In his carefully calibrated response to the covenant (which comes only weeks after the Pope offered a 'safe haven' for Anglo-Catholics), Archbishop Rowan Williams offered up the following statement.

"The Covenant is not going to solve all our problems, it's not going to be a constitution, and it's certainly not a penal code for punishing people who don't comply."

Note the code language regarding punishment. This is a direct reference to The Episcopal Church and the Anglican Church of Canada. What he is saying (and it is always important to read the subtext in anything Dr. Williams says) is that life with TEC will continue even if Mrs. Jefferts Schori lays hands on Mary Glasspool to become the next Suffragan Bishop of the Diocese Los Angeles. TEC's leaders will not be excluded from Primatial gatherings and councils of the church backed by the Anglican Communion Office, aka the Anglican Consultative Council. Basically the message from Williams is "get over it" Africa, Asia and Latin America. In short, there will be no discipline.

In a different forum, the same message was recently delivered to the Pope in Rome about future women bishops. It's a done deal, "get over it" said Williams. The Pope was not amused. Despite polite language that ARCIC talks will continue, all such talks are as dead as yesterday's half eaten turkeys and empty wine bottles. They have achieved little or nothing in 40 years. The same trajectory will only continue.

Liberals are not singing the Hallelujah Chorus over the Covenant's passage either. Layman Jim Naughton from the Diocese of Washington and a shrewd observer of all things Anglican ripped Dr. Williams over the Covenant saying, "I think we need to stop thinking of Rowan Williams as a gentle, scholarly soul caught between warring parties, doing his best to make peace. He exacerbated the crisis in the Communion by convening the emergency Primates Meeting in October of 2003; he has coddled and abetted the most virulent homophobes in the Communion throughout his tenure as archbishop, and he has used this crisis to ram through a centralized Communion structure that departs significantly from traditional Anglicanism, places much more power in his own hands, and dramatically reduces the influence of the people in the pews on the policies of the Church. I think he knew what he was doing every step of the way. Get past the beard. Get over the eyebrows. The man knew what he wanted--an Anglicanism that the Vatican would take seriously--and he has moved shrewdly and skillfully to get it."

The controversial Section Four, which disappeared after Tanzania and got resurrected briefly in Jamaica, is in again with the working party explaining their guiding principles as having "minimal revision", but having some "clearer definition" and "change of tone in language."

Four key questions are now answered: The first is that while the Covenant is designed primarily for "Provinces of the Anglican Communion", dioceses are included in the phrase "any ecclesial body" and some dioceses, for instance Communion Partner dioceses in the Episcopal Church, which may wish to commit themselves to the Covenant if their provinces do not, will be allowed to do so.

Secondly, churches which are not yet current members of the Anglican Consultative Council can affirm the Covenant (e.g. the Anglican Church in North America), but this would throw a real monkey wrench into the Anglican Communion as Rowan Williams will be forced to recognize Archbishop Robert Duncan, an act that will stick in the craw of Katharine Jefferts Schori.

Of course this will not automatically make them members of the ACC. If they want future membership, they will have to follow due process (section 4.1.5). We all know that Canon Kenneth Kearon will never grant status to ACNA because he will not go against The Episcopal Church which pays 60% of the Anglican Communion Office's tab. ACNA has not applied and probably won't. Why try for the front door of rejection when you can go in by the back door with the help of the Church of England Synod which meets in February and may well consider recognizing ACNA.

Thirdly, what of Churches who choose not to enter into the Covenant? While the text deliberately does not deal with this matter, the Instruments of Communion will determine an appropriate response. Now you should know that Mrs. Jefferts Schori and bishop-elect Ian Douglas (Connecticut) were in London to talk about the possibility of lesbian Mary Glasspool obtaining consents to be the next Suffragan Bishop of Los Angeles. After a closed door meeting with the ABC, they left without saying a word even to their own official ENS press. This speaks volumes. Talk of "gracious restraint" clearly was on the table, but Jefferts Schori has no interest in exercising it when it comes to consecrating Glasspool. She has said she will proceed. Gracious restraint is history and has been so since the Windsor Report which also had built in disciplinary measures that were never enforced.

Fourthly, who will monitor the implementation of the Covenant? We are told that the "Standing Committee of the Anglican Communion," which is bit like letting the fox guard the hen house. Nobody is prepared to upset the delicate relationships between the ABC, TEC, the Primates of the Anglican Communion and the ACO. The ABC is totally committed to unity at any price, but the price is the very faith itself and the Global South will have none of it.

Canon Kenneth Kearon, secretary general of the Anglican Communion Office, has opined that the presentation of the Covenant to the Provinces of the Anglican Communion represents an invitation to deepening of relationships among those Provinces. "We have a long history of friendship, affinities and collaboration between Provinces, dioceses, parishes and people across the globe, and we celebrate these manifold expressions of our oneness in Christ. The Covenant represents a further step in these relationships, building on and giving expression to the bonds of affection which shape our common life."

This is pure spin. With the advent of GAFCON, the bonds of fellowship and unity were demonstrably shattered. Many see a rival communion in the making. Unless the GAFCON primates publicly shut down the movement, it will only continue to grow.

A Church of England observer stated, "It would appear, then, that there are no longer any fundamental doctrines within the Anglican Communion-all is now adiaphora. The historic creeds are still recited, but by many within Anglo-Anglicanism they are not believed."

This statement is true for a vast majority of American Episcopal bishops. More believe Spong's remake of the Faith than don't.

