Anglican Condescension of Aotearoa New Zealand and Polynesia

What is our church made of? It would appear that missing from our make up is 'memory'. Two years ago at GS we thought that Sections 1-3 of the Anglican Covenant were fine. Now, according to the Taonga report of the amended motion which passed includes this clause,

"Is unable to adopt the proposed Anglican Covenant due to concerns about aspects of Section 4, but subscribes to Sections 1, 2, and 3 as currently drafted as a useful starting point for consideration of our Anglican understanding of the church."

So, now we have rethought what we once thought about Sections 1-3 and offer the view that they are 'a useful starting point for consideration of our Anglican understanding of the church.'

A useful starting point? Blood, sweat and tears have been spent by fine Anglican minds on those Sections. They have been commended to us by the Archbishop of Canterbury.
But, don't worry, the greatness of the theological acumen of our General Synod has been expressed in the phrase 'a useful starting point'. With such condescension, are we being led by people with more understanding about Anglicanism than the ABC himself?

Perhaps.

But reading the Tweets on the #THW12 thread (which I am inclined not to go back to now that someone calling themselves f**k something has entered the dialogue), I am less than thrilled to find some of our younger leaders misunderstanding the parlous state theological education at St John's College had gotten itself into.

What is going on in Fiji?

To balance the books, clearly some wonderful experiences of life in Christ are taking place, as reported by +Kelvin Wright.

Back to the Covenant: I am pleased that ++David Moxon (according to the Taonga report) took an initiative to improve on the original motion brought against the Covenant. Yeah, we've rejected the Covenant and what great comfort that is bringing to the Covenant naysayers around the world, but we've managed some words which express our commitment to the Communion. But have we undone the good in the motion by refusing to endorse anything substantive about what it actually means to be an Anglican church?

Not, of course, that the state of the Anglican churches elsewhere conventioning and synodising is much improved on our machinations. In England the bishops have led a charge to postpone the motion on women bishops so they can remove the amendments they had introduced to the motion. One can just about imagine the Monty Python skit which would send up this state of affairs in which in the classic English way, sanity prevails at the expense of sensible people first acting like idiots. In America the bishops have found a neat mechanism for avoiding submitting a blessing of same sex unions to the usual kind of vote in case it got lost.

How sweetly Rome will be sleeping tonight!

The full text of the Covenant motion is here.