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The Windsor Report:
The Way Ahead for the Anglican Communion
Part 1 - Introduction
Presented by The Revd Dr Bruce Kaye, Sydney-based theologian, ethicist, Anglican priest and former General Secretary of the Anglican Church in Australia.
3 August 2005
This document was prepared after a series of meetings sponsored by the Chapter of the Cathedral of the Holy Trinity, Auckland, in July 2005.
You may download a complete pdf copy here (size: 112kb), or read it online. The online version has been separated into three logical parts for readability. Follow the links at the bottom.
Introduction
The Windsor Report which has been the subject of this series of meetings was occasioned by the action of the Episcopal Church in the United States in confirming the appointment of an openly gay man as a bishop and of the Canadian church in confirming a view about the blessing of same sex relationships. But the Windsor Report does not deal with these subjects. It is concerned with process. It was written by the Lambeth Commission on Communion. Paragraph 26 of the report says:
It should be clearly understood that this Commission has not been asked to continue this conversation, nor comment on or reconsider either the Lambeth Resolution or the Primates' Statement. Further serious Communion-wide discussion of the relevant issues is clearly needed as a matter of urgency, but that is not part of our mandate.
The mandate for the commission clearly stated that it was about how the Anglican Communion was to function organisationally.
There is a long and honourable history in Anglicanism of doing theology in relation to church order or church law. From the Investiture controversy of the twelfth century through Richard Hooker in the sixteenth, to the revision of the constitution of the Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia, Anglicans have focussed theological effort on the shaping, or at least trying to explain, their church organisation. In this respect the Windsor Report and its intellectual parent the Virginia Report are undertaking a quite Anglican thing. Whether they are doing it adequately might however be altogether another question. Furthermore it might be a question as to whether this is the appropriate priority at this point in time. After all the commission represents the first response of the structures of the Anglicans Communion to this crisis. It might have been argued that it would be more appropriate to focus on the substantive issue in dispute.
Of course these should not be thought of as simple alternatives, though a lot of resources have been ploughed into the production of the Windsor Report and little or nothing has been committed at the Communion level on the substantive issue. The matter is made particularly acute for Anglicans because of the convergence of two streams of influence which have created a level of turbulence that makes clear paths difficult to identify. On the one hand the dynamics within Anglicanism world wide have been creating significant differences and tensions in the last twenty years. In 1960 when I started at Theological College most of the bishops in the Anglican Communion outside the USA were English. Of the 199 diocesan bishops only four were African and six were Indian. All that has been entirely turned on its head. African bishops were in a majority at the last Lambeth Conference and there are reported to be more Anglicans in church in Nigeria on a given Sunday than in England, Wales, Scotland Canada and the USA combined. The only western church which has consistently growing numbers in the last decade has been ECUSA, the rest have been declining at rates between one percent and twenty percent. Yet the wealth remains with the west. Changing numbers, retention of wealth and the emergence of more determined theological perspectives have created significant turbulence in the world wide Anglican community.
At the same time the global environment has created social, political and religious conditions which have brought Anglicans into contact with differences to a degree not seen for six hundred years. Not since the Moors invaded southern Europe and Muslim culture flourished especially in Spain from the eighth to the fifteenth century have Christians been in such close contacts with Muslims. The last fifty years have seen mass migration of people on an almost incomprehensible scale. Those migrations have meant that the great religions no longer exist in comfortable zones of commonality. Five percent of the French population is Muslim, one percent in Australia. The Muslimisation of the population of Europe for long discussed amongst demographers is now debated with anxious uncertainty amongst politicians, not least in the United States of America. Once a protestant stronghold, the USA is now a nation of ethnic and religious minorities and soon may become a nation with a Latin American majority and with a Roman Catholic culture behind them.
All this is happening at a time when communication, or rather the transfer of information, is more immediate and graphic than anyone over thirty could have imagined might have been possible in their life time.
These global changes are having a direct impact on the developments in the Anglican Communion.
It is in this dynamic and in many senses fraught context that the Windsor Report is to be read.
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