NO ANGLICAN COVENANT: ¨So take my advice, don´t buy a pig in a poke¨

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by Paul Bagshaw

Rowan Williams,  Archbishop of Canterbury, bold promoter of the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity Faith and Order (IASCUFO) and their ¨task of fascilitaiting the reception of the Anglican Covenant¨

¨Suddenly there's a little flutter of pro-Covenant publicity. Clearly the No Anglican Covenant Campaign has got people rattled.

There is one very good reason why those who want the Covenant have been so tardy in asserting their case: serious opposition was never expected.

I am confident that there was a conscious policy of not provoking discussion, of not dealing with the issues or the detail. I believe that the planned tactics have been to assert the merits of the Covenant in bland and general terms and to repeat there is no alternative. The calculation was that if this twin message was reiterated often enough, people would be lulled into passing the Covenant on the nod.

Reception of the Covenant

Hence the new talking-heads videos described as "empty of critical content" by Mark Harris HERE. They come from a sub-group of the Inter-Anglican Standing Commission on Unity Faith and Order (IASCUFO). This group is tasked with facilitating the reception of the Covenant across the Communion.

But, please note, this is reception after the Covenant has been adopted. It was never anticipated that the group would need to explain or justify the Covenant in order to convince the voters of each Province to vote in favour. Here 'reception' means a PR exercise to induce people to like the Covenant once it was a legal fact that they could do noting about. (Admittedly 'reception' has always been a poor starveling in the spectrum of Anglican ecclesiology.)

Therefore the tone of the videos is mellow and reassuring: the Covenant is entirely benign, a Good Thing, motherhood-and-apple-pie, so don't worry your heads over it.

This is the Covenant of fairy land. It is as though To Mend the Net had never been written HERE or GAFCON created, as though Gene Robinson had never been consecrated bishop, as though no same-sex couple ever had their union blessed in church, as though there had never been any intrusion by one Province into the territory of others, as though Primates have always shared bread and wine together without demur, as though no Province had already declared itself out of Communion with any other...¨ there is more regarding the fairy tale from fairy land, HERE  (emphasis color/size added by Leonardo Ricardo)

·  Thanks to Paul Bagshaw
·  Thanks to Not the same stream, sidebar
·  Thanks to The No Anglican Covenant Coalition, HERE
·  Thanks to The Reverend Canon Mark Harris
·  Thanks to Preludium,  HERE