Message to Episcopal Church Supporters

The message below was sent today to members of The Episcopal Church who have signed up as friends of the Coalition on our No Anglican Covenant Web Site.

April 20, 2012

Dear Episcopalian No Anglican Covenant Coalition Supporter,

It has been quite some time since I wrote to our supporters in The Episcopal Church. Much has happened since then, but the big news is that the Church of England has failed to adopt the Anglican Covenant. In principle, this is not a rejection for all time, but, at the very least, adoption cannot be considered again before 2015.

We now need to turn our attention to The Episcopal Church and to the 2012 General Convention that meets this summer in Indianapolis. It has been widely assumed that the General Convention will reject the Covenant, and the resolution proposed some time ago by Executive Council would do essentially that. Recently, however, a group of bishops, led by Ian Douglas, has proposed a resolution that does not accept the Covenant but puts our church on the road to eventually doing so. Another group of bishops, led by John Bauerschmidt, has offered an even stronger pro-Covenant resolution that commits to adoption and looks to constitutional and canonical changes to make the Covenant “active and effective.” Suddenly, the independence of The Episcopal Church appears to be at risk. (If you want to read the resolutions on the Covenant proposed so far, you can do so here. Mark Harris has posted an analysis of the resolutions on his blog.)

I am writing to ask for your help. If you are a deputy or an alternate deputy to the General Convention, please let me know, so that you can help us defeat any attempt to adopt the Covenant or to cause The Episcopal Church to expend any additional resources on the “Covenant process.”

Even if you are not a deputy, please do what you can to encourage your lay and clergy deputies to reject the Anglican Covenant outright. If possible, speak to or write to your bishop(s) about the need to put the Covenant behind us.

The No Anglican Covenant Coalition is planning to propose our own model resolution for the 2012 General Convention. If you have any thoughts as to what that resolution should look like, please send them along to me.

I urge you to continue to look for updates at our Web site, our blog, our Facebook page, and on Twitter.

I look forward to hearing from you.

Faithfully,
Lionel
___________________________
Lionel E. Deimel, Ph.D.
Episcopal Church Convenor
No Anglican Covenant Coalition
828 Rockwood Avenue
Pittsburgh, PA 15234
+1 412-343-5337
http://deimel.org
lionel@deimel.org