When this lack of doctrinal coherence is pointed out, it is often replied that the Anglican Communion is "comprehensive"-that is celebrates "diversity in unity". This was one of the repeated refrains of Archbishop Carey, and Archbishop Runcie before him. Comprehensiveness demands agreement on fundamentals, while tolerating disagreement on matters in which Christians may differ without feeling the necessity of breaking communion. In the mind of an Anglican, comprehensiveness is not compromise.

CANA Bishop David C. Anderson wrote of the covenant that it is little more than a Potemkin Village. "As the Windsor Report moves the Anglican Communion toward a Covenant, one wonders if it is even possible to craft a Covenant that a) has enough content to matter, b) has a mechanism to enforce compliance or consequences of meaningful magnitude, or c) will have enough of the Anglican Communion willing to sign on to be truly relevant. Some have placed great hope in the Covenant, but it is quite possible that it also is a Potemkin Village just like the Panel of Reference was, and Delegated Episcopal Pastoral Oversight (DEPO), and other creations of the Lambeth wonks."

San Joaquin Canon lawyer Allan S. Haley wrote that the final text of the covenant means ECUSA will walk apart. Certainly the issue will be raised at the very earliest in 2012 and not before, said Jefferts Schori. He may well be right.

AMiA bishop John H. Rodgers noted that the Covenant is too weak to hold the Communion together. "The 1998 Lambeth Conference took a position on the question of human sexuality which was revisited at the 2008 conference and reaffirmed."

Ever the voice of hopeful moderation the Rev. Dr. Ephraim Radner admits that a tectonic shift in global Anglicanism and Christianity itself has now taken place. "It is one in which the Episcopal Church in the United States has placed itself on the far side of a widening channel separating the ballast of Christian witness, Catholic and Pentecostal, from marginal spin-offs of liberal Protestantism in decline." http://www.anglicancommunioninstitute.com/

Powerful stuff.

"The moment of the Covenant's finalization and ARCIC's reinvigoration are far from miserable; they betoken new promise," he writes.

He goes on to say, "TEC is simply no longer the church filled with even the strength of purpose we saw only 10 years ago...that church, shimmering still with some of the vibrancy of love spent for the Gospel seen140 years before, even 90 years before, is now gone. And TEC will not survive in any real continuity with this past and its gifts. TEC is no longer a church in any substantive sense.". Strong words indeed.

"I am speaking of an institution as a whole - not even in terms of its legal corporation, but in terms of its character and Christian substance given flesh in the Spirit's mission." Radner cites the usual statistics of decline both in parishioners and finances of a "failing institution. We shall hear of bankruptcies soon enough."

On sexuality, Radner comments, "...from the vantage point of some kind of common sense prudence, what shall we say to this? It is hardly "homophobic" to make this observation: The attempt that the majority of TEC's leaders have made to normalize the sexual behavior of a tiny minority of people, and then to build normative moral and even biological principles upon this behavior designed to restructure the form and character of human relations in general, including marriage, family, and civil order, will surely go down as one of the great follies and social distortions of the late 20th and early 21st centuries."

Could one be clearer than that? Radner also rapped TEC's rapid descent into a morass of public and expensive civil litigation. He concludes with this bald statement, "TEC has no more moral capital in the bank. It is all gone."

Radner nonetheless sees hope amidst the ruins, "To me, this moment, in which the tectonic shift of the Anglican Communion now surfaces into view, is one of enormous hope and a testimony to the grace of God in a continued calling."

"The Anglican Covenant, in its final form, points to the likelihood of a growing core of covenanting Anglican churches - the Covenant becomes "active" as soon as any church adopts it - whose critical mass will soon shift the character of decision-making as a whole among the Instruments. TEC's place in this process, even should she presume to adopt the Covenant (which at present could only be in a posture of already-set disregard of its meaning and purpose), is simply one of entering a current that is now gathering force in another direction than her own insistence on isolated and unrecognized sexual prophecy. She has become irrelevant to Anglicanism's own missionary calling and the rising willingness to meet it."

Radner's hope is in hope itself. "The Covenant, founded on a commitment to mutual care and accountability in the gifts of Christ, will prove a means by which faithful Anglicans, in TEC and elsewhere, will also be able to join in this movement. How exactly that will happen, in terms of structure and institution, is not yet known; but happen it will. That I am willing now to say clearly.

"Anglicans have been through these upheavals before in similar and different ways: 1559; 1658; 1785; 1918; 1960's Africa or 1990's Rwanda. At each stage, an opening up, that emerged from a going down. And at each stage, there emerged a larger breadth in Christian communion, however contradicted by the failings of our apostolic calling. God's grace is bigger and wider - and so Anglicanism, with its evangelical-charismatic and scripturally ordered worship, is now called to enter the mission of reconciling grace the contours of which Catholicism and Pentecostalism have most clearly described for the coming century, with Eastern Orthodoxy offering a parallel vocation."

He concludes, "[While] the legal and institutional aspects of this are less important to nail down, frankly, there is much to cooperate on, as Anglicans even in America become anew missionaries of the Gospel of Jesus in the expanding landscapes of unbelief."

Whatever the new configurations of the Anglican future are they will have to include such movements as ACNA, AMiA and CANA as part of the quickening and awakening of North American Anglicanism. The truth is The Episcopal Church, as we have known it and many have given themselves to it, is over. God can never condone (homo)sexual sin and build something new on the foundations of the open espousal of sexual immorality. It is impossible. It goes against His own character and design for how human beings live in the world He has created. It violates the very doctrine of creation.

While the Gospel is alive, and the Church that is Christ's Body given still stands, it can only do so based on truth; and truth about what the Episcopal Church has become is the one missing ingredient in what remains of a declining denomination that has lost its way.

END