What Future for the Anglican-Methodist Covenant?

What Future for the Anglican-Methodist Covenant?The five articles in this issue of Ecclesiology (21.2) examine the theological issues and the current state of play in relations between the Methodist Church of Great Britain and the Church of England, twenty-two years after the signing, in the presence of the late Queen Elizabeth ii, of the 2003 Covenant of mutual Acknowledgements and mutual Commitments, on the way to visible unity.Anglican-Methodist relations go back a long way.As someone who was intimately involved in some of these developments, I've addressed the question of Methodist-Anglican unity twice before in this journal.1So I've asked this question before in these pages, but I think it bears repeating here: who is the best-known, the most famous, Anglican clergy-person of all time?Surely the answer has to be John Wesley, a priest of the Church of England.Wesley's name is frequently on the lips of the 70+ million Methodists around the world when they talk about their church.Many Methodist chapels are named for him, and innumerable Christians of other traditions, including Anglicans, are aware of him.Again, we may ask: who is the most-frequently quoted Anglican clergy-person of all time, whose words are constantly repeated long after his death?Surely the answer has to be Charles Wesley, John's younger brother and, like him, a priest of the Church of England.Christians of all stripes in many lands sing a selection of his thousands of hymns continually because they are among the very best.Since the demise of the Book of Common Prayer (1662), Charles Wesley's oeuvre must have a claim to be the most quoted Anglican text after the Bible.The irony of the phenomenon of the best known and the most quoted Anglican clergy now being almost completely identified with the Methodist churches, when neither belonged to a Methodist church, is palpable.