Diesel Addams' Covenant Presentation

On location in Jamaica with the Anglican Consultative Council: A presentation given on the Covenant and covered by Anglican Satellite Television by Archbishop Diesel Addams with Bishop Patercake-Baker, Bishop Graham Aspidistra, (Bishop-select) Canon Dr. Philip Crumb Monarch Bootslick, Canon Hatton Coaton, Bishop Scot Wales, Doctor Stephen Niall N. Coffin and Canon Christopher Emmerdale, a reporter. Archbishop Roald See O'Vee tries to chair proceedings. Dr Art Tickle Righter is elsewhere writing an essay on the principles of a Covenant from the perspective of dioceses.

Archbishop Roald See O'Vee (RSV): I would like to introduce Archbishop Diesel Addams, chair of the Covenant Design Group (CDG), who has something to say and who will take questions.

Archbishop Diesel Addams (DA): OK, I have worked day and night, night and day, when not consecrating people who are now going to ACNA, on this Covenant, to keep this international Church we all love in pieces together. If we keep it in pieces, I will be very pleased that in true Anglican fashion on the one hand I have done so much to keep it together while, on the other, I helped to pull it apart.

Given what I have done, we really now need to adopt the thing. I don't wish to sound desperate, but in the Windies we can feel a gale coming along unless we adopt it and this is the draft in here to do it. So it is the last draft to save us from the final gale.

I should say that three Anglican Churches, that's three provinces not dioceses, though perhaps Church now has a very loose definition, have openly asked whether there should be a Covenant at all. This could be the tip of a very cold iceberg, very cold because I have to say in all seriousness that this particular iceberg is suffering from global warming and could break up. And if it comes off the landmass then we could be turning the worldwide Anglican Church into a leaky Noah's Ark.

Canon Philip Crumb Monarch Bootslick (PCMB): Could you tell us which provinces are favouring a Federal Communion solution?

Archbishop RSV: The Archbishop's statement is not yet finished and then we will take questions.

Canon PCMB: I most humbly apologise, Your Grace. Please forgive me! I am nothing but a humble sinner not worthy of personal sacrificial alteration.

Archbishop DA: We have to commit ourselves, we really have to commit ourselves, otherwise we shall go mad. There is a madness staring at us in the face. We have to be a family, a proper family, where the parents argue with each other and the children cry from distress. Like this event has cost a third of a million: and families ask, "Where is the money coming from?" And families get divorced, with children from different families meeting each other as new mums and dads marry. Do we want that? No we don't. So it's family first and individuals second. And in this light, we can imagine a family where the children of two parents, must be male and female, have grown up and there are no jobs. So they are under the same roof. This is like the Anglican Communion situation then, this family, where the family guides and the individuals decide. The parents can no longer smack the children, you see, but money is tight and they are interdependent but individuals decide. But after all the arguments they need to draw up an agreement to say we are a family and that the agreement obviously isn't going to remove anyone from the house or do anything if they keep arguing. But if they keep arguing there is an advisory not a coercive procedure for solving the disputes. So OK they may choose to stay in separate rooms but at least they are in the building. I think this family can draw up an agreement by 2014. I've said enough now.

Archbishop RSV: That was a very clear explanation and I think we will take questions.

Canon PCMB: Very clear; I must note down how he said all that.

Bishop Patercake-Baker (PB): Which three provinces? Does that include mine, Aotearoa New Zealand?

Archbishop RSV: So that's how you do not incorrectly say it.

Archbishop DA: No I cannot tell you. It could start a trend. Look this thing has got to go out for consideration and adoption. We're not doing it again.

Canon Christopher Emmerdale (CE): My question from your humble reporter is whether we should have a Covenant that lets Churches join which reject biblical principles: surely a Covenant that is worthy is based on acceptance of biblical principles, at least according to members of the Primates' Council.

Archbishop DA: The question is, "Do we wish to remain a communion?"

Canon CE: That wasn't my question.

Archbishop DA: It was my answer.

Doctor Stephen Niall N. Coffin (SNNC): Where do you identify the discipline existing? On the way in, or on the way out?

Archbishop DA: The new draft firmly states that each Church decides for itself, and the text says quite clearly that nothing in the Covenant can or should change the constitution and canons of any province.

Canon CE: So what is the urgency to have something that doesn't do anything: how can something that does nothing save a Communion by adopting it?

Dr. SNNC: No. Er, to answer my own question, as I do: it saves the Anglican fellowship when you join and get these biblical Churches and dioceses joining quickly.

