What the Windsor Report said — an overview
Whilst we encourage everyone to read the Windsor Report in full, for the benefit of readers we provide this short overview of its main features, with thanks to TA reader, the Revd Roger Stokes.
For a fuller summary this page at Beliefnet is worth reading.
We also like Dave Walker’s lighter summary.
Follow the link on the next line to read Roger’s overview.
5 CommentsMore comments on Windsor
Comment from interested parties has begun to arrive. I will continuing adding the latest reports at the end of this article, rather than add new articles. Some news stories are also listed below in the article ‘At the hour’.
ACNS carries an exchange of letters between the report’s chairman, Archbishop Robin Eames, and the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. Dr Williams writes:
You are not offering the Communion any easy solutions now … You have called us to behave in a maturely Christian way so as to become the Church God wants us to be … You have given all of us work to do and you do not suggest any short cuts … That you have been able to offer the communion a unanimous report gives me great encouragement that the process you have been through as a group may help set a pattern for the Communion itself in the demanding journey that lies ahead.
The Revd David Phillips of the Church Society is reported as commenting
I am pretty disappointed with this, I was expecting something much more definite and clear. My impression overall was that it was very ambiguous. It is toothless. It says what matters most of all it to stick together, we just need to stick together – unity is seen as more important than truth.
There is not yet any comment on the Church Society website.
The same report in The Scotsman quotes Martin Reynolds of the Lesbian Gay and Christian Movement:
The tenor of the document is itself conciliatory — this is a document we can work with, this is a Church we want to continue to be a part of.
Again, there is no comment yet on the LGCM website.
InclusiveChurch comments
We are pleased that the Commission has not recommended the suspension or expulsion of the Episcopal Church USA from the Anglican Communion, or called for Bishop Gene Robinson to resign. We note that the report does not ask for repentance from the Episcopal Church, and we welcome the desire for reconciliation contained within it.
365gay.com suggests that the report ‘has failed to appease either liberals or traditionalists’.
The Archbishop of Cape Town, Winston Njongonkulu Ndungane, quoted in Johannesburg’s Mail and Guardian described the report as “a rich gift of a deep theological and spiritual reflection on the nature of the common life of God’s people” which offers “a ‘win-win’ opportunity” that must be “grasped with both hands.”
The BBC now has a further story: Anglicans buy time in same sex row which covers some of the reaction to the report publication.
More nuanced stories are now appearing, for example this AP story headlined Episcopal right disappointed by report which includes:
An Anglican panel studying the consecration of an openly gay bishop in the U.S. Episcopal Church failed to give American conservatives what they sought Monday: punishment for church leaders and quick recognition for the network of dissenting congregations.
and
4 Comments“We have strong concerns about the fact that they call only for the Episcopal Church USA to ‘express regret’ and fail to recommend direct discipline,” said the Anglican Communion Network and the American Anglican Council.
ECUSA reaction
The Presiding Bishop of the American Episcopal Church, Frank Griswold has issued some preliminary reflections on the Windsor Report. He begins:
I write to you from London where I am attending a meeting of the Primates’ Standing Committee. I have had a matter of hours to review the Report of the Lambeth Commission on Communion, thus I will now offer only some preliminary observations. It will take considerable time to reflect upon the Report, which consists of some 100 pages.
Read the rest of his comments in full by clicking the following link
7 Commentsat the hour
12 noon, and the Windsor Report of the Lambeth Commission, chaired by Archbishop Robin Eames, is published. Unless their website is swamped you can read the report online at the Anglican Communion Office.
If their site is overwhelmed (and it appears to be at the moment) then we have a copy of the pdf version here
Updated
There’s already quite a lot of reportage of this story, most of which seems to lead on the request for an apology from ECUSA. Journalists have perhaps not yet had time to fully digest the Report, or to note the more subtle aspects. Stories include:
- The Independent — Church wants gay bishop apology
- The Daily Telegraph — Church acts to halt gay schism
- the BBC — Can the Anglican Church remain united?
- South Africa’s News24 — Church slammed over gay bishop
- RTE (Ireland) — Anglican report’s warning on gay ordination
- The Guardian — Church report calls for ‘moratorium’ on gay clergy
before the hour
In a short while the Windsor Report will be published and we will be able to form our own opinions.
