As ecumenical understanding of the formation and development of episkopé has emphasized, there are different ways of structuring episkopé collegially, synodically and personally, each with its own theological basis, strength and weakness. This article argues that the proposed Anglican Covenant assumes a normative understanding of the nature and role of the bishop which carries the danger of a kind of ‘puritanism’ in which the focus and energy of the churches in the Anglican Communion are narrowly focused, creating a bureaucratic form of governance that vitiates the mission of the church.

Christian ethics has always taken a complex view of the goods and purposes of human sexuality and its role in human relationships. Sexual desire and behavior have to be seen always within the overarching moral imperatives of love of God and love of neighbor. Such love entails self-giving and other-regard, and in longer-term relationships also some measure of commitment, fidelity, reciprocity or mutuality, truthfulness and generativity. Yet not all relationships with these characteristics do (or should) include sexual behavior. Nor do all sexual relationships include all these characteristics or virtues all the time. So we do better to base our moral evaluations of relationships on the exercise of these virtues than on more obvious criteria of sexual orientation or even status in the eyes of the church. At the same time, it is also possible for faithful and reasonable people to disagree faithfully and reasonably on sexual ethics, as on other things.

An exploration of the development and meaning of the text of the Baptismal Covenant in the 1979 Book of Common Prayer of the Episcopal Church provides the basis for a discussion of the proposed Anglican Communion Covenant. The article concludes by suggesting how biblical, theological and liturgical understandings of covenant offer a perspective by which to assess the proposed Covenant for the Anglican Communion.

Baptism is the sacrament that incorporates Christians into the Body of Christ; 99 percent of the church are laity. The proposed Anglican Covenant's emphasis on formal authority exercised by bishops and primates changes the relationships among all Anglicans, not just bishops. This change may run against a fundamental Anglican tradition of ongoing communal reflection that acknowledges that elements of church life change because they are no longer convenient or useful in particular locales. In adopting the Anglican Covenant, are we stating that traditional Anglican polity is no longer convenient or useful for the Provinces of the Anglican Communion, including the Episcopal Church?

Attitude toward Christian mission agencies was investigated in a sample of 827 Anglican clergy ordained in the UK from 2002 to 2006. The Scale of Attitude Toward Mission Agencies (SATMA) consisted of six items related to the work that agencies do, and whether clergy wished to engage with this work. It had a high internal consistency reliability (Cronbach's alpha = 0.80). After controlling for theological liberalism or conservatism, attitudes were most positive among evangelicals and least positive among Anglo-Catholics. Both liberal and conservative Anglo-Catholic clergy showed less positive attitudes toward mission agencies than did other clergy.

The rise of the global market economy has advanced forms of centrist, corporatist and statist rule that are insensitive to local indicators that this novel social order is ecologically, and socially, unsustainable. For many political theologians, and for secular political ecologists, the related crises of species extinction and climate change, combined with structural economic crisis, require a fundamental relocalization of the global economy and of the harvesting of natural resources. The contest between the political economy of global ‘free’ trade and a relocalized economy and polity bears analogies with debates around the relation between the local and the universal in Christian ecclesiology. In the eucharistic body politics of Saint Paul Christian communion is focused in the eucharistic gathering. However, centrist tendencies in ecclesiastical polity emerged in fourth-century accounts of the universal church. The subsequent doctrine of the primacy of Peter gave a powerful push to centrist over localist accounts of the esse of the Church in the West, and the contest between local and universal in Anglican and Catholic ecclesiologies continues to this day. Orthodox theologians Zizioulas and Afanassieff, describe and fill out the doctrinal implications of a primitive ecclesiology in which ‘the eucharist makes the church’.2 This recovery of a local eucharistic ecclesiology offers valuable resources for thinking about the nature of communion between Anglicans in a Communion increasingly riven by controversy, and for thinking about the nature of the parish in a Church of England prone in the last forty years to centrist and managerial conceptions of the Church, and to the denigration of the local parish church as the esse of the ministry and mission of the Church in England.

All Anglican cathedrals in England have formal associations of Friends (like other institutions in the heritage sector). The majority arose in the 1920s/30s, a period that coincided with the gradual development of a focused outreach strategy by cathedrals, and the abandonment of sixpenny entrance fees. By analysing Letters to the Editor and news reports in The Times, this article explores the origins of cathedral Friends’ associations. The sources illustrate the benefits of Friendship for both sides of the dyad: for the cathedrals, primarily the five shilling subscriptions and the creation of an informed supporter base; and for the members, mainly esoteric benefits. It is also demonstrated that, in the north, Friends’ gifts directly replaced cathedral/diocesan resources being deployed for social welfare. A particular value in focusing on the history of the cathedral Friends’ movement is that it highlights the history of the cathedrals themselves in this difficult inter-war period.