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Leaders of conservative Episcopalians have expressed various levels of anger and disappointment about the Windsor Report, which the Lambeth Commission on Communion released on Monday in London.

Most conservative leaders who spoke to Christianity Today were either in London or on their way to it. None of these leaders expects that bishops of the Episcopal Church will express anything more than token regrets for proceeding with gay blessings or for consecrating Gene Robinson as a bishop earlier this year.

David Anderson, president of the American Anglican Council, cited Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold's "A Word to the Church: Some Preliminary Reflections Regarding the Windsor Report."

"Griswold already said, basically, nothing doing," Anderson said.

Griswold expressed two regrets in his document: "I regret that there are places within our Communion where it is unsafe for [homosexual persons] to speak out of the truth of who they are" and "[members of our church] regret how difficult and painful actions of our church have been in many provinces of our Communion, and the negative repercussions that have been felt by brother and sister Anglicans."

Anderson is no more hopeful that Episcopal bishops will observe a moratorium on consecrating additional gay bishops, should they be elected, or on blessing gay unions. "Will they do that? I've been around for a long time, and I don't expect it."

Robert Duncan, moderator of the Anglican Communion Network, said the network's member bishops will press the Episcopal Church's House of Bishops to enact what the report asks of them.

"We'll call on the House of Bishops very clearly to express their regrets, to embrace the moratorium, to affirm the Lambeth Commission's resolution on human sexuality, and to commit to the core covenant [proposed by the Windsor Report]," Duncan said.

Duncan does not expect retired U.S. bishops to stop crossing diocesan borders unless the House of Bishops is willing to make those commitments.

Though the report gives the network something to work with, Duncan believes it's a weaker document than the current crisis requires. "It's more concerned about family than it is about faith, and more concerned about unity than it is about truth," Duncan said.

Duncan also is concerned that the report merely invites American bishops to refrain from attending pan-Anglican meetings. "It's a very English inviting of the Episcopal Church to come to its senses. It doesn't seem wise to invite the Episcopal Church one more time to do the right thing."

Duncan expects that African bishops will provide their own critiques of the report when they gather in Lagos, Nigeria, October 26 to November 1 for a continent-wide meeting on economic development and other issues.

"The disease of the U.S. church has found its way into this report, and that's going to be a concern to our global allies," Duncan said. "I think at the end of next week we're going to have a much clearer idea of what the bulk of the Anglican Communion believes about this report."

Kendall Harmon, canon theologian in the Diocese of South Carolina, found the report weak in its ecclesiology. "There's not enough of an exploration of biblical calls to discipline and the integration of discipline and community," he said.

The report pays inadequate attention to how the early church dealt with false teachers—that, for instance, orthodox bishops considered the sees of false teachers to be vacant and would therefore cross diocesan borders.

Harmon praised the report's rebuke of the Episcopal Church for consecrating Robinson and its proposal of a core covenant for the global Anglican Communion. Nevertheless, he too doubts that bishops of the Episcopal Church will respond to the report's recommendations.

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October (Web-only) 2004, Vol. 48