In the meantime there is plenty of coverage and comment on what the report is expected to say. No one seems to have disputed the accuracy of the story published in The Times last week.
The BBC has Splits feared in Anglican Church. The Times has Church report to spark gay debate, the Guardian carries a PA story Church report ‘set to fuel gay row’, and the Independent Gay rights report threatens to shatter unity of Anglican Church.
0 CommentsA binding covenant?
The Times claims a scoop today on what the Windsor Report will say. Acccording to Ruth Gledhill:
A commission set up to save the Church from schism will propose a binding covenant.
4 CommentsAnglican provinces are to be told they must sign an unbreakable unity agreement which would prevent dioceses and provinces from ordaining bishops such as Gene Robinson in the US again. A “star chamber” will adjudicate when provinces are accused of breaking the agreement.
Reform apologises
We noted an article in Wednesday’s Guardian reporting comments about the Archbishop of Canterbury made by the Dean of Sydney at Reform’s national conference. Reform has now felt it necessary to apologise to the Archbishop for what was said.
Church Times Reform is sorry for Dean’s jibe
Here are some other reports and reactions to the Dean’s comments.
10 CommentsABC Online (Australia) Anglican Church leaders bewildered by Dean’s outburst
and Australian Anglican Church distances itself from Philip Jensen’s comments
The Sydney Morning Herald Anglican turmoil over Dean Jensen’s attack
and Dean Jensen lays into Prince and church leader
The Star (South Africa) Dean causes Anglican spat
York Advert
Since early last year, the Archbishops’ and Prime Minister’s appointments secretaries have been placing notices in the church press inviting comments and suggestions about filling vacant diocesan bishoprics. The one for York has appeared this week, and is reproduced below.
The Telegraph and BBC picked this up yesterday, but their stories give the impression that the reporters had not actually seen a copy of the notice.
Telegraph Worshippers invited to nominate archbishop
BBC Archbishop job ad in newspapers
The Church Times carries the notice in its paper edition today, but apparently does not consider it to be a job advertisement and so has not added it to its online listing of job vacancies.
The Church of England Newspaper, the other paper to carry the notice, has not yet updated its website to include this week’s classified ads.
VACANCY IN THE SEE OF YORK
Following the announcement of the resignation of Dr David Hope, Archbishop of York, the See will fall vacant on the 1st March 2005. The main meeting of the Vacancy in See Committee will be held on 30th October 2004.The Crown Nominations Commission will meet on 28th February/1st March 2005 and 10th/11th May 2005.
Any person wishing to comment on the needs of the diocese, the northern province or the wider church, or who wishes to propose candidates, should write before the 12th November to
Caroline Boddington
Archbishops’ Secretary for Appointments
Cowley House
9 Little College Street
LONDON
SW1P 3SH
or to
William Chapman
Prime Minister’s Appointments Secretary
10 Downing St
LONDON
SW1A 2AA
Any letters received will be shared by the two Secretaries.
0 Comments'Evangelicals call Williams a prostitute'
That’s the headline over a story by Stephen Bates in today’s Guardian, reporting on the Conference of Reform.
Conservative evangelicals flexed their muscles yesterday by denouncing the Church of England and its leader, the Most Rev Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, as sinful and corrupt, and threatening to refuse to recognise the authority of liberal bishops.
And:
Dr Williams was denounced as a theological prostitute by the Very Rev Phillip Jensen, the controversial Anglican dean of Sydney, addressing the 200 clergy and lay members attending the conference.
Dean Jensen was applauded as his sweeping denunciation of the Church of England took in the Prince of Wales — a “public adulterer”; King’s College Chapel in Cambridge, attacked as a “temple to paganism” for selling the records and compact discs of its famous choir in the ante-chapel; and women priests because, “as soon as you accept women’s ordination everything else in the denomination declines”.
More coverage of the Conference in the Telegraph.
2 CommentsEthical Investments
The Daily Telegraph reports that the Church of England may review its policy on ethical investments. Currently, the Church Commissioners are unable to invest in companies involved in pornography, arms, tobacco, gambling and alcohol.
The Church Commissioners, who manage assets worth £3.9 billion, are reviewing their ethical investment policy to ensure that they are maximising their returns. Clerical insiders admitted that any significant changes could prove controversial among the General Synod, who are sensitive about the size and use of the Church’s holdings.
