Ephesians 6.[1] We mutually exhorted each other to put on the belt of truth and the breastplate of righteousness before we grabbed the sword of the Spirit in order to re-conquer the Episcopal Church for God. It was an excited moment, and I am sure many left rejuvenated and energized once again for their ministry. I, however, left disturbed and have been disturbed by that experience ever since.

The dominating question I had leaving that seminar, and the dominating question that has held my prayer, my study and my imagination since then is simply: What of the cross of Jesus Christ? Where is the cross within our zeal to fight for the faith… Read full post >>

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Name Not Available

In a Word

Friday, October 05, 2007 at 6:46 pm

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It was George Bernard Shaw who said that the British and Americans are divided by a common language. As my friend Bishop Whalon points out "scheme" means something quite different to an American than to a Briton. One might say that we are all divided by our pre-conceived notions concerning what lies behind the use of words placed together to convey or perhaps obfuscate meaning.

These considerations are very much to the fore as we seek to evaluate the answers our bishops recently provided to the primates particularly on the subject of who may or who may not be elected and consecrated a bishop and whether priests may bless same-sex couples. In a real sense these are "new" concerns about ideas our parents or grandparents never considered. They never considered such issues because few people if any thought about either subject. It is not that they perhaps held strong religious convictions on these subjects. Asking my grandfather whether two people of the same gender might be married would have been on the order of asking him whether he was in favor of the internet or blogs! Knowing my grandfathers, or at least one of them, asking whether a person who habitually had sex with someone to whom he was not married might be appointed a bishop would have elicited rude remarks about his doubts about the sexual nature of clergy. He probably subscribed to the three sex theory: there are three sexes, men, women and clergy.

Now mere novelty is no ground for rejection, although given the conservative nature of a goodly proportion of human beings, it is a natural reaction in those who are born "a little conservative," rather than "a little liberal," as W.S. Gilbert… Read full post >>

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Name Not Available

Sherry After Evensong: An Ecumenical Comedy in One Act

Friday, October 05, 2007 at 4:29 pm

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The scene: Heaven, Yorkshire department: CofE section

Enter Henry Hammond, from the south. Your Grace, have you seen that
an American Colonist has accused us of casuistry?

Bramhall: Casuistry? Dost he think I'm a Jesuit? EE by gum, Henry, I
never thought populating yon place were a good idea.

Hammond: What place?

Bramhall: Massachussetts.

Hammond: It was a rather splendid place to dump Puritans, don't you
know old chap?

Bramhall: Aye tha's right there. So my accuser is a Puritan?

Hammond: Not so. He seems to live in a place called Washington DC. I have no idea what a DC is. He seems to be CofE of sorts with leanings towards Orthodoxy.

Bramhall: One of Andrewes lot I suppose. Lancelot spent too much time as a lad talking to those Eastern sailors at his father's docks. I look in at the Orthodox section of heaven occasionally but I prefer Yorkshire Pudding to grape leaves stuffed with the devil knows what and a good pint of Tetleys over Ouzo or what ever they calls it.

Hammond: Were we right about schism though?

Bramhall: Nay, or so they say up here, but I'm damned if I'm attending the next ecumenical do Peter puts on. Last time, Pius IX tried to take over. Had the cheek to ask Mary to back him up. Said she owed him one.

Hammond: Right you are. Sherry after Evensong? I gather Cranmer is the officiant and Pusey is preaching today.

