Global South Anglican

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By the Rev. George Conger

The Anglican Communion is headed “straight for the rocks” and if its member churches do not change course and adopt a concordat laying out the parameters of a common faith and order, Archbishop Drexel Gomez, Primate of the West Indies, told the Diocese of Central Florida on May 15.

Meeting with the clergy and lay members of the diocesan board and standing committee at Canterbury Retreat and Conference Center in Oviedo, Archbishop Gomez offered a somber analysis of the tensions between The Episcopal Church and parts of the 38-member Anglican Communion while leading a day-long discussion of the proposed Anglican Covenant.

“If we are to exist as a Catholic Church we must have order” that finds is strength not in “rules and regulations” or in pleas to parochial polity, but in faithfulness “to the Gospel,” Archbishop Gomez said.  While the divisions within the Communion over homosexuality arose from different ways of interpreting the Bible, he argued the threatened collapse of the Communion lay in a dispute over how the churches order themselves in response to the conflict.

This crisis of ecclesiology was sparked by The Episcopal Church’s 2003 consecration of a partnered gay priest as Bishop of New Hampshire, Archbishop Gomez said.  In refusing to heed the counsel of the Anglican Communion and not consecrate Gene Robinson, The Episcopal Church had chosen to place its “autonomy over and above unity.”

The question before the Church was “Does autonomy supersede Communion, or does a common mission subsume autonomy?” “If we do not agree” on how the churches interact, “then we are bound to be in disarray.” Archbishop Gomez said.

“It would be a tragedy to allow the process of fragmentation to continue” and destroy the Anglican Communion.  It would be an “insult to God and to our history,” he said.

The senior bishop of the Anglican Communion, Archbishop Gomez was consecrated Bishop of Barbados in 1972, and was translated to the Diocese of Nassau and the Bahamas with the Turks & Caicos Islands in 1993.  Elected Primate of the West Indies in 1998, Archbishop Gomez has been chairman of the Inter-Anglican Standing Committee on Ecumenical Relations since 1998, was a member of the central committee of the World Council of Churches, served on the Lambeth Commission on Communion in 2005 that produced the Windsor Report, and was appointed by Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams as chairman of the Covenant Design Group to draft the Anglican Covenant.

A graduate of Codrington College, Barbados and St Chad’s College of the University of Durham, Archbishop Gomez served as a Scripture tutor and as principal at Codrington prior to his election as Bishop of Barbados.

After an introduction and welcome from the Rt. Rev. John W. Howe, Archbishop Gomez rose and addressed the meeting, noting that he saw himself “among friends” in Central Florida. He opened his remarks with an exposition on the Parable of the Sower, Matt 13:3-23; Mk 4:2-20; Lk 8:4-15—likening the four types of soils to the basic types of human personality.

The idea of an Anglican Covenant to bind the churches of the Communion together arose during the work of the Lambeth Commission on Communion (LCC)--the author of the Windsor Report.  “The Archbishop of Canterbury asked us to look at the Anglican Communion” in the midst of the crisis occasioned by the consecration of Gene Robinson and “how then to move forward,” Archbishop Gomez said.

Two paths suggested themselves.  A minority of the LCC “took a juridical view, using canon law to steer the Church.” However the “majority felt the need to go deeper” and believed a covenant was needed.  The Windsor Report offered a “first draft” of an Anglican Covenant “as a way of giving flesh to the Communion.”

The Primates asked the Communion to offer its responses to the Windsor Report and Archbishop Williams created a Design Group to review the responses and prepare a draft.  Two Americans had been appointed to the Design Group, Archbishop Gomez noted, the Rev. Ephraim Radner, rector of Church of the Ascension in Pueblo, Colorado and the Rev. Katherine Grieb of the Virginia Theological Seminary.

The principle influences came from submissions from the Anglican Church of Australia, the Global South Coalition’s paper “The Road to Lambeth,” the Windsor Report, and the Ordinal of the Church of England, he said.

The impetus towards the creation of a Covenant came from the “total breakdown of trust within the Anglican Communion,” he noted.  The Design Group “sought to recognize this and to repair the breach.”

However “trust cannot be legislated.  It requires a commitment to travel with one another and be with one another,” he said.  That “trust does not now exist.”

The first draft was written by Dr. Radner, Archbishop Gomez said, and at its January meeting in Nassau the Design Group “worked on it and released the draft” presenting it to the Primates at their February Meeting in Tanzania.

“The Primates spent very little time dealing with the Covenant”, Archbishop Gomez noted, but “expressed their pleasure of what the group was doing.”