A copy of this Telegraph article also appears here.
0 CommentsNoddy Land
Anthony Howard writes in The Times today about the forthcoming Rochester report, due next month, on women bishops. And he doesn’t like what he thinks it will say.
The Bishop of Rochester’s 15-strong working party has come up with what is, in effect, a shopping list. And a pretty ludicrous one it is, too.
And:
Its suggested courses of action for the future range from a kind of ecclesiastical Noddy land in which women could become suffragan bishops but not diocesan ones, through an even greater fantasy world in which they could hope to be full-scale diocesan bishops but never Archbishop of Canterbury or Archbishop of York, to a somewhat dismal and defeated maintenance of the status quo under which our present crop of women priests may become deans or archdeacons but never break through the stained-glass ceiling to sit on the episcopal bench.
(For the benefit of readers outside Britain, ‘Noddy’ is a character in a simplistic children’s storybook.)
As for next week’s Windsor Report he comments:
0 Commentspunitive action hardly looks like an essentially Christian activity and it is impossible to see anything but damage coming out of this particular piece of reprisal. Conceived in panic, it seems doomed to end in recrimination. No situation is ever surer to delight the outsider than the sight of those who purport to uphold standards of forgiveness and charity failing to live up to them.
Easy Rider
A few years ago I had a funeral which involved a burial in an unfamiliar churchyard. The morning October mist was still over the graves and I went quite a way ahead of the procession to find the grave, and to stand as a marker in the cloud to ensure it would be occupied by the one for whom it was intended. As I stood sentinel the quiet was pierced by a scream, and I caught the red eyes of a stoat, his teeth deep into the neck of a struggling rabbit. I took off after the stoat which persisted, eyeing me from behind successive gravestones before vanishing into the mist.
As one raised as an urban kid, my images of rabbits came from the stuffed variety, and the crimson glare of the stoat lent itself readily to looking demonic, which convinced me of what I thought was the right thing to do. I failed the rabbit in the end by not finishing it off humanely, which I would have done if my instincts had been properly country.
Six years later, I am accustomed to being told the name of the chicken I am eating, and am well adjusted to rural life being about the sharp end of life and death.
So when Old Labour is baying for blood in calling for the abolition of the hunt, its instincts are as skewed as any townie who serves food on the table, the provenance of which is lost in a trail that ends on the supermarket shelf.
The ban against hunting with hounds has to be the most misguided and wasteful cause our representatives can pursue. Old Labour is urban, its roots are industrial, just like my own. While the anti-hunting lobby claims to be caught up in the fate of a fox, what is driving it is a deep disdain for the culture of the people who ride with the hounds.
I think, if Old Labour is still wanting to build a new and fairer world, it can be more effectively occupied.
The hunt is only partly about the fox, it is mainly rural ritual. Like any ritual there is a beginning, middle and end, there are conventions to follow, costumes to wear and patterns of deference to observe as you enjoy, for a brief season, the freedom to ride across the land unfettered and free. In the past, the hunt leader was at the head, and those who followed were in their appointed order according to their position in the rural community. The hunt was a ritual rehearsing the social makeup up the community.
The very fact that it is possible to even consider the demise of the hunt is not because we want to be kind to foxes, but because the social hierarchy which it depicts is fading quickly from country life. More often these days, whether you ride at the head or the tail of the hunt, you are likely to be found in your grey pinstripe on the platform waiting for the 0610 to Liverpool Street.
This is the 100th year of the Harley Davidson, the steed of choice for the classic biker pack. Fifty years ago, bikers had the same fantasy of riding free, the road coming to meet you, and an open horizon. The biggest and meanest dudes rode at the front, while the weakest followed behind. These days, the only people who can afford Harleys are middle-aged accountants in mid-life crisis. I’m certain that, after the bike is in the garage, today’s bikers check to see their grey pinstripe is where they can find it when they all stagger for the 0610 on Monday morning.
Old Labour should leave the hunt alone, it is already a changing institution, and can safely be left in the hands of history. In the meantime, Old Labour would be more true to its vocation if it turned to championing the cause of the availability of public services for the rural elderly and poor.
