Today, three additional Church of England dioceses, Oxford, Guildford, and Lincoln, voted against sending the proposed Anglican Covenant back to General Synod for final approval. Three dioceses voted for return—Blackburn, Exeter, and Peterborough—but today’s voting means that 23 of 44 dioceses have voted to terminate consideration of the Covenant, whereas only 15 have voted to consider adoption. This, adoption by the Church of England has been blocked, at least until 2015. The Anglican Covenant Coalition sincerely hopes that the matter will never be taken up again, and the current vote will be accepted as a rejection of the document.
The No Anglican Covenant Coalition, the anti-Covenant group that began with an e-mail message from me in 2010—see “The Announcement”—has issued a news release that you can read here.
This is a great day for the Anglican Communion, though perhaps not for its nominal leader, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, who has championed the Covenant with unseemly enthusiasm.
I hope that this rejection of the Covenant by the Church of England will deal a definitive blow to this ill-considered and radical redefinition of worldwide Anglicanism. In particular, I hope that it will make it easy for The Episcopal Church’s General Convention to reject Covenant adoption quickly and definitively when it meets this summer.
A senior cleric in the COE told me yesterday that many who voted in favor did so out of loyalty and respect for Rowen. I think many Americans simply don't get the English, and their value of fair play, tolerance, and respect. I would have thought (as an American) that a respectable liberal cleric in the COE would say they were disappointed by Rowen. Not so in this case. Rowen did his best to keep things together, which they respected. But the COE is just simply not aligned with the the global south, and it is not creedal, it is about "the" issue. The COE is just simply not going to marginalize gay people. An over-simplification? Yes. (and wake up)
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