The Choice Before ECUSA
By the Bishop of Durham, Dr N. T. Wright
June 2006

Introduction

1. There is already a burgeoning literature on the subject of the 61-page Report of the Special Commission on the Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion. As might be expected, comments, criticisms, suggestions and pleas have been flying around from and in all directions. Having tried to keep up with this over the last few weeks, I have reached the conclusion that the crucial issues are comparatively simple, and that attention must not be diverted from them by the plethora of sub-questions which will no doubt run this way and that in General Convention. What follows is in the spirit of what I said at the English House of Bishops nine days ago: that there are more or less equal and opposite dangers in (a) some people being eager for ECUSA to show its true liberal colours and go its own way, and therefore hinting that Windsor raised the bar higher than it in fact did, and (b) others being eager to paper over the cracks and to accept any expression of regret as Windsor-compliant even if it obviously isn’t. Faced with this situation, the only way forward which will command assent from the Communion and enable us to proceed together is to be careful and exact about what precisely Windsor said and meant. That is the aim of the present paper.

2. What follows now emerges both from my own prayers for ECUSA over the last years and months and, particularly, from my participation in the Lambeth Commission which produced the Windsor Report. I cannot stress too highly that this was a unanimous report produced by a Commission of widely differing views. The Windsor recommendations were not general, arm-waving aspirations; they were precisely focused, thoroughly thought through and carefully worded. Many on the Commission wanted to say more, many would have preferred to say less, but all were agreed that these recommendations were the essential requirements if ECUSA were to continue in full communion and fellowship with the rest of the Anglican Communion. I write not only as one of the authors of the Windsor Report but as one of those who discussed, prayed over and debated, phrase by phrase and line by line, the whole document, not least the specific recommendations. I then had the task of presenting the Report to the Church of England General Synod in February 2005, where it was endorsed by an overwhelming majority. I speak therefore, not as an Englishman telling my American cousins what to do (I am well aware of the dangers of that position!) but as a member of an international and multicultural team which produced a unanimous report for the benefit (we hope) of the whole Anglican Communion.

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