Skip to main content

Fences

For a long time, I have used the role renegotiation model as a way of analysing relationships. This model acknowledges that all committed relationships - marriages, churches, tribes, families, clubs, whatever - have boundaries: there is a limited set of participants in the relationship and there are rules about who these participants are. If there are no boundaries then there is no relationship. People who participate in the relationship have expectations about how others in the relationship will behave and expectations about how they themselves will behave. In a sense, a relationship is an agreement -made formally or informally, consciously or unconsciously- about what these expectations are. Relationships break apart when expectations are not met, so it is important to know what the expectations are, and how breaches in expectations can be repaired.

Now I'm telling you all this because much of today's 14 hours of General Synod was spent dealing with issues of membership The day ended with a motion requesting the synod to define membership, and the matter wasn't taken terribly seriously. We Anglicans don't like defining our membership, and we don't like anything which might suggest we are excluding someone, which is a nonsense really, if the role renegotiation model has anything to tell us. The motion was dismissed fairly quickly, but the other matter which relates to membership was not quite so easily ignored. Much of the morning was taken up talking about The Covenant. Now I'm not going to spend a lot of time at this hour of the night talking about The Covenant but if you haven't heard of it, or don't know why we are talking about such a thing, as about 80% of Anglicans and about 99% of non Anglicans don't, you'll find an account of it here.

The Covenant is not something that individual Anglicans adhere to, or even individual dioceses; it is, rather, something that entire provinces of the Anglican communion are invited to sign up for en masse. Getting all of us in the Anglican Church of Aotearoa/New Zealand to agree is going to be quite a task, but necessary I suppose, if you think that the ultimate aim is to have The Covenant encompass all 80 million people from around the globe who identify themselves as Anglicans. The text of The Covenant has four sections. The first three define what it means to be an Anglican church with regard to practice and belief. In terms of the role renegotiation model they define expectations: what we might expect an Anglican province - ours or someone else's- to believe and how we might expect them to act. So far to good: we can more or less agree on these three. It's when we turn the page and start to read section 4 that our Anglican livers become all lilyish, because section 4 defines what will happen if we breach the expectations laid out in the first 3 sections. Not that the penalties are all that severe; we are Anglicans, after all. It seems that the ultimate threat will be exclusion from some committees and boards and commissions and so forth, which, after 14 hours of synod, holds less horror for me than it might have done at 7:00 this morning. But as the lawyer in The Castle said, it's the whole vibe of the thing that counts. It's the prospect of the world wide communion breaking up because we can't reach agreement on basic doctrinal and ethical issues which lies behind the covenant. This fear is the impetus for signing up, and, paradoxically, it's also one of the reasons we are so reluctant about committing ourselves. The other reason, for being nervous about The Covenant is, of course, a deep uncertainty about who we are. What is an Anglican? It seems we are a bit anxious about even asking the question.

So, faced with this uncertainty, we have taken a truly Anglican stance on The Covenant. After agreeing in principle to the first three sections, we have decided to talk about it for another two years before making a decision. Who knows? Perhaps in the time before the next General Synod we will come to some agreement on Anglican identity which will enable us to make a principled stand together, either for or against The Covenant and nobly bear whatever consequences may arise from that decision. Or perhaps we are secretly hoping that events will have overtaken us before we need to commit ourselves one way or the other.

Comments

NIE said…
"It's the fear of us in Aotearoa/New Zealand finding ourselves excluded that causes us angst. This fear is the impetus for signing up, and, paradoxicallly ....."
That sends alarm bells when you talk about fear, so I was glad to read on Anglican Taonga website what Bishop Victoria had said in her introduction to the day.

Pray that people in the pews may just keep going out into each week being what God directs them to be in Aotearoa/NZ over the next two years and pray further that attitudes will change because of the way(s) parts 1, 2 and 3 way are adhered to down here at the bottom of the Communion.

Thanks for your reflections - and the humour! May this day go well for you all.

