It is interesting to see the archbishop's use of the word "sound" as I thought this was UCCF slang for people like us.

More seriously, as it will take several months to set up the committee there will be a lot of work to do to prepare a draft covenant before Lambeth 2008. The report on the Anglican communion web site refered to makes interesting reading and gives some indication of a possible timescale.

David

The full text of the Pastoral Letter from the Archbishop of Canterbury to the Primates and Presiding Bishops of the Anglican Communion, 15 September 2006, is copied below:

My dear friends Greetings to you all in the name of Our Lord Jesus Christ, on this commemoration of his Holy Cross, to which we all look for our healing and hope.

In our uncertainties and explorations in the Communion, my prayers are not only for those who, like ourselves, have the responsibility of leadership in our Provinces, but most especially for all those ordinary people of God, in the Episcopal Church and elsewhere, who are puzzled, wearied, or disoriented by our present controversies. So many say they simply do not want to take up an extreme or divisive position and want to be faithful to Scripture and the common life. They want to preserve an Anglican identity that they treasure and love passionately but face continuing uncertainty about its future.

Scripture reminds us, in the Book of Jonah as well as in the gospels, that God is supremely patient and loving to those who are in this sort of confusion and uncertainty. All our churches are, in one way or another, partly sound and partly not; and none of our churches would, on the basis of their virtue and their strength alone, merit Gods approval. All of us look to the merciful Lord who has acted for us and independently of us (as Luther said) in the Cross. We need to remember this as we consider our current difficulties and challenges.

In the months that have passed since the June meeting of the General Convention of the Episcopal Church, a great deal of public and private comment has been circulating, and many meetings have been organised to consider the impact of the Conventions decisions. I am deeply grateful to those of you who have already let me know your initial reactions and those of your Provinces to the actions of the Convention, and I hope that others will be able to communicate their responses in the period between now and February.

I write now not only to thank you for this, but to remind you of the process currently going forward in the Communion to help all of us weigh and interpret Conventions work. You will recall that the Joint Standing Committee appointed a small group of representatives from its number (two Primates and two laypeople, along with staff support) to assist me in preparing an initial response. Now that the Episcopal Church has had opportunity for detailed consideration of the requests from the Primates at Dromantine last year, based on the Windsor Report, it is important that we develop a unified and coherent response as a Communion to the situation as it is developing.

The report of this advisory group has not yet been finalised but will be available at our meeting in Tanzania next February. In the meantime, the group agrees with me that it might be helpful to offer some indication of the direction of its initial thinking.

It is clear that the Communion as a whole remains committed to the teaching on human sexuality expressed in Resolution 1.10 of the 1998 Lambeth Conference, and also that the recommendations of the Windsor Report have been widely accepted as a basis for any progress in resolving the tensions that trouble us. As a Communion, we need to move forward on the basis of this twofold recognition.

It is also clear that the Episcopal Church has taken very seriously the recommendations of the Windsor Report; but the resolutions of General Convention still represent what can only be called a mixed response to the Dromantine requests. The advisory group has spent much time in examining these resolutions in great detail, and its sense is that although some aspects of these requests have been fully dealt with, there remain some that have not. This obviously poses some very challenging questions for our February meeting and its discernment of the best way forward.

I have also received  as you will have done also - the appeals of seven dioceses of the Episcopal Church for alternative primatial oversight. As we move to reflecting on these requests, we have to acknowledge that we are entering uncharted waters for the Communion, with a number of large issues about provincial identity and autonomy raised for all of us. I write having just heard the outcome of the meeting in New York which was requested in order to see what might emerge from a carefully structured discussion between American Bishops of diverging views. So far, no structure has been agreed, but there is a clear sense that the process has been worthwhile and that it is not yet over. I am sure that there will be more need in the months ahead for such face-to-face discussion, and I continue to hope that colleagues will not take it for granted that there is a rapid short-term solution that will remove our problems or simplify our relationships for good and all without the essential element of personal, probing conversation.

My earlier observations  building on the Windsor Report - on the possibility of a Covenant have on the whole been received with sympathy, and the work on this continues. At the March meeting of the Joint Standing Committee, it was decided to adopt a short introductory paper on the Windsor Covenant proposals, outlining some of the issues that would need to be addressed. It would be of great help to receive observations from any of you who have not yet expressed views on this paper (available at http://www.aco.org/commission/covenant/index.cfm).