2 Commentsthe Windsor Report
ACNS reports that the Lambeth Commission report will be published on Monday, 18 October, 12.00 midday in the crypt of St Paul’s Cathedral. The report is named the Windsor Report after St George’s, Windsor, where it was drafted.
ACNS expects a large media frenzy to surround the report, which will also be available online at midday BST (i.e., GMT +1) on 18 October.
Update 18 October — for more reports and comments on the Windsor Report see the main page at Thinking Anglicans
14 Commentsnew Deputy Secretary General
ACNS reports that the Anglican Consultative Council is to have a deputy Secretary General, a new position. Canon Gregory Cameron has been appointed to this position with immediate effect.
Canon Cameron is currently Director of Ecumenical Affairs and Studies at the Anglican Communion Office, and he has been secretary to the Lambeth (or Eames) Commission.
(As an aside, it’s interesting to note that in this announcement Canon John Peterson is described as ‘Secretary General of the Anglican Consultative Council’, and not as ‘Secretary General of the Anglican Communion’, a phrase which has been used frequently over the last few years.)
0 CommentsGladwin for York?
The House of Bishops of the Church of England is having one of its regular private meetings today and tomorrow. Michael Brown in the Yorkshire Post reports that they will discuss who they would like to see chosen as the next Archbishop of York and that their first choice will be John Gladwin, Bishop of Chelmsford. The paper describes him as a “tolerant liberal”, a “tilter at Thatcherism” and a “friend of gays”. He is also a former Provost of Sheffield Cathedral, which explains the paper’s particular interest.
This weekend’s Sunday Times also tipped Gladwin, but did not go so far as to say that the bishops as a whole were supporting him.
The York diocesan vacancy-in-see committee will be holding its first meeting on Tuesday 12 October. Can anybody tell me when the Crown Nominations Commission will meet to consider the York appointment?
0 CommentsMuscular Christianity?
Food stories are a standard part of the news repertoire – and I suspect they have more impact on most people’s daily lives than high politics or war. This week’s (apart from Jamie Oliver’s beans-on-toast) was about the Co-op’s introduction of labels showing the fat and salt content of foods on their shelves. Another prompt to healthy eating. Food, diet, and health are not just news items, they are now part of the entertainment industry. This is the third week of BBC 1’s ‘Fat Nation’ series, diverting us couch potatoes with the progress to virtue of residents of a Birmingham street, as they give up burgers and take up skipping. Part of what fuels all this is a desire for people to be healthy. Discovering that the nation is idle and obese, the government fears for our well-being, and even more, for the cost to the health services in the long run.
If, as Christians, we seek to be good stewards of a divine creation, of which we are part, surely we should wish for ourselves and for others to live healthy lives, in body as in mind and spirit.
But I have a few questions about all this. Two come from the damaging ‘do nots’ of the Christian tradition. We stand in the shadow of the long history of Christian ambivalence towards the body: restricted diet and physical stress have long been used as ways of denying or diminishing our being as bodily creatures, and consequently becoming closer to God. It is a tradition which has been challenged only relatively recently, as we have sought to recover a sense of the goodness of our bodily being.
And then there is another strand in Christian thinking, a strand which we characterise as ‘puritan’, and which tells us that whatever is enjoyable cannot, by definitition, be of God. I’ve caricatured it in those few words, and there is no doubt of the value of setting aside much of what we do and get in a consumer society; but surely we are called to delight in the lavishness of creation, remembering the creator, rather than to withdraw from it as ungodly.
In contrast to these negative traditions, we set images of food and feasting at the heart of our worship: to do so is to speak to a fundamental human need and to use a universal language. But how do words about being called to the heavenly banquet sound to someone on their umpteenth diet? How do they sound to someone with a serious eating disorder, a group whose numbers are increasing as our image of an ideal body becomes more and more distant from the reality with which most of us live.
In my prayers for all those who use our community centre, I find myself at certain times praying for Slimming World and Weightwatchers, for the aerobics class and the line-dancers. And as I offer those prayers, I am increasingly aware of the ambiguities: am I praying for lives of physical well-being to be found through self-dislike and self-punishment, or for a growing acceptance of our different sizes, shapes, and life-styles? I hope I am praying that we are good stewards of ourselves and of each other – but I’m not quite sure what that stewardship involves.