Bishop Scot Wales (SW): May I say something?

Archbishop RSV: Yes, I would like to introduce Canon... sorry Bishop Scot Wales, who of course has just joined our happy family.

Canon PCMB: Excellent, excellent! I bet that was a fine ceremony. Where was it?

Bishop Scot Wales (SW): Gogledd Cymru i chi. Of course it remains to be seen how many do adopt the Covenant. It could be some, it could be many. At the moment, there is no linkage between adoption of the Covenant and participating in the life and activities of the Communion. The more the merrier: the more that join, the more it might gain some mass like a big ball that knocks down buildings, and thus demonstrate real Anglicanism inside the knocked down building as opposed to those who stay outside the building.

Bishop PB: That's not what's been said so far. That's doing it by the back door, and Anglicans don't like the back door. Anglicans say use the front door, not the back door.

Bishop SW: It's all been done by the back drws as well as the front drws isn't it? Beth ydych i'n eisiau?

Archbishop RSV: Modern somewhat informal way of asking what do you want.

Archbishop DA: The new draft keeps as many doors and windows open as possible, so that as many can get into the building as possible.

Canon CE: That's my point.

Dr. SNNC: So what you are saying is, Canon sorry Bishop Scot, it is not the entry conditions that matter but the mass. I've been saying, the doors and windows that are open are coloured evangelical, see, and thus only can anyone come in through them; but you're saying have the lot open and then the house gains occupants and gives it importance or mass. But we don't do mass in Anglicanism.

Canon PCMB: Surely this is a most excellent Communion solution. As a bishop I would be prepared to do mass. This is the breadth of a central evangelicalism, doing mass. I think I am an Affirming Evangelical now. Or perhaps not.

Archbishop DA: What? Look, this is my presentation and I am answering the questions. Bishop Scot Wales is entitled to put his spin on it about mass and commitment over association but it is not mine.

Canon Haton Coaton (HC): Frankly, with this document, none of us have a clue. It is utterly plasticine, utterly elastic. We just want to get the thing out there and not to be a total flop after so many years of pointless activity. If we just keep waiting and waiting it will die like a plant without water.

Canon PCMB: But this is a good thing, to have the flexibility to call ourselves an Anglican family. We can go around watering the plants like families look after their gardens, their pot plants, their flowers.

Canon HC: For goodness sake.

Archbishop Graham Aspidistra (GA): May I make a comment?

Archbishop DA: If you must. This is supposed to be my presentation.

Archbishop RSV: Welcome to our Australian friend Archbishop Graham Aspidistra.

Archbishop GA: These independent Churches of ours, you know, have lots of different polities, and some of them will take two synod meetings to decide to adopt, and, let's face it, some of them are going to drag the thing out.

Archbishop DA: It is just too long into the future. Look, this is my presentation. I've done all the work here, with a few others. This airport, that airport, this hotel, that hotel. Do you know how much money it costs flying to all these different places in order to prop up this Anglican Communion? It's not as if we can have a bulk package deal and go to Rome every time, is it? And then all these consecrations. Perhaps that's what we need, not just centralisation but an ecclesiastical equivalent of Adolf...

Archbishop GA: Look the Churches can adopt this thing whenever they like. Any Church can move very soon should it wish to but if the Communion guides and each Church decides...

Archbishop DA: Now you are pinching my lines. Look, I'm ending this now. Just someone do something with this load of verbiage, right? The Covenant offers us a description of what Anglicans are, care about, how to discuss, and it might not hold any of us together but hell's teeth there is bugger all else. Perhaps we should adopt a blank sheet of paper? Would that make everybody happy? Well it is not a blank sheet of paper because I, we, worked hard on this, and the 660 bishops gathered in Lambeth have delivered our verdict...

Canon CE: Sorry, I thought the idea was that you did not deliver a verdict of any sort: indaba and all that.

Archbishop DA: Phew. We were positive in what we said. Let's look at the work before and after. Those provinces that have responded have, OK, mainly said that we worked hard and where they said we got things wrong we put them right until the document became meaningless. So not everyone agrees, there is no unanimity. But can we here in Jamaica volunteer to get this thing sent out?

Canon CE: Sorry, what is the substance of the thing to be sent out? I'm just a reporter asking questions.

Archbishop DA: There is no appetite, Canon Emmerdale, for an Anglican Confession or Statement of Belief, and we don't do creeds.

