Tuesday, January 15, 2008

Three cheers for New Zealand

The NZ province has always been far ahead of Australia, although to be fair Australia has been held behind by the log on its leg called Sydney.
They have responded to the idea of an Anglican covenant which (from what I read) would mean the Anglican communion being ruled from above, a bit like the RCs only by a committee instead of a pope.
Anyway their reply seems very sensible arising from their unique situation of 3 groupings or Tikanga. You can read it here
I particularly like the final part -
In conclusion we endorse the words of one of our Archbishops, Archbishop Moxon when he said:

“Perhaps the challenge is to transcend the old ways of fighting or leaving, to find a new way of discovering what integrity we can trust in each other by virtue of the fruits of our baptism and by how much we may be prepared to live respectfully with what diversity God has given us. It is crucial that we use a Gospel based process of discernment, rather than the litigation, trench warfare and the labelling judgements of the world. We will need to look significantly different from the ways of the world in the way we process what happens from now on to have anything different to say to the world.”

1 comment:

June Butler said...

We have no need of another covenant. We have the New Covenant of Our Lord Jesus Christ. That seems sufficient to me.

For others a Covenant is linked to the concept of something given to us by God. The move to call this proposal a Covenant is therefore to claim far too much. They see this exercise as a very human device and are by no means convinced that it is worthy of any other status.

Exactly.