Jane Freeman
0 CommentsDiscrimination and the Church
As we await the report of the Lambeth Commission set up to address the crisis over sexuality, it might be useful to look at the rest of the news, and the way the secular world addresses such issues in Britain. The BBC news website has the following
A gay Conservative candidate has survived a deselection vote within his local party after winning support from Tory leader Michael Howard. Mr Howard earlier stepped in after press reports that Ashley Crossley hadbeen the victim of homophobia. He said there was ‘no place whatever for discrimination of that kind’ in his party, in a letter to local Tories.
Whilst the news media are all clear in their reporting of the Tory leaders’ view, what is equally significant is that without exception they all consider him to have acted correctly. Silence, or fudging the issue, would have been seen as reprehensible.
Of course Michael Howard has the full support of the law of the land in taking his stand. Discrimination on grounds of sexuality is wrong. Yet only ten years ago gay members of parliament were still being persecuted in the news media simply on the grounds of their sexuality.
There has been a complete revolution on this issue, one perhaps as challenging to people’s perceptions as was the ending of slavery in the 19th century.
The Church has asked for an opt out clause on sexuality, and this is beginning to look increasingly inappropriate. It is as though the Church were saying, at the point when slavery was outlawed, ‘but Christian clergy may continue to keep slaves’ with some argument like those used in the apartheid days of South Africa, to justify maintaining the status quo.
Lest this example appear unduly offensive, note that it is the South African churches and nation that have been foremost in campaigning against discrimination against homosexuals. They know, from their experience of discrimination, that all forms of it must be eradicated.
So, when the Eames commission reports, the rest of the Anglican Church will need to note that society in North America, in Europe and South Africa, finds discrimination against homosexuals unacceptable. The public, decisive, action taken by Michael Howard, as leader of the Conservatives, and Liam Fox, party chairman, ought to be an example to us all, and particularly to our own bishops. Homophobic discrimination has no place in the Church, and no place in the world today.
14 CommentsOh come let us adore him
I am a conventional bloke really. When I find something that works I tend to stick with it. So when an overseas trip fell through at quite short notice and I decided to book a retreat it was a blow to find my favourite place couldn’t take me. At short notice I found myself heading for the Welsh Coast and a Jesuit-run week.
God was, of course, in all the places I’d expected to find him. There He was in my daily meetings with my spiritual director. He was up on the mountains – even when the fog descended – and on a glorious, almost deserted sunny beach. He was in the faces of my fellow retreatants as we ate our meals in silence. And of course He was there each day in the Eucharist as bread and wine were taken, offered, broken and consumed. None of that was any surprise. I do a retreat most years. Often it is in an Ignatian style and it is always wonderful for prayer to be the constant of the day rather than fighting for its share of space among all the other priorities.
What surprised me was how close I felt to God in a less usual setting. Each evening, after supper we gathered to sit in complete silence for half an hour with the sacrament set out before us.
The Eucharist is a drama. But this was a stillness. The Eucharist is a constant flow of words, music and actions. Here Christ was with us in silence. The time was set aside simply for us to be there with Christ. And to shun our usual responses of word and action in order to enter into a deeper adoration.
For an Anglican this is of course deeply controversial stuff. The final paragraph of article 25 begins “the sacraments were not ordained of Christ to be gazed upon, or to be carried about, but that we should duly use them.” I don’t sit lightly to the Articles of Religion. Not only have I from time to time to assent to their place within Anglican tradition, I also regularly require others to so assent in my presence.
As I know from regular, daily reading of the scriptures, words not only convey meaning but also often hide, confuse or distort it. And never more so than when the writer and the reader live in very different contexts. For the Anglican Reformers the issue was not simply that lay people were gazing at the sacrament but that this had pushed the receiving of communion into a much lower place. People would rarely receive, would often leave the church once the Host had been elevated or even as a devotion go from church to church simply to be present for the consecration. A devotional practice that seems to have more in common with bird watching than genuine Eucharistic devotion.