Canon PCMB: But, may I ask, can we not adopt a Communion Conservative approach and use this at least as a definitive move against a Federal approach, either liberal or conservative?

Archbishop DA: Well just to contradict my deepest desires, out there there is certainly no appetite at all for the centralisation of the life of the Communion. So it makes no difference there either. And I'm afraid, with that, I'm taking no more questions and have nothing further to say, until next time. Good bye to you all.

Canon PCMB: I think that was a most excellent presentation and... Oh everyone seems to be leaving.

Game of Anglican Whist

Members of the local congregation are reading the rules before playing a game of Anglican Whist...


The woman in pink close by has already worked out her strategy, but the one next to her needs to make some notes to help herself. The guy in the beard at a nearby table is having to read the rules again carefully. Anyway, hearts are trumps.

Second Interview in Jamaica

On location in Jamaica with the Anglican Consultative Council: A second Interview for Anglican Satellite Television with Bishop Patercake-Baker, (Bishop-select) Canon Dr. Philip Crumb Monarch Bootslick, Canon Hatton Coaton, Reverend Doctor Art Tickle Righter, Doctor Stephen Niall N. Coffin and Canon Christopher Emmerdale, a reporter. The interviewer is, again, Archbishop Roald See O'Vee.

Archbishop Roald See O'Vee (RSV): Well, welcome to our second panel for interview and conversation and indeed patience, so I will simply introduce the fact that the same people here except that Bishop Nasser Alley has gone home, and instead we are joined by Bishop Pattercake-Baker from Art, er Aero, oh New Zealand and also we are joined by a reporter, Canon Christopher Emmerdale, or at least I think he is a reporter.

Canon Hatton Coaton (HC): He's no reporter but a snake in the grass.

Canon Dr. Philip Crumb Monarch Bootslick (PCMB): Well, whatever we may think, I do hope personalities do not come into this and that we can persuade Emmerdale about the virtues of the Communion Conservative position...

Archbishop Roald See O'Vee (RSV): Now this is no longer not unlike the situation I envisaged in 2006, indeed the adoption of the Covenant no longer follows a central approach and no longer defines the committed or associate approach to...

Canon Hatton Coaton (HC): What's he doing writing all this down?

Canon Christopher Emmerdale (CE): I am a reporter. This is what I do - to quote a bishop.

Canon HC: Not exactly for a neutral website.

Canon CE: Not exactly a neutral Anglican Communion.

Archbishop RSV: If we might be afforded some explanation.

Canon HC: The text is mature enough.

Reverend Doctor Art Tickle Righter (ATR): Why thank you!

Canon HC: And frankly we are all a bit bored with it now. Basically the strategy is, make it as easy as possible to join, so the Archbishop's strategy can't be said to have failed, but make it insignificant with Churches joining willy nilly or not, with absolutely no consequences for joining and not joining, so just to see who wants to do what with the thing.

Rev. Dr. ATR: I don't think that was quite the intention behind the third draft. The intention was to adapt to the new situation regarding the varieties of institutions that can call themselves Anglican and make the Communion strengthened by a looseness of definition appropriate to the situation. Now, this looseness...

Canon Dr. PCMB: I do think there is a moral authority attached to being a member of the Communion Covenant, and that we will be a community of bishops able to draw that community along a roughly conservative trajectory, understanding that bishops have pastoral responsibility for all their flock and the priests they delegate under them, and that this means that much that the Archbishop set out to achieve he will in fact achieve and this is a great commendation for him I am sure.

Dr. Stephen Niall N. Coffin (SNNC): What I've said is this is the real deal for a bit of fancy footwork. Whether he wants to get 'em out from the inside or not, or me down the wing, me old mate Righter here gives us a chance to get the pack of cards in the right order.

Bishop Pattercake-Baker (PB): No, I don't think this is about fancy footwork. It's about trying to extend the Indaba basis Lambeth Conference last year that might just be fading from too many memories at the moment, to build on the bishops' experience of working together to achieve understanding of... well not a set of resolutions, because these create problems, but an inclusivity, if I may use that word, of using that togetherness to come to decisions for the Communion that does not exclude anyone.

Canon CE: You mean it is too easy to include the unbiblical.

Canon HC: I thought you were just a reporter? Why don't you own up to your real presence here, if you believe in real presence anywhere?

Canon CE: If that bloke can come here, who wouldn't come to our conference to get 'corrected' first, then I shall be here too.

Canon HC: Yes but he's not muscling in like you are, at least here.

