Week of Prayer for Christian Diversity

Bosco Peters, the Anglican New Zealand priest who writes the Liturgy blog, has declared January 27, 2013 – February 3, 2013, the Week of Prayer for Christian Diversity. The octave of prayer for diversity is analogous to the established Week of Prayer for Christian Unity. Unity in the Anglican Communion is taken by some to require uniformity, and Peters’ newly declared week is intended to promote the acceptability of the notion of unity in diversity. His blog post on his declaration is here, and the logo he has designed to celebrate Christian diversity is shown below.

Status Update on the Covenant

“South Park” Malcolm
from Simple Massing Priest blog

News of the Anglican Covenant has been scarce for quite some time. The Anglican world has instead largely been focused on various goings on in the Church of England. The English church now has a new Archbishop of Canterbury, has the potential to consecrate gay (but celibate) bishops but not women bishops (of any sort), and has shown itself to be out-of-touch with the larger society on the matter of marriage equality. No one seems to be talking about the Anglican Covenant.

The Rev. Malcolm French, the No Anglican Covenant Coalition moderator, noting that he has not written anything about the Covenant since he blogged from the General Convention of The Episcopal Church last summer, has now published a post on his blog titled “Time for the new broom to sweep clean.” In it, Malcolm offers an evaluation of where the Covenant stands in January 2013. He stops short of asking Justin Welby, the new Archbishop of Canterbury, to sign the death certificate (or, perhaps, death warrant) of the Covenant, but he observes that the Covenant “staggers on like some dessicated zombie or reflection-free nosferatu.”

You can read Malcolm’s post here.
 

Moderator French an Episcopal Candidate

We are pleased to announce that the moderator of the No Anglican Covenant Coalition (and convenor for the Anglican Church of Canada), the Rev. Malcolm French, is a candidate to become the next bishop of the Diocese of Qu’Appelle in the Anglican Church of Canada. The list of candidates is here. Malcolm’s profile is here.

Please pray for the selection process in the Diocese of Qu’Appelle.

The Rev. Malcolm French

Blog Comments

Recently, this blog has experienced some odd posts. While I share this blog with my colleagues and do not post my "three rules" here regularly, they are worthy of your consideration.

1. Stay within musket range of the topic. Items that are off subject are deleted.
2. Ad hominem attacks will be deleted period.
3. Avoid obscure unintelligible writing. While this is often in the eye of the beholder, Lionel and I while tolerant, do mean it.

So, if you are wondering why you are not finding some brilliant comment you think really showed the Coalition how wrong it is, consider it it light of those three. We do not claim infallibility, we know we can be wrong. But we do expect guests here to be reasonably polite.

Jim B

General Convention Brochure

The No Anglican Covenant Coalition distributed both buttons and brochures at the recent General Convention. For the benefit of those who did not attend, you can see one of our buttons in a previous post.

Our brochure was a tri-fold affair on glossy white paper:

 

Click here to see the content of the brochure, which was designed specifically for distribution at the 2012 General Convention.

You can find pictures of Malcolm French and me at our General Convention display on my own blog.

What Would an Ideal Anglican Communion Look Like?

The Anglican Covenant would re-engineer the Anglican Communion. But the Anglican Communion was never really engineered to begin with. Instead, it developed in fits and starts with no planning as to what a “mature” Anglican Communion should look like.

Encouraging the Communion to avoid making the serious mistake of adopting the proposed Anglican Covenant has been satisfying, but Anglicans really should be asking what an ideal Anglican Communion would look like. What would we want to create if we were beginning from scratch?

Do readers have any ideas to contribute? What should be the underlying principles of an ideal Anglican Communion? How should those principles be incorporated into particular structures and processes?

ACANZAP says NO, TEC declines to take position

NEWS RELEASE
JULY 11, 2012
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

COALITION STATEMENT ON THIS WEEK’S VOTES ON THE ANGLICAN COVENANT

INDIANAPOLIS, INDIANA – Two days ago, the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia rejected the Anglican Covenant. Yesterday, the Episcopal Church voted to “decline to take a position on the Anglican Covenant,” and to continue to monitor the progress of the Covenant until the next General Convention in 2015. No Anglican Covenant Moderator, the Rev. Malcolm French, has issued the following statement:

The wind has clearly gone out of the sails of the Anglican Covenant. There was not even a single dissenting vote when the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia declared itself unable to adopt the Covenant. While our Coalition would have preferred a clearer “no” from the Episcopal Church, the resolution passed in Indianapolis is scarcely more than an abstention – and the commitment to “monitor the ongoing developments” rings hollow when we consider that the same General Convention phased out funding for the Episcopal Church staff position for Anglican Communion affairs. Perhaps they will monitor the situation by following #noanglicancovenant on Twitter.

The next major step in the Covenant process will be at the Anglican Consultative Council meeting in Auckland, New Zealand, this fall. We understand that there will be an attempt to introduce a ratification threshold and a sunset date to the Covenant process. Depending on the details, our Coalition is likely to be broadly supportive of both initiatives.

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The No Anglican Covenant Coalition is an international group of Anglicans concerned about how the proposed Anglican Covenant would radically change the nature of the Anglican Communion.

noanglicancovenant.org

The Rev. Malcolm French (Canada)     +1-306-550-2277
The Rev. Jean Mayland (England)    +44 07966 921247
The Ven. Lawrence Kimberley (New Zealand)     +64 3 981 7384
The Rev. Canon Hugh Magee (Scotland)     +44 1334 470446
Dr. Lionel Deimel (USA)     +1-412-512-9087


Note: A PDF version of this news release is available here.