The draft Covenant is comprised of a preamble, written by Dr. Grieb, and six sections and has been commended by the Primates to the Communion for study and review.

“There is nothing new” in the first section, The Life We Share: Common Catholicity, Apostolicity and Confession of Faith, Archbishop Gomez said.  Its first three clauses were drawn from the Lambeth Quadraleteral and the second three clauses come from the Ordinal of the Church of England.  It is the “assent made by each priest and bishop at ordination,” he noted and affirms what Anglicans have always believed.  Archbishop Gomez conceded some might balk at the inclusion of the Thirty-nine Articles of Religion in the Covenant.  However, “given the history of Anglicanism, it is important to emphasize it as part of our historic journey,” he explained.

The following section, Our Commitment to Confession of Faith was not a confessional declaration on the order of the Reformed Churches’ Westminster Confession or Martin Luther’s Confession but a recapitulation of the core principles of the Anglican Churches.

Archbishop Gomez acknowledged that “some people had a problem with Biblically derived moral values” as defined by the Covenant but noted this had been “put in deliberately” as “Anglicans are Biblically driven.”

By ratifying the Covenant, each Church would “uphold and act in continuity with the catholic and apostolic faith,” promote Eucharistic fellowship and “pursue a common pilgrimage” with the other Churches “to discern truth.”

The fourth clause of Our Commitment “acknowledges the prophetic role” of the Church, and was included in deference to views on church mission articulated by Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori.  However, the prophetic witness of the Church was always circumscribed by “scriptural revelation” he said.

The Church’s calling as stated in the third section, The Life We Share with Others: Our Anglican Vocation was an “extremely important section” that “is the heart of what it is to be church,” he said.  Without “mutual accountability” the Anglican provinces were but a congeries of denominations, falling short of the fullness of the Catholic ideal.

Archbishop Gomez also stated the covenant’s five marks of mission: “to proclaim the Good News”, to “teach, baptize, and nurture new believers,” to respond to need through “living service,” to combat societal injustices, and to “safeguard the integrity of creation” were derived from the work of MISSIO, the Anglican Consultative Council’s mission group.

Our Unity and Common Life reaffirmed the place of the episcopate within Anglicanism, drawing upon the language of the Lambeth Quadralateral, while the affirmation of the “four Instruments of Communion” came from the recent work of the ACC, Lambeth Conferences and the Primates Meetings.  It contains “nothing new” Archbishop Gomez stated.

The Anglican Covenant reformed the language adopted by ACC-13 to describe the four principle actors within Anglicanism: the Archbishop of Canterbury, the Lambeth Conferences, the Primates Meetings, and the Anglican Consultative Councils, calling them instruments of “Communion” not “unity”.

The Archbishop of Canterbury was no longer the “focus of unity” but one of four “instruments of Communion”; first among equals among the Communion’s bishops, the convener of the Lambeth Conference and Primates Meeting, and president of the ACC.

The Unity of the Communion Archbishop Gomez stated would be the most controversial part of the Covenant.  The first three clauses “are what one would expect”, he said, while the fourth clause harkened to the consecration of Gene Robinson.

Its call to “heed the counsel of our Instruments of Communion in matters which threaten the unity of the Communion and the effectiveness of our mission” had arisen in response to the actions that brought the Communion to the brink of dissolution.

When disputes over doctrine and discipline could not be settled by “mutual admonition and counsel” the Covenant stated it would be resolved through a process that began with the Primates Meeting.  If the Primates were not of one mind as to a response, it would pass to the Lambeth Conference, the ACC and the Archbishop of Canterbury for deliberation, and then returned to the Primates for “guidance and direction.”

Archbishop Gomez stated the dispute resolution mechanism provided for a “full consultative process across the Communion.” The Primates had been vested with the final say as they have “been acting as an executive committee of Lambeth.”

“For logistical reasons” the ACC is “too large” and meets too infrequently to assume this role, he explained.

Failure to heed the counsel of the Communion would result in a church expelling itself.  “If you go this way, you put yourself out,” he said.

In summarizing the Covenant, Archbishop Gomez stated the Covenant was not offering anything new to the Communion but in one document “we are pulling together what Anglicans have always believed.”

“A ‘church within a church’ is the plan for the Covenant” Archbishop Gomez said, allowing those who hold to the Anglican ideal to remain united.  “We have no curia, we have no central administration,” he noted.  There “must be a way of holding each other accountable” he concluded, for “without the Covenant Anglicans will drift” apart.