Rev. Dr. ATR: Maybe he's a bit of a coward. Look, there is actually substance in this Covenant. It isn't just a statement of Anglicanism. Read it carefully: it took long enough for us to write it.

Archbishop RSV: I felt it wasn't right for me to invite the unmentionable to our discussion on the basis that it could cause a sense of further rupture across the Communion when I am trying to gather everyone in for discussion, though I am happy to invite other people of the same views and actions and indeed to listen to them intensely as I once carried such views myself before I took on this job. But can I put it to you that we are seeking the same decision making here at the Jamaica no she volunteered meetings (ha ha) that we did at Lambeth.

Bishop Pattercake-Baker (PB): The same management team?

Canon CE: The same management team of indecision as at Lambeth 2008?

Canon HC: Who asked the reporter to butt in?

Canon Dr. PCMB: But but... But I think we can say that the atmosphere of Lambeth was a triumph and this triumph represents the importance of Anglicanism and I am so pleased that whatever Canon Emmerdale thinks, your leading theologian has advised to adopt the Covenant and so give the Covenant by its very participants a Communion Conservative imprint.

Dr. SNNC: Get in there! We can steal a march on the heretics. In the breakdown of the Communion as we know it, we might just forge a new set of relationships of the orthodox in there first. Art, you've allowed ACNA to sign, and you might just get your dioceses in. One bomb from above, one from below.

Canon HC: Well we will have to decide in this meeting whether dioceses are eligible to sign the Covenant as well as provinces. As regards the Communion, it is important to state that the moratorium consents to the consecration of a bishop in a same sex relationship has held, that the moratorium on the public rites of same-sex blessings has held mainly, but that cross-border interventions had not ceased but have got worse.

Canon Dr. PCMB: Yes, the Communion approach has held but the Federal Conservative approach has proved to be unhelpful. But if we can achieve ACNA signing and the dioceses signing is a very live issue if this bolsters the Communion.

Bishop PB: It undermines The Episcopal Church as a unit, and other Churches.

Dr. SNNC: Irrelevant. Blow the bloody thing up!

Canon Dr. PCMB: Irrelevant in the face of the needs of the Communion and a definition of the Communion. We can't have anyone in: no same sex blessings, same sex marriage, same sex bishops...

Canon CE: Tough for them: it was a strategic mistake, as someone in Australia said.

Bishop PB: We can't have dioceses in one Church signing on, but not in others. What would that imply?

Canon Dr. PCMB: We are bishops in Communion, headed by our courageous Archbishop.

Canon CE: We are a fellowship of believers: believers means excluding those who aren't. Now the people managing here are the indecision makers of the Lambeth Conference here to make indecision.

Canon Dr. PCMB: As has already been pointed out, you are a reporter here and you are not a bishop like I will be.

Canon HC: My actual point is that he is not a reporter. He's here with his own agenda and as for him not being a bishop, he's waiting for Orombi or the like.

Canon Dr. PCMB: Unfortunately, for the purposes of bringing him on board, he is not here, nor has he been at joint meetings of the ACC and the Primates.

Canon HC: He is risen too high in the hierarchy.

Archbishop RSV: I think it is important that we judge the success of the Covenant and the decision making or perhaps the not decision making here (which can still be an atmospheric success) by how much we can then go fishing.

Dr. SNNC: Fantastic turquoise waters out there. Wow. We always choose such good locations for us people to come and visit. How much is this little meeting here?

Canon HC: A third of a million pounds or more.

Dr. SNNC: What shit loads like that? Hey I could be here for months on that money out there on a bloody good boat!

Archbishop RSV: By fishing I mean mission. I was using a little part of narrative licence. Is not fishing what we are about? Fishers of men and women and indeed listening to gay people. I did once hope this was about strengthening the institutional bonds of our Communion up to myself via our bishops in dioceses on the basis of the kind of reading of the Bible I have not myself ever indulged in but would be a price worth paying including the self-scacrifice of gay people to make a Church that could be shown to the Holy Father in Rome as being a proper Church, but it seems that now none of this will happen on the basis of leaving the Covenant writing to other people to do because I am not a pope and so how can we move on to fishing - mission - then, which must be our priority, if this Covenant thing seems to be, well, what I did not intend it to be not unlike.

Bishop Pattercake-Baker (PB): By closing the churches here and knocking up a big congregation and getting the press to report on it?

Canon HC: We've done that.