I felt in my own devotions not a desire to replace the receiving the Sacrament but a delight to find it complemented. My time was not spent gazing on the Host but seeing it as a lens through which to see the One who gave himself for me and for many. A time to pause and be with Him in His self offering and in His passion. Sometimes, as St. Peter articulated on the Mount of the Transfiguration, it is simply “good to be here”. That moment of intimacy with Christ cannot be clung onto, as Peter himself was to discover. But it can be savoured whilst it is there. The sacrament becomes like an Icon – a window onto the Divine – but even more so because its relationship to that which it represents is closer than for any holy picture or religious ornament.
The primary purpose of the sacrament lies in the full drama of the Eucharist. Climaxing in the sharing of the elements by the substantive body of the congregation. The reformers rightly draw us back to this central truth. But at a time when we struggle to resist Forster’s jibe of “poor, talkative Christianity” and in a world ever busier, maybe devotion that brings us into the stillness of the presence of Christ is what many of us need.
And perhaps next year too I should plan my retreat at the very last moment.
1 CommentInclusive Church, One Year On
Inclusive Church has issued a newsletter, the full text of which is below the fold.
On Thursday 2 September, there will be a seminar entitled Inclusive Church – One Year On – details of this are listed at the end of the newsletter.
update
Posters advertising the seminar can be downloaded from:
Poster as a .jpg file here (100K)
Poster as a pdf file (60K)
A personal pilgrimage
In a few days I shall be embarking on a pilgrimage. It will take me to Groszowice, a small town in Silesia in Poland. Like many pilgrims, I shall be looking for the comfort of a church when I arrive, and for some better understanding of who I am and where I am going. I suppose like many pilgrims also, I have no real certainty that I shall get that better understanding, and I am not altogether sure that my journey will give me comfort – but of course I am hoping that it will.
In fact, this is a personal family pilgrimage. My father was born in Groszowice (or ‘Groschowitz’) to a Prussian-Polish family in the early 20th century. In the second World War he was a German soldier, and at the end of the War his family property was confiscated as Silesia was transferred from Germany to Poland in the post-Yalta carve-up of Europe. Unlike some others I have met with a similar personal history, my father accepted this outcome of German fascist adventures and atrocities stoically, and at no point in his later life — lived in Germany and Ireland — did he ever indicate any resentment at the loss of his family possessions. Eventually he returned to visit his birthplace, and expressed satisfaction at how well it had been maintained.
I have never been there myself, but some six years after my father’s death I have decided to visit the place where he was born and grew up and about which he spoke often. I am not a ‘roots’ person, and so in all truth I don’t have any fixed idea of what I shall find. But to my great surprise, I am approaching the visit with rather more emotion than I had anticipated, and the idea of seeing my father’s house, and seeing the graves of his (and my) ancestors is turning this into an unexpectedly sentimental journey.
I suspect that not many of us can approach some lost heritage with indifference. We may neglect and ignore it for a long time, but bring us face to face with it and it will produce a reaction — perhaps one of awe, or of revulsion, or of a sense of loss, or of frustration, or of suspicion, or of love. For myself, I am not yet sure which of these it will be.
By a quirk of recent events, I am travelling to Poland just as a German pressure group is lodging legal claims for the return of or compensation for lost properties in Silesia. I shall have to emphasise that this is not my mission. I am not going in order to claim the heritage as my property. And this has reminded me that none of us should make such claims, because in doing so we trespass on the heritage of others. Our memories must co-exist, as must we.
Many of the squabbles in Anglicanism over the past year or two have been about lodging claims to exclusive heritage rights. Some of these claims are made by people who have not yet made, and perhaps have no intention of making, the pilgrimage to the source. And beyond Anglicanism, groups are placing flags in territories in which nobody should be claiming exclusive rights.
The Roman Catholic church of the perhaps rather short-lived Vatican II era spoke about the ‘pilgrim church’. Many of today’s would-be pilgrims appear to be marching in formation and singing battle songs. Maybe we should all be seeking to go on that great pilgrimage of uncertainty, of not quite knowing who we are or where we are going, of unknown emotions — but knowing that others are on the same journey; different people, different aspirations, but with the same rights. And then maybe we can accept the past as the past, and move on.
When I arrive in Silesia, I shall visit (at his invitation) the Archbishop of Opole (my father would have called it ‘Oppeln’). He has written to me to say that ‘if you grieve at the loss of your father’s posessions, then I can reassure you that, here in Silesia and everywhere else, you are welcome as a family member in our Father’s house.’
2 Comments