Executive Council endorsed a report on the proposed Anglican Covenant which expresses significant reservations with the current draft and recommends delaying until 2015 a final up-or-down vote by General Convention.
 
In a press conference at the conclusion of three-day council meeting in Stockton, Calif., Presiding Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori and Bonnie Anderson, president of the House of Deputies, said council made virtually no changes to a report prepared by a task force in response to the second draft of the proposed covenant.
 
The report said that delaying a vote until 2015 “would provide a fruitful opportunity for TEC to hear the voices of other members of the Anglican Communion as they discuss future drafts.” It also said the covenant can only “be embraced on the provincial level, that is, The Episcopal Church, and not on a diocesan level.”
 
The report took into consideration comments submitted by 31 of the church’s 110 diocesan deputations. It expressed significant reservations with provisions for holding covenant partners accountable to one another. The report approved by council noted that the majority of diocesan deputations would prefer to see those provisions of the covenant eliminated entirely.
 
“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 states in its introduction. “Matters of moral authority and interdependence amongst the churches result from mutuality, not from regulation.”
 
Council also approved a draft 2010-2012 budget that includes an 11 percent increase in funding for General Convention, a freeze on staff salaries, and a 2 percent decrease in mission and program support. The increase in funding for General Convention is primarily due to a need to update software that tracks legislation and will enable committee members to register via the internet, according to Mrs. Anderson. Funding for The Episcopal Church’s assessment contribution to the Anglican Consultative Council remained unchanged, Bishop Jefferts Schori said, adding that she had expressed concern about the perceived shift in priorities that draft budget might convey by reducing financial support for mission and ministry.
 
The draft budget reflects the reality that The Episcopal Church’s investment funds lost 33 percent in 2008, said Kurt Barnes, treasurer. The value of the church’s endowment funds at the end of 2007 was $363 million. Even if the council agrees to increase the draw on the endowment from 5 percent to 5.5 percent as proposed, that income line would still be down by about $7 million from the last triennium. Because the draw is based on a five-year average of the income, “we’ll be dealing with the 2008 result for the next five years,” Mr. Barnes said, as reported by Episcopal News Service.
 
The council is required by canon to present a balanced budget for the upcoming three-year period to the Joint Standing Committee on Program, Budget and Finance no less than four months before the next meeting of the General Convention. The joint standing committee can then refine that version before it proposes a budget to convention. The budget will not become official until after General Convention approves it in July.
 
Steve Waring
 
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