P.S. Bit worried about the variation of the Blogspot header for the photo of the day yesterday, though. Remains of a broken-down former wharf leading to nowhere? Oh well ...
Alden Smith said…
“To seek to transform unjust structures of society” as the Church stands vigilantly with Christ proclaiming both judgment and salvation to the nations of the world, and manifesting through our actions on behalf of God’s righteousness the Spirit’s transfiguring power.

I liked this part of the covenant which will be a big support for those seeking justice in the Anglican church regarding the appointment of female priests and bishops and also for those seeking justice and enlightenment regarding the gay and lesbian community.

Having said that I actually wonder about the correlation between these sorts of covenants and actual everyday practise. The Catholic church has all sorts of written obligations and proclamations regarding for example birth control, yet most of Catholic Europe has nil population growth - writing convenants can sometimes be a way of trying to insure against the need for future struggle, resolution and enlightenment, but reality always has another agenda.

Popular posts from this blog

Camino, by David Whyte

This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede

En Hakkore

In the hills up behind Ranfurly there used to be a town, Hamilton, which at one stage was home to 5,000 people. All that remains of it now is a graveyard, fenced off and baking in the lonely brown hills. Near it, in the 1930s a large Sanitorium was built for the treatment of tuberculosis and other respiratory ailments. It was a substantial complex of buildings with wards, a nurses hostel, impressive houses for the manager and superintendent and all the utility buildings needed for such a large operation. The treatment offered consisted of isolation, views and weather. Patients were exposed to the air, the tons of it which whistled past, often at great speed, the warmth of the sun and the cold. They were housed in small cubicles opening onto huge glassed verandas where they cooked in the summer and froze in the winter and often, what with the wholesome food and the exercise, got better. When advances in antibiotics rendered the Sanitorium obsolete it was turned into a Borstal and the

Kindle

 Living as I do in a place where most books have to come a long way in an aeroplane, reading is an expensive addiction, and of course there is always the problem of shelf space. I have about 50 metres of shelving in my new study, but it is already full and there is not a lot of wall space left; and although it is great insulation, what is eventually going to happen to all that paper? I doubt my kids will want to fill their homes with old theological works, so most of my library is eventually going to end up as egg cartons. Ebooks are one solution to book cost and storage issues so I have been  using them for a while now, but their big problem has been finding suitable hardware to read them on.  I first read them on the tiny screens of Ipaqs and they were quite satisfactory but the wretchedness of Microsoft Reader and its somewhat arbitrary copyright protection system killed the experience entirely. On Palm devices they were OK except the plethora of competing and incompatible formats

Ko Tangata Tiriti Ahau

    The Christmas before last our kids gave us Ancestry.com kits. You know the deal: you spit into a test tube, send it over to Ireland, and in a month or so you get a wadge of paper in the mail telling you who you are. I've never, previously, been interested in all that stuff. I knew my forbears came to Aotearoa in the 1850's from Britain but I didn't know from where, exactly. Clemency's results, as it turns out, were pretty interesting. She was born in England, but has ancestors from various European places, and some who are Ngāti Raukawa, so she can whakapapa back to a little marae called Kikopiri, near Ōtaki. And me? It turns out I'm more British than most British people. Apart from a smattering of Norse  - probably the result of some Viking raid in the dim distant past - all my tūpuna seem to have come from a little group of villages in Nottinghamshire.  Now I've been to the UK a few times, and I quite like it, but it's not home: my heart and soul belon

Return to Middle Earth

 We had a flood, a couple of weeks back, and had to move all the stuff out of the spare bedroom, including  the contents of two floor to ceiling book cases. Shoving the long unopened copies of Sartor Resartus and An Introduction to Byron into cartons, I came upon my  copy of The Lord of the Rings . Written in the flyleaf are the dates of its many readings, the last one being when I read it aloud to Catherine, when she was about 10 or 11, well over 20 years ago. The journey across Middle Earth took Catherine and me the best part of a year, except for the evening when we followed Frodo and Sam across the last stretches of Mordor and up Mount Doom, when we simply couldn't stop, and sat up reading until 11.00 pm, on a school night.  My old copy is a paperback, the same edition that every card carrying baby boomer has somewhere on their shelves. The glue has dried and hardened. The cover and many of the pages have come loose. I was overcome with the urge to read it again, but this old