Tom Wright on the Anglican Church

WRIGHT: We don't have a proposal for a "church within a church." That's one of the possible unfortunate results that might happen if the proposals that are on the table don't work.

The proposal is for an Anglican covenant. The bizarre thing is that we're in covenant with the Methodists, and we're in ecumenical covenant with all sorts of people, but we should be able to be in covenant with ourselves. The point is this: What happened three years ago with the election and consecration of Gene Robinson, to everyone's surprise in America but to no one's surprise in the rest of the world, tore the fabric of communion at the deepest level. The Anglican primates said that in a meeting in October of 2003. The result of this was that we had a very expensive, long, drawn-out year in 2004 when the Lambeth Commission met and produced the Windsor Report. That cost a lot of money to get 20 theologians together from around the world three times to discuss everything. It ate up the budget for several other things that should have been going on. But we couldn't not do it because we had to have some way of addressing the issue.

But we can't afford to do that again every two or three years whenever something like this happens. So we have to have some way of setting up ground rules of how we can live together as a communion. The covenant is a minimalist proposal for ground rules to enable us to explore, to push the boundaries if we want to, but to do so without throwing all the china off the table — as has happened.

The question of how you know which issues are "china-off-the-table" issues and which ones aren't is the critical thing. In other words, the real issue is: How do you tell which issues make a difference and which issues don't make a difference? The example I've often used is: If someone says, "We have flowers on the altar at our church and you don't." Well, come on. Get used to it. Grow up. This is not a communion-breaking issue. It's a local option.

If someone says, "You read Matthew, Mark, Luke and John in your services and we always read the gospel of Thomas, the gospel of Judas and the gospel of Mary." Well then you say, "Not sure we're talking about the same religion here. Are we really in fellowship with you guys or not?" In other words, that would be a communion-breaking issue.

The question is: On that scale, where do you locate the other issues that are in front of us? Lay presidency of the Eucharist being an obvious one. Some want to do it; most say you shouldn't. Ordaining practicing homosexuals as priests and bishops. It's happened in some quarters; it would be unthinkable in other quarters.

So the question is: How do you tell? The covenant is not a way of saying, "Let's have a church within a church." The covenant is a way of saying, "We want to be a church where we can have these discussions without the china getting tossed off the table."

If in the process someone says, "We know that, covenant or no covenant, we're going to have to push ahead and do this, because we're going to be prophetic and we know we're right," then the rest of the communion might say, "That's horrible because you are actually thereby breaking the covenant that the rest of us think we have with each other." And if that then creates a church within a church, or a church outside the church, that is tragic. It's not the aim.

We haven't got there yet, and I pray God we won't.