Bishop Pattercake-Baker (PB): Oh I thought that wasn't a bad turnout. So they couldn't go to their usual places then. What was that Rastafarian song again?

Canon CE: Yes, I'll make a note of that: 'Heretical interfaith content overseen by the Archbishop'. Was that not so, Your Grace?

Archbishop RSV: #Let's get together an' we'll be all right!# We'll get together again later perhaps.

Canon Dr. PCMB: What an inspired evangelical hymn Archbishop: I shall have that at my enthroning ceremony. Let's get together indeed.

Dr. SNNC: Anyone coming fishing?

Canon HC: I know of a boat: cost a few dollars though.

Canon Dr. PCMB: Well, can I just say to end, what a most useful interview this was and... Oh everyone has got up and left. I suppose I'd better too. I do like that shade of purple that chap from New Zealand was wearing. Who was he I wonder?

Interview in Jamaica

On location in Jamaica with the Anglican Consultative Council: An Interview for Anglican Satellite Television with Bishop Nasser Alley, (Bishop-select) Canon Dr. Philip Crumb Monarch Bootslick, Canon Hatton Coaton, Reverend Doctor Art Tickle Righter and Doctor Stephen Niall N. Coffin. The interviewer is Archbishop Roald See O'Vee.

Archbishop Roald See O'Vee (RSV): There is a fairly general (though not universal) view, is there not, that Anglican differences can be understood within the spectrum of manageable diversity about what the Bible and the tradition allow and that, in the context of that manageable diversity Anglicanism is worth bothering with because it tries to be a Church neither tightly centralised nor just a loose federation of purely autonomous independent bodies that hears the Bible read in public and breaks bread and distribute wine under Christ with its threefold ministry and recognisable as Church to our ecumenical brothers and sisters...

(Bishop-select) Canon Dr. Philip Crumb Monarch Bootslick (PCMB): Absolutely, absolutely; you could not be more right.

Canon Hatton Coaton (HC): Yes.

Rev. Dr. Art Tickle Righter (ATR): Yes, absolutely.

Dr. Stephen Niall N. Coffin (SNNC): Indeed.

Bishop Nasser Alley (NA): Possibly so.

Archbishop RSV: And this is not meant in some bureaucratic way but, yes, I think so, according to that ministry...

Bishop NA: What is the question?

Archbishop RSV: Well, the question: if we were to draw on your internationalist perspective, for example, which you intend to develop, these common features of ministry and a biblically-centred form of common prayer, focus on the Holy Communion (I think so, yes): we are as a community attempting to grasp and gather regarding the action and the invitation of God that is made real for us in ministry and Bible and sacraments; and is this not what a Covenant between local Churches, by which I mean mainly national Churches, stands out as being the best way forward so long as, given the common features but the absence of one Canon Law, until some point in the future, is necessarily an 'opt-in' matter?

Canon HC: I would like to come in here. I think with this current draft, the Ridley-Cambridge, we have come to the view that it must be an opt-in Covenant between the Churches and have no impact at all on membership of the Institutions of the Anglican Communion.

Bishop NA: Why ever not? What is the point of having an agreement to be a Communion, if those who do not agree to be a Communion are still going to be in it?

Canon HC: Because we think there are legal difficulties about accepting foreign overview in some if not most Churches, and also we don't want a mad unprincipled scramble for membership.

Rev. Dr. ATR: We do not want The Episcopal Church or the Anglican Church of Canada thinking it ought to join when they do not need to join. So we make it as little cost for them not joining as possible.

Bishop NA: Then what is the point of anyone joining, if it clearly means no cost and no benefit? What is the benefit of membership and the discipline of losing membership?

Dr. SNNC: It is in the entry conditions that we make a moral demand upon the protagonists: who it is who joins first, joins alone, is joined by others joining, and then decides whether the Covenant is effective or not effective, by the joining.

Canon Dr. PCMB: So those who join enhance the Communion conservative model of the Communion in the Covenant rather than those who remain out having a Federal Conservative model becoming endorsed by the Covenant, but allowing the Liberal Federal Model to keep out should conditions for them be doubly difficult.

Dr. SNNC: What?

Canon Dr. PCMB: Well, if you take the four-model...

Bishop NA: Shut up Philip, you're boring us already.

Archbishop RSV: Let me try to move this along a little with a further related question. It's about Churches, local, or national if you wish, being prepared to use the Covenant as an expression of responsibility to curtail local, or national, freedoms for a greater witness; and,of course, some might not be open to this. I think so, yes. Nevertheless, the RCDC, shall we call it...

