The Ridley Covenant Draft – Taming GAFCON

In today’s Church of England Newspaper (1st May 2009), Bishop Michael Nazir Ali asks ‘Is the much debated Covenant fit for purpose?’ Clearly not he answers. However, the Revd Professor Stephen Noll, a leading GAFCON theologian and American missionary  Vice Chancellor of  Uganda Christian University, in a recent article  urged that GAFCON Churches should now be much more positive about the Windsor Covenant process and ‘move to the front of the queue and sign on to the Covenant’.

 
So how can two very able theologians, both strongly committed to the GAFCON movement, come to such different conclusions?

The clue is in their context. Stephen Noll’s surprisingly positive assessment of the Ridley draft  has been welcomed by Fulcrum,  the English liberal leaning evangelical Anglican group, with its Theological Secretary Graham Kings, the newly appointed Bishop of Sherborne,  describing  Stephen Noll’s  proposal  as ‘very encouraging indeed’.

Yet only twelve months ago, Fulcrum’s leading bishop,  Tom Wright, the Bishop of Durham,  controversially  denounced  the GAFCON leadership as ‘super-apostles’  using St Paul’s designation for the false teachers of 2 Corinthians chapters 11 and 12. So praise from the same group should give pause for careful thought.

The Fulcrum response is a very significant  because it illuminates the English context in which the Windsor covenant process needs to be understood, a context which is much more immediate and pressing  for Michael Nazir Ali than for Stephen Noll.  So when Michael Nazir Ali concludes that the Ridley Draft ‘leaves us exactly where we have been these last six years’ and fears that ‘it may even be worse’ the question arises as to what is really energising the Covenant process after years of fruitless discussion. Could it be that it has become a strategy for taming of the GAFCON movement?

Whatever our working assumptions about the wider context, it is only right that the new draft should first be taken at face value. Stephen Noll helpfully notes that ‘the two essential ingredients of an effective Anglican Covenant involve both ‘doctrinal substance and disciplinary efficacy’  and claims that the essential weakness of the St Andrew’s and Nassau drafts was that while tolerable on the former, they failed on the latter.

He is not unaware of the shortcomings of the Ridley draft, admitting that the ‘absence of an exclusion clause’ akin to the specific commitment of the Jerusalem Declaration ‘to reject  the authority of those Churches and leaders who have denied the orthodox faith’ is a ‘lost opportunity’. He also recognises that the Covenant does not make any direct reference to the key issue of homosexuality. 

Notwithstanding these difficulties, Stephen Noll argues  that ‘the plain sense of the oblique references to a “pattern of moral reasoning and discipline that is rooted in and answerable to the teaching of Holy Scripture and the catholic tradition” is surely consonant with norm in 1998 Lambeth Resolution 1.10’, but if we are having to make inferences from what is already oblique, there can be little hope that the covenant could  function as a normative document in this most contested area, all the more so  when we recall the capital that revisionists have made out of the ‘listening’ clause of Resolution 1.10.

Professor Noll finds particular encouragement in a reading of the Ridley draft which suggests that , unlike its predecessors, it is stronger on disciplinary efficacy. In  Section 4:2 it is recognised that a point may come where an erring Province might find itself in broken communion. However, as he recognises, the whole process is governed by the word ‘may’.

Furthermore, as Michael Nazir Ali notes, even if the Joint Standing Committee (of the Primates and Anglican Consultative Council) did get to the point of declaring a province to be acting in a way incompatible with the Covenant, this is only a ‘recommendation’ and it is not binding (or even, as I understand  4.2.5, binding upon the other Instruments of Unity – so a Province could be declared as acting incompatibly with the Covenant, yet still be invited to the Lambeth Conference!)

So this is still essentially a voluntary covenant and it is difficult to see how any Province could be stripped of its recognition if it chose to ignore advice. The impression of a document shaped by pragmatism rather than by biblical principle becomes even clearer by reference back to section 4.1.5 which specifies that while adoption of the covenant by a ‘Church’ – there is no attempt to define ‘Church’ in this context – will not carry with it an automatic right of recognition as part of the Anglican Communion, adoption may be ‘accompanied by a formal request to the Instruments for recognition.’

