Throwback Thursday emerged in pop culture and social media in the past several years as an opportunity to dig up bits from the past, usually embarrassing or dated photos: the 1980s have figured largely here. Hip as we are here at Covenant, we thought it might be fitting to tap into this general cultural expectation, but subvert it a bit. As an online community, Covenant has existed since August 2007, and one of its greatest strengths is its treasure trove of reflection from the past seven years, snapshots of our collective reasoning together. Some of these languish unread for months on our servers, either on this site or on the one we’ve cheekily labelled Old Covenant in our tab above. So it seems fitting to draw our readers’ attention to them from time to time.
Today, we’re highlighting a contribution of enduring value from the Rev. Dr. Michael Poon: “Rebooting Anglican communication.” It  first appeared in the series Our Unity in Christ (see the rationale for the series and its index here).
Poon offers an analysis of why the Instruments of Communion “have now become part of the problem,” a discussion of what issues remained (and remain) unaddressed in the Anglican world, and some brief suggestions on how to move forward. He also highlighted the spiritual aspects of the crisis, namely, a loss of charity and the ability to speak truthfully.
How can we recover the capacity of love, of growing in God’s love and ways, and of connecting our lives to those of the saints in heaven and on earth?
This leads us to the heart of the spiritual crisis among the Anglican faithful worldwide. Disputes about unity, faith, and order in the Anglican Communion have led to a pervasive corruption of speech. Repetitive rhetoric, words on words from different camps, have eroded communication. We have lost the capacity to receive what is new. We have lost the sense of wonder and mystery in communal life when words are filtered through ideological prisms… Human words no longer point to the true Word of Life. Sound bites mask private ambitions and secular undercurrents that in fact shape our disputes.
Read it all.
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