US Church–No Covenant before 2015: CEN 2.06.09 p 6.

The Executive Council of the US Episcopal Church has recommended a six year delay before voting on the Anglican Covenant.

At the close of its three day winter meeting on Jan 31 in Stockton, California, the Executive Council endorsed a report from a task force that recommended the delay on adopting the Covenant, and voiced strong criticism of the most recent draft of the document.

The Anglican Covenant will be presented the Communion at the May meeting of the Anglican Consultative Council in Kingston, Jamaica. Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori last year urged the church not to take up the Covenant at the July meeting of General Convention saying more time was needed. However conservative critics said the delay was politically motivated, noting that when the issue of affirming the election of a partnered gay priest was brought before Convention in 2003, a similar timeframe was not found to be objectionable by the church’s liberal hierarchy.

Waiting until the 2015 General Convention “would provide a fruitful opportunity for [the Episcopal Church] to hear the voices of other members of the Anglican Communion as they discuss future drafts.”

The report also said dioceses would not be permitted to endorse the Covenant by themselves, as it could only “be embraced on the provincial level, that is, The Episcopal Church, and not on a diocesan level.”

Sanctions for bad behavior contained in the Covenant’s appendices were held objectionable, and violated The Episcopal Church’s autonomy. “Care needs to be taken that our conversations around an Anglican Covenant do not draw us necessarily toward a hierarchical model of a church union or even the perception of Anglicanism as a singular global church,” the reports said.

“Matters of moral authority and interdependence amongst the churches result from mutuality, not from regulation,” said the report, which was adopted unchanged by the council, save for the movement of a coma Bishop Jefferts Schori said.