The Windsor Report

It is Thursday morning. I did not have the energy to post anything last night after returning from the Windsor Report hearing. I have asked the members of our deputation to write about it from their perspectives. The following is from Lee Shaw.


It was a standing room only crowd in a full ballroom at the Hyatt Regency for a public hearing on the Windsor Report, the document commissioned by the Archbishop of Canterbury to address the divisions within the Anglican Communion. We were told that 1,500 chairs were set up, and it was an overflow crowd into the hallway.

It was an evening of listening. This was the time for the church to listen to her members about things that are important to all of us. It was not an evening of easy answers or clear mandates from the breadth of the Episcopal Church. It was, however, an evening that highlighted some of the strikingly different points of view and understandings of scripture, tradition and reason.

For 2 1/2 hours we listened to each other. Sometimes with frustration. Sometimes in agreement. Sometimes with laughter. Sometimes with a sense of wonder of what we had just heard. Throughout it all the vast variety of what we call the Episcopal Church came shining through.

I left the hall tired and unsettled. I await to see how Convention will deal with the resolutions before us regarding our relationships with the broader Anglican Communion. I look to these coming days still with hope, guarded at times, yet hopeful that we will find the language and the approach that will meet the desires of the main body of the church.

And I say main body, because it does seem clear that certain parts of our church have decided already that they have no need for the rest of the body. For some it is deal or no deal with total compliance to the Windsor Report. That saddens me since I really do not see the vast majority of Episcopalians going in that direction.

One part of the hearing that will stay with me forever was a comment by Bishop Gene Robinson of New Hampshire. He gave a heartfelt and impassioned statement of his own sense of God's love and acceptance of him as a person who is gay. He acknowledged that there is much talk about the so-called "homosexual agenda" as if there were a specific plan for all gays and lesbians. Then he acknowledged that agenda: "The homosexual agenda is Jesus Christ."

There it is. I would hope that that is an agenda shared by all of us. Our challenge is to discern the will of Christ in the ordering of our common life at this time in our lives.