Bishop NA: Sounds like AC DC to me.

Dr. SNNC: Yes, this has unfortunate sexual connotations which we are trying to marginalise.

Rev. Dr. ATR: Well I don't mind. Call the draft 'Jamaica'.

Bishop NA: Jamaica? No she volunteered. Like this Covenant.

Archbishop RSV: I would not use the word 'marginalise': self-sacrifice for the good of the Communion I would hope, especially if I can go on persuading others to do this. Anyway, I think we can call it The Draft. Ha ha. Volunteered! Yes, it does allow for autonomy to be better recognised but we can also allow for a set of constituent Churches and associate Churches but in a completely welcoming Anglican spirit under the newly re-emphasised Holy Spirit. Humm, yes I think so. We remain bound by historic and perhaps personal links, fed from many of the same sources, and now we try to retain as much institutional togetherness as possible whether or not we are in the Covenant or out of it, recognising that we are both in and out, and out and in, remaining a single and unrestricted sacramental communion, whilst having a situation where some Churches do not recognise others regardless of the Covenant, though it may indicate to some extent our inness and outness, and so the relationship now would be different from before when envisaged - not not unlike that between the Church of England and the Methodist Church, for example, between those who are in this Covenant and out of this Covenant.

Canon Dr. PCMB: You put this so well, Archbishop; I wish I could construct my answers in a similar way.

Bishop NA: He's lost me. Sounds like having it both ways. Typical Anglican and what does this say about informing British culture?

Rev. Dr. ATR: Now what were we trying to do?

Bishop NA: God knows - I hope He tells us by divine revelation or some such way because I don't know.

Rev. Dr. ATR: I can tell you. We were crafting a situation where clearly limited autonomy and interdependence was an issue, but also the autonomy argument of some dioceses, and that Church and province is looser now because of those who have TEC reasserter solutions and the Anglican Church of North America.

Canon Dr. PCMB: If we can just get ACNA to adopt a Communion Conservative approach rather than a Federal Conservative approach, this would go so far to repair the situation for Evangelicals. Only the other day Archbishop Orombi...

Rev. Dr. ATR: Philip, please. Please. By the way, have you been to that corner of England where you will have your new appointment? Anyone know of it?

Canon HC: Come on, come on. It is good to get out of London sometimes. Merrie England and bishops go together.

Canon Dr. PCMB: I think you might just be jealous.

Archbishop RSV: Gentlemen. This is the Anglican Communion. There really is very little to be jealous about. Ask me.

Rev. Dr. ATR: So, to continue, we have to be as flexible as possible, to allow for the possibility of new applications to become members of the Anglican Communion, though this is not directly linked to the Covenant but might just help accelerate it, with new bodies in our midst, and have dioceses join too, so that those of us like myself, in Canada, working from the inside, can gnaw away from the inside and basically bugger up the institution better than the GAFCON lot trying to do it from the outside.

Dr. SNNC: This is what I am saying to me old mates in GAFCON. Get in there! Do the old down the wing, cross the ball and goal! Get in there first. Join up and embarrass the heretics.

Bishop NA: Not at all, not at all. If the heretics join, the Covenant is worthless. This is no game of prisoner's dilemma about conditions of joining when the doors are open to the cells: it is about a Covenant that would make Anglicanism a further laughing stock if: everyone joined it, no one was disciplined for anything, and the same problems went on and on. That's why I am becoming independent. I'll do my own thing. If I can't have Canterbury, because I want to change Britain and reintroduce Christianity to the British, then we shall have to say that Canterbury is not essential to the Communion, and the Covenant assumes that it is.

Archbishop RSV: Well let me try and put it this way regarding The Draft. Jamaica? No she volunteered. Oh that is so very good. Yes, I think so. Put it this way. The associated Churches outside the Covenant would no longer have no direct part in the decision making of the constituent Churches in the Covenant, though they might well want to be observers whose views were sought or whose expertise was shared from time to time, though they could now be fully members, and with whom significant areas of co-operation might be possible either way in or out. Now of course this leaves many unanswered questions, yes, I know this, given that the lines of division with which we are dealing run within local, or national, Churches as well as between them. For example, if Sydney Archdiocese pursues the legitimacy of lay presidency at the Eucharist, what are we to do then? We would want them still at the centre of Anglican institutions even though we might want to comment on this complete breaking of the threefold order. So it cannot mean the ordered and mutually respectful separation between constituent and associated elements; but it could still mean a positive direction for Churches to work out what is involved in belonging in a global sacramental fellowship, to come together regardless for a waiting on God as St Paul commends to the Corinthians. By the way, are you looking forward to your retirement?

