Covenant - Response to Critics

This response is well worth a read for those interested in the furore surrounding the "Covenant for the Church of England". It's a response to the criticisms by some of the original authors of the Covenant.

More on the "Covenant"

first thing I wrote on it

In a way, the key to the issue seems to be how differently people are reading it. I know quite a few of the signatories, and I read it one way, as do most of the people I know from that sort of background. On the other hand, people from other backgrounds tend to read it very differently.

This is roughly how I read it:

We (the signatories) agree that there are several things that often really frustrate us about the Church of England:

• the parish system often hinders mission
• very good candidates for ministry are often rejected because of some low quality selectors
• there are too many people in the Church of England who don't share the historic and Biblical faith
• we think it's unfair that we should have to support them financially

Some of us feel so strongly about these, and find them so much of a problem that they might ignore the C of E when it does silly stuff like stops us from serving God for no really good reason, and the rest of us, while we might not do that ourselves, can certainly understand where they're coming from and will support them in that.

We don't want to leave the Church of England – we are Anglicans and still see ourselves as Anglicans.

On the other hand, people who aren't from that background tend to read it as something that's essentially starting a schism or something by drawing a line and saying “we're on this side, you're on the other, we don't like you”. To my mind, that suggests that the people who wrote it probably wrote it too quickly, as Tom Wright points out, and should probably have asked more widely about how people would understand what it said.

As to where I stand - I'm certainly in sympathy with the concerns of the people who wrote the Covenant, but wish they had expressed them better and that Tom Wright and others had been more loving in their responses. I'm not saying I'd have done any better in any of their positions though...

Some people have written some more stuff on it worth reading:

• Andrew Goddard
• Andrew Carey
• Richard Turnbull (one of the original signatories)

Thanks to Thinking Anglicans for the links.

The Covenant Mess

I've been wanting to blog my own thoughts on this for a while, but don't have time to write much at the moment. In the meantime, here are a few links to events saying what is going on. I've used original sources where possible.

• The text of the covenant
• Tom Wright's response, which in some ways is helpful, in others misses the point and in others is just plain nasty. I hope that's a political nastiness rather than a genuine one.
• Dave Walker's cartoon about it, which misses the point too, but does so in a funny way.
• Full list of signitories of the covenant, plus some answers to the questions
• Anglican Mainstream's list of relevant articles and links

Here are some thoughts I've posted elsewhere on some of the underlying problems which Tom Wright didn't address in his piece:

The rapid growth of some churches and decline of others has meant that the C of E synodical system is no longer fairly representative of the membership. Instead, it is heavily weighted towards members of small churches (which tend to be more liberal and/or catholic) compared to larger ones which tend to be more evangelical and/or charismatic. For example, St Ebbe's in Oxford has five main congregations on a Sunday, with a total attendance probably over 1000, yet it only counts as one church. HTB is a lot bigger even than that. 1000 members of local traditional anglo-catholic churches (of which there are many) would probably be 20 or more churches, with far more seats on Synods. This means that a high (and growing) proportion of congregants in the C of E, particularly the more evangelical ones, are greatly under-represented in the structures of the C of E.

The increasing mobility in society has led to a situation, particularly in urban areas, where the parish system has broken down. Parish boundaries are increasingly irrelevant and the majority of members of many churches do not live in the parish. Urban churches are therefore becoming more specialist - students, young families, elderly people, evangelical, liberal, anglo-catholic, whatever. The hubs of communities in towns are no longer the old village high streets, which worked well with the parish system, but larger developments. In such a context, it makes little sense to have a parish system, at least within towns. That's actually a large part of the thing they wrote.

As society becomes decreasingly Christian, people are more and more recognising that most people in Britain have very little awareness of the good news of Jesus Christ. This means that people who think it is important to proclaim that good news to everyone, and who don't see it being done effectively want to be able to work with the unreached wherever they are.

With the whole women bishops thing being debated, it is felt that there is a fair bit of debate going on about the role of bishops, and it is likely that the next few years will be formative for the structures in the C of E for the next few decades. If they're going to make a point about bishops, it seems a sensible time to do it.

There is a growing unity among the different groups of evangelicals within the C of E. As far as I can tell, this is the first time New Wine and Reform have got together on something. Certainly, it feels like the charismatic divide is starting to heal, which is good. That also means that they are more likely to be listened to.

What I think Tom Wright's response risks doing, however, is to create divisions within evangelical Anglicanism, which isn't good. I don't think that the original covenant did that in the same way, and Bishop Tom would have been much better (in my opinion) to gently point out a few faults rather than lay into them so heavily.

Here are a few more quick thoughts:

• I know a fair few of the people who signed the covenant personally, and I really don't think they're trying to do schism. What they're trying to do is be clear that there's a lot that they agree on about ways forward in the current situation, specifically with the debates about the future of bishops in the Church of England and the debate that should be happening about the future of the parish system
• The covenant is a covenant with each other - it's them agreeing on something.
• They represent a lot more people than Dave Walker suggested. I know at the college I'm training at, only a minority are members of any of the groups officially listed there (I think, though that might be close), but probably a majority would agree with the substance of what was said
• I don't think the purpose of it is to establish an us-and-them situation - it's to try to kick start dialogue. If someone else wants to come back at them with a discussion about how the parish system enables mission today, for example, I imagine they would be more than welcome to. But as it is, there's a large chunk of the C of E that thinks it hinders it.

More here.