Here there is a certain asymmetry – if it is possible for a Church to be formally recognised and accepted into the Communion by the Instruments, does it not follow that it should be equally possible for a church to be formally stripped of its recognition and ejected from the Communion by the Instruments?

This inconsistency suggests that whatever claims the Ridley Draft may have to be confessionally based, the real concerns are those of  institutional realpolitik. For instance, on this basis, while it would be  virtually impossible to eject The Episcopal Church of the United States (TEC) and the Anglican Church of Canada (ACoC) on the basis of covenant non-compliance, it would be possible to recognise the emergent province of the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA), no doubt in the hope this would effectively draw ACNA into the Lambeth orbit and wrong-foot those in the Church of England itself who are bringing the GAFCON  vision and critique to bear on their own Church and the  Archbishop of Canterbury himself.

It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that despite his long experience of the trials of the orthodox in TEC and around the globe, Stephen Noll is being remarkably optimistic. Why should that be? Perhaps the answer lies in a preoccupation with the particular problems of North America as he perceives them now.  By signing up quickly to the Covenant, the GAFCON Primates would marginalise the North American revisionists within the Communion. They would, he hopes, be effectively selected out. He  writes : ‘Given the premise that GAFCON churches and the revisionist Provinces of North America cannot as they now stand simply come together in a genuine communion relationship, the following permutations seem set for the adoption of the Covenant:

Scenario A. GAFCON churches adopt the Covenant and TEC/ACoC refuse to adopt.
Scenario B. TEC/ACoC adopt the Covenant and GAFCON Churches refuse to adopt.
Scenario C. Both GAFCON churches and TEC/ACoC adopt the Covenant.
Scenario D. Both GAFCON churches and TEC/ACoC refuse to adopt the Covenant.

If my analysis above is correct, it should be logically and theologically easier for the GAFCON Churches to adopt the Covenant than for the revisionists. Therefore scenario A is one that the GAFCON churches should consider carefully and certainly not reject out of hand.’

The problem is the ‘therefore’. The conclusion does not necessarily follow from the premise. While it is indisputable that the GAFCON Churches are better placed theologically to sign up to the Covenant than the revisionists, it by no means follows that they should.

From an American perspective to do so might look like shrewd politics, the revisionists suffering  a kind of passive ejection as GAFCON Churches set the tone and make the Communion increasingly inhospitable for them. However, this does not take into account the extent to which revisionism is embedded on the other side of the Atlantic, even if its voice is somewhat muted. It is not  shrewd to run the real risk of  being co-opted by an Archbishop of Canterbury who demonstrably falls well short of orthodoxy and being drawn back into the ‘interminable conversations’ which Archbishop Peter Akinola rightly criticised after the Primates meeting in Alexandria.

In fairness to Stephen Noll, his GAFCON  resource paper  of March 2008 ‘the Global Anglican Communion and the Anglican Orthodoxy’did recommend for ‘strategic and tactical reasons that a statement of Anglican orthodoxy keep in close touch with the idea of a Covenant’ but added ‘ It seems unlikely that a final Covenant from Canterbury, filtered now through the Anglican Consultative Council, will be sufficiently crisp to deal with the present crisis.’  It is difficult to see why he is less cautious now and the global context of the Anglican Communion would seem to demand a much more robust defence of orthodox Anglicanism than the Ridley Draft can provide, even on a resolutely optimistic reading. 

The Jerusalem Statement recognised that the existing Instruments of Unity were not fit for purpose and described ‘the manifest failure of the Communion Instruments to exercise discipline in the face of overt heterodoxy’  as an ‘undeniable fact’ . This ‘undeniable fact’ has not changed since those words were written and if anything last year’s Lambeth Conference with its deliberate avoidance of decision making underlined the truth of the Statement’s ‘devastating conclusion that ‘we are a global Communion with a colonial structure’’.