The Joint Standing Committee also asked me to appoint a small Covenant Design Group to take forward the work. I have asked Archbishop Drexel Gomez to chair this and would now welcome your suggestions for membership before I proceed to nominate people who might serve. We are envisaging a small number of full members (perhaps no more than ten in the core group) with a wider circle of corresponding members, and in the first instance I shall be looking for nominations representing expertise in ecclesiology, missiology, ecumenical relation and canon law. If you wish to make a nomination, perhaps you could indicate something of the background and competence of the person or persons you suggest. I hope, as I wrote earlier, that this will be a major and serious focus for the Lambeth Conference, and the work now commissioned will be a vital task in preparation for the Conference.

As we take this work forward between us, let us continue to pray for one another and for all of Gods people. At this season, we pray that we may seek not an empty external unity but a deep common commitment to the crucified Jesus which will unite us as forgiven sinners, whose good news to the world is not the preaching of our own strength and wisdom, but the proclamation of the triumphant foolishness of God in the saving work of Our Lord.

 

+Rowan CANTUAR:

www.archbishopofcanterbury.org/releases/060915a.htm 

Thanks, David. Rowan Williams's respone to Arius relates closely to the concept of the Fatherhood of God, so I will post my reply to your question on that forum thread.

Thank you Graham for the reading list. I think you said something elsewhere about trying to put lead on a cat. This must apply as much to a Fulcrum thread as to the church. I have tried to suggest some semblance of order in the past but now I just add my comments on the thread where the item I am replying to lies regardless of the heading. I had thought that the article you introduced opened up the tread to a wider discussion of Rowan Williams

Turning to the quote in your last post: Leadership is more than repeating the existing consenus. It must be seen as taking the consenus forward in a new way which was ideally not anticipated but seen in retrospect as the inevitable development. In this  sense the Windsor report has given new impetus to the development of the Communion and Rowan Williams is right to promote it. Praise for Williams and Windsor is abundant if in a nuanced and gentle way in Oliver O'Donovan's second web sermon. I am waiting with eager anticipation to read other peoples comments on this sermon ( that is what we call a hint in Yorkshire).

Your reference to the Arius book is interesting because I would read that book to find out about Arius rather than the author. I know that when J I Packer or J M L Jones tell us that a Puritain taught something they often mean and still says to us today and I agree with him and the Church would be a lot better off if we listened to him. I undertood that Rowan Williams was a revisionist in that he suggests that Arius was not quite the teacher of Arianism that the standard histories present Are you saying he not anly presents Athenasiuses rebuttals but diplays personal approval of them.

David, thanks for your comment. It seems to me that Garry Williams's booklet, The Theology of Rowan Williams (2003), was deliberately written to be disturbing, but it is not a well rounded description of Rowan Williams's theology and omits his major work on Arius. 

The booklet also was the spearhead of an attack on him by some conservative evangelicals that was one of the issues leading to the founding of Fulcrum. 

For more balanced and nuanced perspectives, I suggest you read some of the following:

Rupert Shortt, Rowan Williams: An Introduction (London: DLT, 2003)

Mike Higton, Difficult Gospel: The Theology of Rowan Williams (London: SCM press, 2004)

Andrew Goddard, 'English Evangelicals and the Archbishop's Theology', one of the two articles first published on Fulcrum in September 2003 and originally published in the Wycliffe Hall newsletter, Spring 2003.

www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/page.cfm?ID=131

This forum thread is focussing on Rowan Williams's current response to the situation in the Anglican Communion today, as manifested by his article 'Challenge and Hope of Being an Anglican Today'.

One of [the insiders] even cited an old adage that 'trying to lead the Church of England is like trying to take a cat for a walk on a lead.'

This is a quotation from 'Spirited Companion: Profile of Rowan Williams', by Sarah Woodward, CAM, Cambridge Alumni Magazine, No 48, Easter Term 2006. The article continues:

The archbishop is criticised if he speaks out, and criticised if he doesn't. One topic that preoccupies Williams' detractors - of whom there are many - is 'leadership'. They joke that if he's asked about leadership he talks more loudly, and if he's asked about prophetic leadership he shouts. In return, he laughs that when he's asked for leadership he's simply being asked to agree with the views of his critics - and when he's asked for 'prophetic' leadership he's still being asked to agree, 'only very loudly'.

