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The Windsor Report:
The Way Ahead for the Anglican Communion
Part 2 -
The Windsor Report
Presented by The Revd Dr Bruce Kaye
Auckland Cathedral of the Holy Trinity.
3 August 2005
Part 2 of a document 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.
1. The Occasion
The report sets out the context of its work at the beginning as one of process. The process by which the proposal to ordain women as priests and then as bishops was promoted is first reviewed. It is underlined that widespread consultation took place at the time and at each stage. In contrast two actions taken in Canada and the USA followed no such consultation and indeed flew in the face of advice from the Primates’ meeting. The diocese of New Westminster approved services of blessing for same sex unions and the Canadian General Synod affirmed the integrity and sanctity of committed adult same –sex relationships. The ordination as bishop of New Hampshire of a “divorced man openly acknowledged to be living in a sexually active and committed same sex relationship” with the approval of the General Convention of ECUSA. Some bishops have intervened in other dioceses and in the words of the Windsor Report “these developments have now contributed materially to a tit-for-tat stand-off in which, tragically in line with analogous political disasters in the wider world, each side now accuses the other of atrocities, and blames the other for the need to react further in turn.” These actions precipitated the crisis meeting of Primates in October 2003 and the appointment of the Lambeth Commission on Communion which in turn produced the Windsor report.
The Report identifies six underlying issues which it believes produce the symptoms of this conflict:
- Theological development, things change and we develop our understanding of the faith
- Ecclesiastical procedures which were not followed,
- Adiaphora, the idea that there are some things which are core and other where we can live comfortably with differences within the church,
- Subsidiarity, that is deciding matters at the lowest level in a hierarchy as is possible. The Canadians and Americans were wrong in their judgment on this issue.
- Trust, has been a casualty in this episode and needs to be re-built
- Authority. We have not worked through how the style of authority we agree about actually works, or should work.
2. The Recommendations of Windsor
The Windsor Report makes a number of recommendations:
There should be a moratorium and a period of listening.
The Organisational arrangements in the Communion should be re-jigged in three principal ways:
- An enhanced role for the Archbishop of Canterbury to “intervene” in a province, and to have a council of advice to assist him in this
- Change the constitution of the Anglican Consultative Council to include the Primates as the Episcopal representatives and to make the elected provincial representatives more effective by being members of the provincial structures
- A covenant be entered into by provinces which would enhance fellowship and commonality
3. The Primates Meeting
In February 2005 the Primates received this report and issued a long and detailed statement. They expressed disquiet at the idea of an enhanced role for the Archbishop of Canterbury to intervene and they set up a Panel of Reference to supervise visiting arrangements for bishops who extend Episcopal oversight to parishes who have lost confidence in their diocesan bishop. It asked the ACC to initiate a listening and study process on the sexuality issues and asked the Archbishop of Canterbury to establish a reception process, that is, a process which can monitor how the report and associated actions are being received. They also requested that ECUSA and the Canadian church voluntarily withdraw their members from the ACC until the next Lambeth Conference, save that they should be invited to make a presentation to the next meeting of the ACC.
4. The Anglican Consultative Council
The ACC met in June this year and confirmed the constitutional changes and also heard the presentation from the North Americans. They reiterated the call of the Windsor Report for calm:
156. We call upon all parties to the current dispute to seek ways of reconciliation, and to heal our divisions. We have already indicated (paragraphs 134 and 144) some ways in which the Episcopal Church (USA) Communion in a way which would foster reconciliation. We have appealed to those intervening in provinces and dioceses similarly to act with renewed respect. We would expect all provinces to respond with generosity and charity to any such actions. It may well be that there need to be formal discussions about the path to reconciliation, and a symbolic Act of Reconciliation, which would mark a new beginning for the Communion, and a common commitment to proclaim the Gospel of Christ to a broken and needy world.