Bramhall:… Read full post >>

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Craig Uffman

ACI: Response to the New Orleans House of Bishops Statement

Friday, October 05, 2007 at 2:21 pm

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Anglican Communion Institute
Response to the New Orleans House of Bishops Statement
With brief reflections on the report of the Joint Standing Committee

Introduction and Context

In July 2006, following the response of General Convention to the requests of the Windsor Report, the Archbishop of Canterbury said, “There is no way in which the Anglican Communion can remain unchanged by what is happening at the moment�. In February 2007, the Primates at Dar concluded that “the response of The Episcopal Church to the requests made at Dromantine has not persuaded this meeting that we are yet in a position to recognise that The Episcopal Church has mended its broken relationships� and sought a further response with the warning that “if the reassurances requested of the House of Bishops cannot in good conscience be given, the relationship between The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion as a whole remains damaged at best, and this has consequences for the full participation of the Church in the life of the Communion�. It is therefore unsurprising that last week, after the House of Bishops of the Episcopal Church had met to seek to respond to the Primates, the Secretary General of the Communion wrote that “The Joint Standing Committee is also conscious that the very life of the Communion is standing at a crossroads at present�.


The origins of this crisis can be traced back to the fact that, though overwhelmingly supported by the Communion’s bishops at the 1998 Lambeth Conference (and subsequently repeatedly reaffirmed by the other Instruments of Communion) , Resolution I.10 on Human Sexuality has not been welcomed and indeed is widely ignored by a significant part of The Episcopal Church (USA) and, to a lesser extent, the Anglican… Read full post >>

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Sam Keyes

Sam Keyes: The Eschatalogical Yes

Wednesday, October 03, 2007 at 12:43 pm

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We all have our satanic agendas.

If that sounds overly provocative, perhaps we’ve put too much distance between ourselves and words like “Satan,� which means “adversary,� and “devil,� which means “slanderer.� It’s nice to make a person out of the devil (and don’t construe all this as a lack of belief in real fallen angels); the problem is that our devil figures often turn into a Manichaean substantiation of evil, a sort of flesh and blood thing that neglects one of the fundamental parts of Christian doctrine: “We believe in one God…maker of heaven and earth, of all that is, seen and unseen.� In other words, as Christians we do not believe that evil is. Evil is merely the privation of the good; it is negation and violence and lack.



We’re used to hearing, “We have all sinned,� but just as this has been obscured in “progressive� circles to mean something along the lines of “denying my identity� (e.g., conforming to traditional morality), so in “orthodox� circles sin has been made into a list of things that annoy God (which would include a lot of praise bands, I think). Thus there’s either an apathy towards sin or an obsession for “naming� it—which is a rather funny thing to focus on for something that doesn’t, ontologically speaking, exist.

So when I say that we all have satanic tendencies, I mean something along the lines of what Origen meant when he talked about the contemplation of God: whenever we turn from God, we start falling into nothingness. But more specifically, we take on an idiom of violence and negation—we become adversarial (satanic).

Our own Baptismal liturgy confirms this—and I’m talking about the older examination part,… Read full post >>

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Dave Sims

The Joint Standing Committee responds to the HOB

Wednesday, October 03, 2007 at 11:32 am

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The Episcopal cafe has the full text of the Joint Standing Committee's assessment of the HOB response from New Orleans. On the whole, the report appears to be a complete endorsement of the HOB's response. This is not surprising since members of the JSC had apparently worked closely with Bishop Schori on crafting the HOB response's language.

On same-sex blessings, the JSC concludes:

On this basis, we understand the statement of the House of Bishops in New Orleans to have met the request of the Windsor Report in that the Bishops have declared “a moratorium on all such public Rites� , and the request of the Primates at Dar es Salaam that the bishops should “make an unequivocal common covenant that the bishops will not authorise any Rite of Blessing for same-sex unions in their dioceses� since we have their pledge explicitly in those terms.

On the consecration of non-celibate gay and lesbian persons to the episcopate, the JSC says:

By confirming the interpretation of the Communion Sub-Group and quoting it explicitly, as well as making the explicit acknowledgement in the last sentence of their text that Resolution B033 does refer to “non-celibate gay and lesbian persons�, the Episcopal House of Bishops is answering the question of the Primates positively.