Along with a colonial structure goes a colonial mentality which is instinctively controlling and it is this which Professor Noll seems to have underestimated. It is a commonplace to observe that despite the large number of self-identified evangelical clergy and bishops in the Church of England, very few are willing to act or speak in ways which challenge the liberal/permissive consensus in society of the Church itself and instead tend to reserve their strongest criticism for that minority of fellow evangelicals who are prepared to speak and act more prophetically.

This so called ‘open evangelicalism’ coheres around Fulcrum, formed some six years ago  as a reaction to the publicly expressed concerns of some English evangelicals about Rowan Williams’ theology and ethics. Although it has stopped short of directly endorsing Dr Williams’ views on homosexuality, it has remained  fiercely loyal to the Archbishop and the Lambeth institutional processes.

Fulcrum now illustrates a particular danger for the GAFCON movement  – to be welcomed by an historic and prestigious establishment may seem like an opportunity to exert influence, but sooner or later the price is co-option by an institution much more sensitive to the pressures of the predominant culture than the claims of historic biblical faith.   Michael Nazir Ali’s courageous resignation as  Bishop of Rochester and the appointment of Fulcrum’s Graham Kings as Bishop as Sherborne both seem to be recent manifestations of the same dysfunctionality.

This is not simply an internal English problem. The institutional challenge for Rowan Williams is to hold together a Church of England deeply embedded in secularised English society with a wider Anglican Communion which, numerically, is overwhelmingly orthodox. To try and resolve this growing tension theologically simply exacerbates the institutional problem because it highlights irreconcilable differences, so the solution has to be political and the tactic of co-option which has been so effective within England is now being applied to the Communion as a whole through the Covenant process (which is why Michael Nazir Ali attracts such particular hostility as a non co-opted leader).

This may seem somewhat abstract, even farfetched, but consider for a moment an unconsciously  revealing incident in Rupert Shortt’s biography of Rowan Williams.  Professor Oliver O’Donovan, a personal friend of Williams and subsequently Fulcrum’s leading academic, invited three Primates, Donald Mtememela of Tanzania, Drexel Gomex of the West Indies and Yong Ping Chung of South East Asia to an ‘evidently lavish’ dinner at his Oxford college in early July 2002 since they were considered to be the most likely critics of  Williams’ possible appointment as Archbishop of Canterbury. The dinner turned out to be surprisingly congenial and afterwards O’Donovan wrote to his friend giving a full report and assured him that if the burden of the See of Canterbury were to fall on his shoulders, he should ‘not forget that even the fire – breathers can sometimes be tamed, and that there are one or two determined and skilful tamers out there in the field, on whose good will you can count.’ (Rowan’s Rule, Rupert Shortt, p243).

Subsequent events would demonstrate that in this particular instance, O’Donovan was not quite as skilful a tamer as he thought, especially in the case of  Archbishop Yong who courageously continued his  personal sponsorship of the Anglican Mission in America, even at considerable personal cost in his own backyard.

In this light, we can see that the real problem the Anglican Communion faces is not so much the apostasy of the revisionist North American provinces, but the failure of the Instruments of Communion in the face of this challenge, for which the Archbishop of Canterbury with his presiding role must carry special responsibility.

The specific danger of the Windsor Covenant process is therefore that it becomes a process of co-option, of taming the ‘fire – breathers’ and drawing the GAFCON movement back into the orbit of a Communion which, with no real defences against a counterfeit gospel, ends up as a counterfeit Communion,  implicating the godly in its ungodliness and confusing the gospel they seek to proclaim.

 The great promise of the GAFCON movement was that it would bring godly order to the Communion through a genuinely conciliar and confessional leadership wholeheartedly committed to the historic Anglican faith. To focus now on the Covenant process would cloud its vision and threaten its global future.

Charles Raven

1st May 2009