157. There remains a very real danger that we will not choose to walk together. Should the call to halt and find ways of continuing in our present communion not be heeded, then we shall have to begin to learn to walk apart. We would much rather not speculate on actions that might need to be taken if, after acceptance by the primates, our recommendations are not implemented. However, we note that there are, in any human dispute, courses that may be followed: processes of mediation and arbitration; non-invitation to relevant representative bodies and meetings; invitation, but to observer status only; and, as an absolute last resort, withdrawal from membership. We earnestly hope that none of these will prove necessary. Our aim throughout has been to work not for division but for healing and restoration. The real challenge of the gospel is whether we live deeply enough in the love of Christ, and care sufficiently for our joint work to bring that love to the world, that we will “make every effort to maintain the unity of the Spirit in the bond of peace” (Eph. 4.3). As the primates stated in 2000, “to turn from one another would be to turn away from the Cross”, and indeed from serving the world which God loves and for which Jesus Christ died.
They also set in train a process to monitor the listening process on issues of sexuality in the following terms:
- In response to the request of the bishops attending the Lambeth Conference
in 1998 in Resolution 1.10 to establish "a means of monitoring the work done on
the subject of human sexuality in the Communion" and to honour the process of
mutual listening, including “listening to the experience of homosexual persons”
and the experience of local churches around the world in reflecting on these
matters in the light of Scripture, Tradition and Reason, the Anglican
Consultative Council encourages such listening in each Province and requests the
Secretary General:
- to collate relevant research studies, statements, resolutions and other material on these matters from the various Provinces and other interested bodies within those Provinces
- to make such material available for study, discussion and reflection within each member Church of the Communion
- to identify and allocate adequate resources for this work, and to report progress on it to the Archbishop of Canterbury, to the next Lambeth Conference and the next meeting of this Council, and to copy such reports to the Provinces.
5. Comment On These Things
One is bound to sympathise with the difficulties faced by those involved in these discussions, not least the Archbishop of Canterbury. The members of the Lambeth Commission were obliged to work under great pressure of a very tight timetable and in the circumstances one has to say that they have done extremely well. That capacity to work under pressure and to do something creative may be the result of the significantly high representation from this diocese of Auckland. It is not difficult to be grateful for the work done by the commission. I do not wish to comment in detail on the text, but I do want to say something about two aspects of the report and I also want to ask where in all of this is the Inter Anglican Theological and Doctrinal Commission, whose work was commended by the ACC, but whose budget was cut so that, as far as I can see, it alone of the Communion commissions has not been able to meet. The theological task given to the IATDC in 1998 has been effectively gazumped by the mainly organisational and process terms of reference given to the Lambeth Commission.
The first comment on the report I wish to make relates to the parallel drawn between the ordination of women and the current issues of sexuality. The ordination of women concerned the church coming to terms with changes in the wider society which have been in train over a period of a hundred years. The issue related to the public institutional arrangements in the church’s ministry. Furthermore the population of the Anglican Communion which was consulted, that is the institutional elites, were at that time in large measure western or western trained.
By contrast the issue of sexuality has come up more quickly and at a time when the institutional voices in the communion are no longer so commonly western. Indeed the majority are not. Even within western countries these issues are still contentious. In Canada there is a rights law which provides the basis for changes in legal arrangements. In the USA different states have different patterns and these have proved in the recent past to be highly contentious. In Australia gay and lesbian people have most individual rights at law as other citizens, though marriage is reserved in Federal legislation for heterosexual relationships. In the non-Western world the matter is extremely contentious and in places like Nigeria it is enmeshed with the relations between Christians and Muslims in the politics of the state. Christians who appear “soft” or “western” in these contexts are easily described by others as disloyal and foreign in their attitudes.
I think it is too easy to make the comparison with the women’s ordination issue to the disadvantage of the North American churches. The issue of gender relations is more fundamental, more contentious and more complicated and what worked for one issue may not be assumed to be appropriate for the other.
The second comment I would like to make is that while process is important in terms of facilitating conflict resolution, it is not the whole story by any means. The failures at the 1998 Lambeth Conference and the terms of some of the cyber warfare that is going on in this matter, cannot be explained simply as failures of process. They represent failures of conduct. For the ordinary Anglican watching the 1998 Lambeth Conference from outside through the public media it was the appalling behaviour and language of some of the bishops which was so embarrassing. That problem continues on the internet. Modelling love and respect is a vital part of dealing with conflict in the Christian community. We should be grateful for the example given in this regard by the recent Lambeth Commission, and the meetings of the primates and the ACC. It is a model that needs to spread through the whole of the debate.
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