Bishop NA: You're not kidding. Pakistan looks like a good idea compared with all this rabble.

Canon Dr. PCMB: I'm really, really, excited about my new posting.

Canon HC: You must be riveted.

Canon Dr. PCMB: It's called wearing a pectoral cross when you are entitled to do so, Hatton.

Bishop NA: I've had enough of this. I'm going.

Dr. SNNC: I can feel another essay coming on: The Right Way is the GAFCON Way. We have the right institutions now to reform the Communion and if it doesn't like it we can do it ourselves.

Rev. Dr. ATR: I feel several essays coming on. You'll all be pleased to know that I'll get started straight away.

Archbishop RSV: Well, goodbye then Nasser. I suppose this means thank you everyone, and it's good to know that we shall soon be recommending this Covenant to the local Churches to try to get over the Anglican tendency to squabble. I shall probably then retire myself, as it will have done nothing really - will it? Yes, I think so. I don't think we'll end with a prayer. Yes, I think not. Goodbye all.

Canon Dr. PCMB: I'd just like to say to end how pleased I am that we are going forward with the Covenant and that as many... Oh I'd better leave as well if you're all going.

Small Gatherings

Knut Heidelberg now seems to call himself a Superintendent Minister or Bishop, which (if properly so) makes three in worldwide Unitarianism. He has taken up the Norwegian tradition (that was two traditions) and revived it via small groups and installed a Pastor at Skien (probably for another small group) and he has installed a minister in Denmark (another Unitarianism that came and went; though Denmark never really had a Unitarian connected liberal tradition, as I understand it, but a different experience based on one chapel). The French presence has a news item about this Danish event; France is again an addition to the main centres of Unitarianism: central Europe, Britain and North America.

These are small revivals, and small revivals are the means to gather more people.

Knut seems to want to promote what I call the central European Unitarian tradition via his own ordination in Hungary, as held within the Hungarian and Transylvanian (Rumanian) Churches. It is noted that the tradition has occasional Holy Communion, as illustrated among the few gathered in Skien.

Meanwhile, in the United States, a panic seems to be part of the electoral bid of one hopeful for General Assembly President in that membership of the denomination has fallen for the first time in donkeys years, by some 74 (yep, 74) and some figures quoted are that candidate Rev. Peter Morales's church is down 1.16 percent while the UUA as a whole is down 0.02 percent.

Obviously if you are used to year on growth every year the chill of a sudden dip can be quite a worry. Problems problems!

Addition: While on Unitarian matters here, Pete Seeger, folk musician (recently singing This Land is Your Land at the Presidential inauguration) and Unitarian Universalist, features on the BBC as he is 90 years old. Listen on Monday 4th May 2009 at 15:00 on BBC Radio 4.

GAFCON Split on RCDC!

The man Noll, he like to say Yes, because of entry conditions, and the man Nazi-Ali, he like to say No, because of the absence of exit conditions, as regards the Ridley-Cambridge Draft Covenant.

I've covered Noll, so what's Bishop Nazir-Ali saying (soon to have plenty of available time in which to organise GAFCON and the FCA)?

• The theology of the Covenant remains weak, with the introduction 'outside' the Covenant itself
• Nothing about the communion between or among particular Churches on a belief-fellowship basis [contrast would be with Archbishop of Canterbury's Advent Letter 2007]
• Reference back to the 1930 Lambeth Conference (the teaching role of bishops) is not fully reflected in the decision-making processes proposed
• Moves away from the previous language of autonomy in interdependence to a renewed emphasis on autonomy (no biblical or apostolic evidence)
• No power to direct any province causing offence nor the response of any of the other provinces
• The possibility of both covenanted and non-covenanted Churches continuing to belong to the Instruments of Communion
• How long to wait for the Covenant?

Well, such is Anglicanism: a collection of autonomous Churches! This Covenant Draft achieves nothing. A little while back I wrote:

It goes in one direction, and undermines itself, it goes in another direction, and undermines itself. It cannot achieve anything other than more argument. Nothing can be imposed, and probably little can be generated in order to be directed. Its emphasis is against a two tier Anglicanism that might be a basis for disciplining, and so cannot serve the purposes of the theological/ ecclesiological right, but whilst moving slightly leftward (in terms of autonomy, scholarship, Holy Spirit) still leaves wheels that can rotate against such movement.

