This site is the work of the No Anglican Covenant Coalition. The Coalition comprises dedicated Christians, many of them bloggers, from around the worldwide Anglican Communion who believe that the proposed Anglican Covenant our churches are being asked to endorse is, at best, redundant, but, more likely, will do irreparable harm to our churches and to our Communion.

In particular, the members of the Coalition believe that the covenant is likely to change forever the fundamental nature of not only the Anglican Communion, but also of Anglicanism itself. Out of a fellowship of mutually supportive yet diverse regional and national churches tracing their historical and liturgical traditions to the Church of England, there threatens to emerge a monolithic, worldwide church unresponsive to local needs, narrow in its theological outlook, and governed exclusively by bishops most of us will never see.

It is ironic that inheritors of the English Reformation are now proposing that churches surrender autonomy to a conservative central authority. Despite sixteenth-century protestations that the Church of England was merely replacing the Pope with the King of England as head of the church, far-reaching changes were quickly implemented in the newly independent church, some of which would appear in Roman Catholic tradition only centuries later.

From its earliest history, Anglicanism has been an uncomfortable amalgam of seemingly incompatible ecclesiastical traditions. Whereas we see this as Anglicanism’s strength, others view it as a weakness to be corrected. Indeed, for five hundred years, adherents of one tradition or another have attempted to extinguish competing strains of thought within Anglican churches. Their victories mostly have been local and short-lived.

The proposed Anglican Covenant, however, could usher in a wholesale conversion of a vibrant and iridescent Anglicanism into a monochromatic nonentity from which work of the Holy Spirit has been permanently precluded. The Covenant, after all, seeks uniformity, rather than unity. Uniformity gives the illusion of unity and is most easily achieved by expelling or silencing voices that dissent from a defined norm—in other words, by a series of acts of disunity. But true unity is a gift of God for which diversity is a prerequisite.

By opposing the adoption of the covenant, we are working to prevent the calamity that a major change to the Anglican Communion could easily become.

We, the members of the No Anglican Covenant Coalition are acting independently and do not necessarily hold the same views as those of our churches or of other organizations to which we belong.