The article is well worth reading in full:

www.foundation.cam.ac.uk/uploads/File/CAMArticles/Easter%202006/profile.pdf

On the Global South web site there is a very interesting response by Michael Poon of Singapore.

How much is the Global South worth? A Response to the ACI on ECUSA GC2006.

http://www.globalsouthanglican.org/index.php/comments/how_much_is_the_global_south_worth/

It begins:

Graham Kings view of the Anglican world offers a good starting point in this discussion.  In Fulcrums June Newsletter, Kings referred to Andrew Goddards analysis of the Communion and divided Anglicans into four groups: the federal conservatives, communion conservatives, communion liberals, and federal liberals.  (See Shechem, Corinth and Columbus: ECUSAs Choices, Fulcrum, also Andrew Goddard, A Commentary on the Address of the Bishop of Exeter to the American House of Bishops, Anglican Communion Institute. He placed the Global South among the first two categories in the quadrant." 

A very significant 'fulcrumesque' response to Rowan Williams's Reflections has recently been published by the Anglican Communion Institute, written by Christopher Seitz, Ephraim Radner and Philip Turner, 'A New Season of Anglican Maturing', 10 July 2006:

www.anglicancommunioninstitute.org/articles/2006/Our_New_Season.html

They contrast two understandings of communion among conservative Anglicans in the USA:

One has assumed, and may still assume, that something called 'orthodoxy' can be maintained by carving out ecclesial space in a new province. How this may be achieved is conceivably through a variety of means, but one popular avenue is by forging links to primates and other regions in the Communion. The main concern is getting distance from ECUSA and achieving an 'orthodoxy' identifiable precisely by its public detachment from this local ecclesial reality. 

Another has assumed that the chief concern is with maintaining the highest degree of Communion possible by the necessity of disciplining a wayward province, in whatever form that is proper, through consultation with the same Communion. Here the role of Canterbury, in conjunction with the Primates, and the ECUSA's historical claim to be in communion with Canterbury and a constituent member of the Anglican Communion, are viewed as the best way to think about discipline within the Body. At issue is not detachment or separation, but the determination of Communion full-stop. Communion is here defined by means of conciliarity, under the authority of Holy Scripture and in the light of received Christian teaching. In the contested area of sexuality, Lambeth 1.10 is the last conciliarly determined statement of human sexuality in this Communion, and compliance with this teaching is a sign of Communion.

The first understanding, which ACI caution against, relates, it seems to me, to the Church of Nigeria electing Martyn Minns as a missionary bishop in the USA, and to the actions of the Anglican Mission in America since its inception. The AMiA leader, Chuck Murphy, spoke at a fringe meeting at General Synod, and at an event in London yesterday, both sponsored by Anglican Mainstream. This understanding I entitled as 'Federal Conservative' in my Fulcrum newsletter for June, 'Shechem, Corinth and Columbus':

www.fulcrum-anglican.org.uk/page.cfm?ID=114 

ACI go on to develop their criticism of this first understanding:

In our view, the problem with the first 'strategy' being pursued by conservatives is that it seeks to create a new province by detachment, but leaves unclear what the responsibility for maintaining the Anglican witness in this region is, as a historical and providential fact. It does not want to take up the work of determining the character of Communion, in such a way that those who do not wish to be a part of it can be identified through their own consent and decision. This may result in parallel provinces and putative links to 'orthodoxy' in regions beyond the US , but the work of Communion will not be taken up, only moved to a different place for adjudication. Or it will simply be left dangling.

The second understanding is more fulcrumesque and, in terms of my June newsletter, is 'Communion Conservative'. ACI have offered to be involved in developing this understanding:

It is not too soon to begin thinking about what a covenant might look like. Our view is that one could now work toward stipulating what minimal covenant thresholds might be, like Lambeth 1.10, the Windsor Report and Dromantine Responses; these would have to be passed through to reconnect to processes of conciliarity already in place, and so to be a part of a future covenant process.

It will be interesting to see how the liberal half of the quadrant outlined in the June newsletter - 'Federal Liberal' and 'Communion Liberal' develop their own responses to Rowan Williams's Reflections. It is already happening.