Reports from the ACC Front

So the Anglican Consultative Council has been meeting in Jamaica and I've frankly been so busy between parish stuff, marriage equality stuff and last week's jaunt to Philadelphia & Washington that I have NOT been hanging on every word, action and blog post.

But I've just taken a few minutes to check in and see what's going on so here's some of what's up:

The latest news seems to be that efforts to paste on a fourth section -- with disciplinary provisions in it -- to the Covenant draft has gone down in the flames it deserves.

Chris Sugden -- one of the architects of both the schism du jour and the convenant charged with healing the wounds inflicted BY the schism du jour (try explaining all this to someone outside looking in and this is the part where they say, "you're kidding, right???") is most unhappy with this development, posting over at Anglican Mainstream "without section 4, which deals with issues of discipline, the covenant was meaningless."

Inspiring a colleague to note: While this comes as no surprise to most of is it does need underscoring: if the Covenant is (according to one of its prominent – and connected –proponents) "meaningless…..without section 4" – without disciplinary mechanisms – then the Covenant is really only about discipline – or, to put it another way, the primary goal of discipline is achieved by using the tool of the Covenant.

Mark Harris has this to say about that ... and Colin Coward has this very interesting account of nearly having his camera seized by a not-very-happy-Nigerian caught confabbing with conservative allies in the hallway.

Then there's this from George Conger on "Religious Intelligence:"

Delegates from the Church of Nigeria stated they were perplexed by Dr Williams’ actions. “All of the Archbishop of Canterbury’s contributions were positive” up until the last moment of the meeting, Bishop Ikechi Nwosu of Nigeria said.

Nigerian Archdeacon Abraham Okorie said there was a “satanic” spirit of confusion in the air. He noted it was hypocritical of the ACC to make a great noise of using African ways of decision making in addressing the covenant, but then resorting to slippery parliamentary tricks to thwart the will of the meeting.

Hmmm. Why is this sounding vaguely familiar? Maybe because it's the same M.O. His Archbishopness pulled at Lambeth when the bishops went through what seemed like months of Indaba process only to get the "Gospel According to +Rowan" in his final address (as noted in my final "Report from Lambeth"):

By pushing his preference that the American and Canadian churches abide by the moratoria on blessings of same sex unions and the consecration of any more openly gay bishops, he undid in a two-hour span a good percentage of the good work that had been accomplished over the two- week conference.

At this point, I'm pretty much over the whole darned lot of them and wondering what the Anglican version of tea in the Boston Harbor would be. Any thoughts?