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Anglicans have been waiting for the arrival of the Windsor Report like Tolkien fans panted after the movie premiere of The Lord of the Rings. The difference is that the Windsor Report, read instantly by Anglicans worldwide on the internet, has flopped. At least according to conservative Anglicans—and in their profound disappointment, there lies a lesson about weak accountability, a lesson all churches are wise to ponder.

The world's top Anglicans (known as primates) in October 2003 instructed the Lambeth Commission to recommend how the Communion, with 70 million baptized members worldwide, might hold together. The presenting problems? The American church had just elected an active homosexual, Gene Robinson, as bishop, and both American and Canadian dioceses were going ahead with official ceremonies to bless same-sex couples. All this despite the broad Anglican consensus that heterosexual marriage is God's normative design for a lifelong relationship between a man and a woman.

How did it come to this point? Let's focus on the American church: The problem began in the 1960s when a bishop of the Episcopal Church (ECUSA), James Pike, began publicly doubting doctrines like the Trinity. His fellow bishops, afraid that church discipline would seem medieval to the rest of America, only mildly rebuked him and dropped the issue.

This failure of nerve gradually opened a hole in the church that truckloads of aberrant clerics have since driven through. They have endorsed everything from premarital sex (during the values clarification sex-education era) to homosexual sex (beginning in the 1970s) to the worship of pagan deities (a service for which was posted briefly on the church's national website in late October)—not to mention the regular and sundry denials of key church doctrines (like the resurrection and the deity of Christ) by such bishops as Jack Spong and Charles Bennison.

It is no wonder that by 2000, ECUSA was regularly ignoring the biblical teachings of the larger Anglican Communion. Last October, Anglican primates asked the American and Canadian churches to cease and desist from moving forward on the homosexual front. The North American leaders didn't blink.

The Windsor Report tried again. Revisionist American and Canadian bishops were "invited to express [their] regret that the proper constraints of the [Anglican] bonds of affection were breached" by their actions. They were asked to immediately cease and desist from further actions. They were also "invited to consider" withdrawing from international Anglican gatherings until they could agree to do the above.

Not surprisingly, these flaccid suggestions were stillborn. Within three days, though a few revisionist bishops had expressed regret, they did so only for the emotional fallout of their actions—not for the acts themselves. Most defiantly supported ECUSA's Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold, who said that the church would "continue to exercise its own freedom and judiciousness in how it chooses persons for ordained ministry." Griswold also said he had no intention of absenting himself from international meetings. So much for the experiment in voluntary church discipline.

The Windsor Report tries hard. It begins admirably, with a sound theological section. And it concludes by recommending that Anglicans commit to a "covenant," whereby they can be more accountable to one another. But it has an inadequate mandate at this stage in Anglican history. It all feels too little, too late.

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December 2004, Vol. 48, No. 12