Anglicans gather at Lambeth Palace to debate Windsor Report

Rev Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury will lead a summit today, which will see more than 50 Church of England bishops discuss the homosexuality crisis in the Anglican Church. The gathering comes following a four-page letter sent by the Archbishop to worldwide Anglican Primates last Friday, which gave a caution to Anglicans of the serious results that would come about if division was to linger in the Communion.

Dr David Hope, the Archbishop of York will jointly chair the meeting, which will take place at Williams’ Lambeth Palace, in London.

Invitations were sent out to every single one of the 44 diocesan bishops and 10 suffragans were also welcomed to discuss October’s Windsor Report, which is the document made by the Lambeth Commission to analyse, report and reconcile the crisis.

The Windsor Report advised the Anglican Church to produce a moratorium on the authorisation of same-sex ceremonies, and the consecration of homosexual bishops. It also called for the bishops who had breached the peace of the Communion to express their regret, and proposed that a covenant be created for all 38 provinces to sign up to, thus ensuring a denominational schism would be prevented.

However, recently it has been revealed that same-sex blessings are still being carried out by Church of England bishops in various regions of the UK, and the Lesbian and Gay Christian Movement have stated that they expect 1,000 similar ceremonies to be performed every year once the government’s new Civil Partnership Law becomes effective next Autumn.

Rev Pete Broadbent, the Bishop of Willesden said, “It is important that the bishops give a lead on this matter. We are all committed to trying to stay together if we can.”

An Anglican Evangelical stated, “The meeting has been called at short notice. It has come out of discussions in October. It is being held so that the bishops are not at logger-heads over this, so any fights and arguments are got out of the way before the meeting scheduled for January.”

The upcoming January meeting precedes the General Synod in February, which will be the time when the Windsor Report will be debated in full by a complete range of bishops, clergy and laity in the public eye for the first time.

Anglican Evangelicals are also set to publish their own report which will state that the Church’s Biblical based stance against active homosexual relationships, which was agreed at the 1998 Lambeth Conference, should not be “gradually eroded”.

Since the release of the Windsor Report in October, a large number of conservative Anglicans have been very outspoken regarding the report and the sensitive issue.

The Church Society stated that the report should be rejected as it would “allow immorality to fester” and that this would “destroy the churches of the Anglican Communion”.

African bishops argued that the report was “offensive”, and suggested that the report’s request for statements of regret from the Episcopal Church, USA and the Anglican Church of Cananda did not go any where near far enough.

Anglican Mainstream, which was originally set up to campaign against the appointment of Jeffrey John as the Bishop of Reading said that the report had “fallen short” in recognising “the reality of human sin within the Church.”