Book Review from The Living Church-The Anglican Covenant already binds together one fifth of the Anglican churches, making explicit the basis of their unity and the nature of the common life to which they are committed. But sadly, it has been unable to escape from the context that gave rise to it — the crisis sparked in 2003 when a divorcé in an avowedly sexual same-sex relationship was consecrated to the episcopate despite the primates’ warning that this would put “the future of the Communion itself … in jeopardy.”
Several essays in this important volume point to the mismanagement of the 1998 Lambeth Conference, and subsequent failure to implement its resolutions, as significant contributory causes of the crisis. As Andrew Goddard shows, the Covenant reflects the growth of inter-Anglican structures and responds to needs recognized in the 1980s and ’90s: to identify the limits of acceptable teaching and practice, formulate an expression of shared faith, and balance what the 1908 Conference had called “the just freedom of [the Communion’s] several parts” and “the just claims of the whole Communion upon its every part.” Lambeth 1998 failed to give sufficient consideration and weight to the Inter-Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission’s Virginia Report, which addressed these deficits. It also failed to draw on Rowan Williams’s keynote address on “making moral decisions” (outlining themes later developed in his study of Dostoevsky — which, Nathan Humphrey suggests, illuminates Williams’s support for the Covenant). Its botched discussion of homosexuality might also have been mentioned.
More here-
http://www.livingchurch.org/diagnosis-stalled-covenant
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