Our prayers and thanksgivings are offered that our Lord Jesus may bless your ministry and that we might walk together for the spread of the saving Gospel as the new day dawns for Anglicans in North America. We are very pleased that borders do not limit Christians in responding to the pastoral needs of God’s people.

A Covenant must therefore give value to the strands in our tradition, not excluding reason from our theological method but finding a new way of expressing the Anglican approach to the faith in today's world.

If we are to approach the process of agreeing a Covenant with honesty and integrity we must as Provinces and local churches be willing to be open about our own present situations.

Many provinces have practices which other parts of the Communion may not support.

Now he has decided that the time for emollience is over. Exasperated by the repeated failure of the Episcopal Church of the United States of America to heed the pleas for restraint from other members of the Anglican Communion, he has drafted plans to expel the Americans from the worldwide Anglican Church, and offer it only "associate" membership. It is schism in all but name.

The archbishop's proposal will play out dramatically in California, which includes churches at both ends of the ideological spectrum: San Francisco clergy have been blessing gay unions for 27 years, while the Diocese of San Joaquin still refuses to ordain women.

California "shows the extremes in the church," said the Rev. Ann Coburn, outreach director for the Church Divinity School of the Pacific in Berkeley, an Episcopal seminary.