A rare moment of agreement between Nazir-Ali and the likes of me!

Postmodern Authoritarianism

Oliver O'Donovan makes an appeal to the postliberal theology school of Yale for his treatment of Scripture, whilst making use of the super-realists who produced the Jerusalem Declaration (who'd hardly rate the Yale approach - and there is a Yale approach).

What is the Yale approach but the non-objective fixing of the grammar of texts to identify a community by its performance of the texts, e.g by public reading. It's a cultural icecube: culture from the past frozen because it cannot be objectified today. Or, using the words of O'Donovan himself:

we cannot simply take it up and put it down, but read it as the church, depending on it for our identity

Trouble is language is always dynamic and changing. In a kind of linguistic Darwinism among the cultures, accents became languages, languages start to mix and borrow, and concepts full of meaning in one context shift in another, and the shift gets transmitted back. Yale wants everything frozen: the last gasp of historical authoritarianism after all the current reasoning has been lost.

So time to do a bit of postmodern deconstruction on this article then, if we are talking about text. Some word and phrase selections are extracted:

• a huge mountain of over-confident speculative rubble
• arose a doctrinal and apologetic way of talking about Scripture, one driven by the pastoral need
• icon of revelation for us
• "Authority" is a term of practical reason
• "translated", "read", "preached", "taught" and "obeyed"
• "hear", "read", "mark", "learn", "inwardly digest"
• New literature is more elusive
  
• the reader is, and must remain, an unknown
• the writer is always a prior and unnegotiable quantity
• fashionable... "reading against the grain" is simply a battle to suppress the text
• the text lacks resources to resist the violence offered it
• the strength the text has offered
• an implicit hierarchy of texts
• the logic of a canonical text
• a reading in faith - not as opposed to reason, but as a founding moment of reason's exercise
• a reading in love
• a search for such a "first text", a text to illuminate all texts
• aesthetic values will not point us to the authority of the canonical text
• The privileged book
• the Christ-moment which fulfils the promise of history
• words of Christ are already interpretations of Holy Scripture
• God's self-emptying into Scripture
• the history of the law-text, the history of God's manifest will
• Reading is a Christological business
• the authority of Scripture... the attested reality of God's acts disturb the ideal constructions and zealous projections of human piety
• the authority of Scripture in the church arm it against the greatest danger of a culture that declares itself "post-modern"
• translated, read, preached, taught and obeyed
• plain and canonical sense, respectful of the church's historic and consensual reading
• a disciplined act of plain and simple reading
• interpretation must happen in due order, under the command of the text
• a proper value assigned to the corporate exercise of public reading
• primary to the catholic identity of the church gathered as the reading and recitation of Scripture
• It is the nuclear core
• not trying to manipulate or evade its claims...
• guided by moralistic ideals, has surely crossed the line at which interpretation becomes domestication
• a strange and slightly mystical claim, that the text has its own ongoing life in the life of its readers
• In extending the authority of the text to cloak the vagaries of its readers, it dissolves the text's critical authority altogether
• challenge, out of the text itself, even the most historic and consensual readings if they are downright wrong
• the Bible is not the creation of the church's reading but its judge
• the reading of Scripture is a collective enterprise
• insights of one generation and another will complement each other
• Good interpretation
• a proper test of our readings
• a great deal of normative weight to tell us
• what obedience is all about
• we may confront the indeterminacy of practical decision
• authority is genuinely a practical, not merely a speculative category
• There are mistaken ways of hearing that promise.
• ...we are advanced where Jesus and the apostles were naive, we are developed where they were primitive, and so on. [irony]
• measured by a norm, which is the works and words of Jesus, the perfected law which lies at the heart of Scripture
• [God] judges the ambiguous proposals of science, literature, culture, politics, economics - yes, and sexuality
• reading the text for our time, but also reading our time from the text
  
• what we need as we read
• shall not need to look elsewhere
• God's masterful government of history

This is not an argument, but a construction of vertical authoritarianisms, phrase after phrase of stacked up texts emphasising discipline and regulation. It should be seen for what it is, as a skyscraper of piled high crates and why this article should be rejected as nothing more than an artifice reaching up, pressing down its mass, and swaying in the wind.

Instead, living now, read in creative dialogue, in reflection on what is there, not upon a book of rules, and read along with the reading of other books of life.