The Anglican Covenant: Hope for the Communion?

For those associated with the Episcopal Church in the US (TEC) or the Anglican Communion world-wide, you are going to start hearing more and more about something called the Anglican Covenant. Briefly, the The Anglican Covenant is the final work product of the Windsor Process which was instituted after the Consecretion of Gene Robinson, a non-celibant openly gay priest, as bishop of New Hampshire. It is a document that lays out the meaning of Anglicanism and the requirements of the various provinces of the Anglican Communion. By signing onto the Covenant member provinces in essence promise to abide by the Covenant. If a province strays from the Covenant, then there are disciplinary steps the Communion might take to bring the errant province back into accord.

What kind of a Covenant is this? Well, it is not really a Biblical Covenant because God has not ordained the terms of the covenantial relationship. In such a Biblical Covenant the people who keep the Covenant fall under God's protection.

So really here we are talking more about a contract as in the sense of a Real Property Law type of covenant. Such Covenants contain mutually agreed upon terms and conditions.

This is all fine and well and the first three sections of the Anglican Covenant give a beautiful expression of what it means to be Anglican and what our shared agreements are to each other as a Communion.

Now a multi-party covenant or contract is not very useful if there is no way to enforce or demand performance to the contract or covenant. And this is where my difficulty with the Anglican Covenant comes in. Section 4.2 attempts to lay out a process by which straying provinces who have signed the covenant may be brought back into accord. One does not have to be a rocket scientist to realize that any process as laid out in Section 4.2 will take years upon years to slog through and in all likelyhood will not draw any absolutes in terms of condemnation of any specific behaviors. In short, the thing has no teeth!

What this means is there is no up front pain for any province, such as TEC to the sign the thing, throw it in a drawer and then proceed on to ordain any number of openly homosexual non-celibant deacons, priests, bishops, wickens or whatever. So what if 20 years later there are some consequences?

How can we put some real teeth into such a document? Do we throw it away and start all over? No, we do not need to start all over. There is a simple way to fix this document but I guarantee you we will not see it. Here is how you do it:

1. Get rid of Section 4.2

2. For every point in sections 1, 2, 3, 4 have a signature line at the end of each statement.

3. The primate for each province which wants to execute the Covenant signs every signature line as an assent by the province to what is said in the document.

4. All the signature lines have to be signed for that province to be a member.

5. If a member is found to violate one or more of the signed statements, the Archbishop of Canturbury declares that membership void.

6. The membership remains void until such time as the offending province confesses its sin, repents, redresses the offending issue, and receives absolution from the Communion in the form of a vote by all members to reinstate the membership of the offending province.

Maybe not perfect, but some real teeth. No doubt someone will say that even this Covenant could be violated by TEC. Well probably. But if you enter into contracts with NO intention to be honorable, no contract can make you honorable. That has to come from each member.