Church of England moves closer to global agreement

The Church of England took a step closer to signing a worldwide agreement aimed at maintaining unity within the Anglican Communion amid rows over issues such as homosexuality.

Members of the General Synod, the Church’s national assembly, voted to press ahead with sending the Anglican Covenant to its dioceses for further consideration.

The vote will be interpreted as a boost to the Archbishop of Canterbury Dr Rowan Williams who has backed the covenant in the face of a campaign in favour of rejection by liberal groupings within the Church.

The General Synod, meeting in Westminster, central London, heard a series of speakers express reservations about the covenant including fears that it would create a “two tier” Anglican Communion.

Miranda Threlfall-Holmes, a chaplain at Durham University, singled out plans to allow a standing committee powers to recommend “relational consequences” for those provinces found to have taken controversial actions.

She said: “We are told that the covenant sets out a framework for family relationships but what sort of family draws up a covenant with ‘relational consequences’ for breaches of the rules?

“To me, this text sounds rather like a couple in marital difficulties deciding to ask their wider family to vote on whether they should divorce or not.”

The Bishop of Lincoln, the Rt Rev John Saxbee, expressed his fear that the covenant would single out Anglicans to “stand in the corner until they have seen the error of their ways and return to the ranks of the pure and spotless”.

The Rt Rev Michael Perham, Bishop of Gloucester, said he was voting for further consideration of the covenant with “some reluctance” as he feared it could eventually be used to punish other Anglicans.

He added that one of the reasons he would be backing further consideration was out of loyalty to Dr Williams. “Not to vote for it is to make more difficult the task of the Archbishop of Canterbury in his ministry to the Communion, I want to strengthen, not weaken his hand,” he said.

Dr Williams urged the Synod to back the covenant.

“We are trying to understand what it is to be properly accountable to each other,” he said.

“We are not ruling out innovation and we are not attempting through the covenant to declare in advance the impossibility of this or that development.”

The Rev Simon Cawdell, from Bridgnorth, Shropshire, backed the covenant. “As a community, we sometimes have periods of time when we become dysfunctional, there are arguments, there are disputes, which need to be worked out between us,” he said. Under the proposals, each of the 38 provinces of the Anglican Communion would be invited to sign the covenant with a standing committee of the Anglican Communion monitoring compliance.

The idea of the covenant was first put forward following the row within the Anglican Communion over the consecration in 2003 of Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as Bishop of New Hampshire in the US.

The covenant is expected to return to the General Synod for further consideration in 2012.