On Alternative Primatial Oversight, the JSC appears to endorse the "Episcopal Visitors" scheme proposed in New Orleans by Presiding Bishop Schori:

Unfortunately, there were aspects of the recommendations of the Primates at Dar es Salaam that The Episcopal Church felt bound to reject because they were perceived as inappropriate interventions into the polity of The Episcopal Church and contrary to its Canons and Constitution.

As a Joint Standing Committee, we recommend that the Archbishop… Read full post >>

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Dave Sims

The Living Church: Primates asked to respond to HOB statement

Tuesday, October 02, 2007 at 7:53 pm

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From The Living Church:

Archbishop Williams has begun telephoning and writing the primates, seeking their views. However, his trip to Armenia and Syria, and the opening of the Church of England’s House of Bishops meeting on Oct. 1, has hindered a speedy response to the New Orleans statement.

Public statements from some of the primates indicate a split of opinion along factional lines, with some declaring the statement adequate, while others have dismissed it as dishonest and non-responsive to the primates’ request.

Read it all. Read full post >>

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Dave Sims

Mark Heard: Lonely Road

Tuesday, October 02, 2007 at 7:00 pm

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I thought it serendipitous that just as I finished the previous post, this song came up randomly on my iTunes. It struck me that the track really captures the spirit of Hauerwas, Radner, et al, and the cost of patient, charitable catholicity. It brought to mind as well Fr. Tony's recent post on brie and crackers.

Here's the lyrics and a sample of the track. You can find out more about Mark Heard (which you should) here and here.

Lonely Road
Written by Mark Heard
From the album Dry Bones Dance

[audio:Lonely Road.mp3]



Not taking note of the fools or the wise
Being a pawn of time and chance
Not making vows when the flood waters rise
Is simpler than nails through your hands

Being a slave to the sultans of grief
Keeping the hand to the plow
Being held captive to public belief
Is easier than thorns through your brow

And it's a lonely road
And it's a lonely road
And it's a lonely road
That the Son of Man walks down

Being immune to the war of the heart
And never wondering why
To bury the conflict deep in the dark
Is safer than spears through your side

And it's a lonely road
And it's a lonely road
And it's a lonely road
That the Son of Man walks down

For him who burns with a creed and a flame
Words are as smoke on the wind
Some kind of volatile helplessness reignsRead full post >>

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Dave Sims

Christian Century: On Greener Pastures and Living in Ruins

Tuesday, October 02, 2007 at 5:35 pm

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The title of this Christian Century article, "Going Catholic : Six journeys to Rome," doesn't really capture the breadth of ecumenical and Christological ground covered within. It is well worth the read. If I were to conceive of an expanded, chapter-long extension of the Covenant Mission Statement, it would look something like this article. Of course, the section on Dr. Radner is of particular interest to Covenant readers:

Radner sharpens this argument with a christological coup de grace: in the face of infidelity, Jesus himself stays put and dies for his enemies. He does not flee for greener pastures. "It is facile and ultimately misleading for orthodox Christians to identify, face, and respond to their churches' errors by saying 'repudiate and separate' . . . for the simple reason that this is not the shape of Israel's history—which must ultimately be our own—because it is not the shape of Jesus' own life. There is no other standard."

Read it all. Read full post >>

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Dave Sims

Conservative Evangelical group warns ++Williams: C of E will split

Monday, October 01, 2007 at 3:29 pm

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From the Telegraph:

Conservative Christians will throw down the gauntlet to the Archbishop of Canterbury this week by demanding that he openly disowns the American church over gay bishops.

A letter to be sent to Dr Rowan Williams tomorrow by Reform, an evangelical group representing 1,000 parishes, urges him to make it clear that he opposes the American position

Read it all.

Update: Reform denies ultimatum was sent (hat tip to Stand Firm).

Rod Thomas, Chairman-elect of Reform, denies that any such 'ultimatum' has gone to the Archbishop, or that anything has been said in a letter to him other than to seek clarification about the Communion service he is apparently to conduct, being organized by the 'Clergy Consultation'.

From Chelmsford Anglican Mainstream. Read full post >>

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