Anglicans Online Declares Itself Against Covenant

Anglicans Online, one of the oldest and most respected Anglican destinations on the World Wide Web, has declared itself opposed to the adoption of the Anglican Communion Covenant. Anglicans Online is not noted for taking political stands, but its weekly home-page essay posted last night characterizes the Covenant as out-of-touch with the 21st-century world:

The very looseness of the Anglican Communion (at least until the Tedious Years of the Anglican Covenant Discussion) is what will give it strength to move with relative ease in this new world. The gentle, unlegislated bonds of affection and the tolerance for variances of custom, behaviour, churchmanship, hymns, divorce, prayer books and the like are far more aligned with the way we live now. The old-speak of the proposed Covenant hearkens back to a world that is passing away, one of rigidity, structure, and complex mechanisms of governance.

Anglicans Online goes on describe the Covenant as, in many ways, un-Anglican and offers this chilling analysis:

That it could be adopted is, to our mind, one that will signal the death knell of the Anglican Communion as we have known it. (And frankly we don't want to know any other kind.)

Read the whole essay here.