The Windsor Report, released on 18 October, was doomed long before it was released. It was doomed when the decision was taken to avoid addressing the substantial issue underlying the current crisis in the Anglican Communion. Whether this decision is tied to the mandate the Lambeth Commission was given (although it is happy to step outside of its mandate on other issues, e.g. structural questions concerning the Instruments of Unity §107) or to a conviction that the traditional and current teaching of the Anglican Churches on human sexuality is bound to change sooner or later, what has resulted is a report that has no chance of success because it is preoccupied with symptoms rather than causes.

Some of the omissions in the report are nothing short of scandalous. A superficial treatment of "unity' ignores those occasions on which the teaching of Scripture is repudiated by false teaching or by unrepentant sinfulness. There are some kinds of unity which we are to avoid at all costs (2 Cor. 6"14). Similarly, the section on the authority of Scripture lacks an appreciation that these words are the word of God to us, which might call even the bishops of the churches to account for their teaching and behaviour. Most serious of all, the report lacks any consideration of the notorious and reprehensible actions of bishops in the USA, Canada and the UK against those who have dissented fromthe revisionist views of human sexuality which lie at the heart of the current crisis. In certain dioceses of the Anglican Communion, faithful Christian men and women are facing, not simply "a potentially hostile leadership' but acts of hostility, which should have been roundly condemned as unchristian and thoroughly inappropriate.

The great offence, as far as this report is concerned, is to breach fellowship by unilateral action or by interfering in another bishop's jurisdiction. There is virtually no appreciation of the magnitude of what has been done by those who have turned their backs on Scripture by endorsing homosexual practice. The lack of discernment evident throughout the report is staggering.
The great offence, as far as Christians are concerned, is that leaders of the denomination should be more concerned to preserve the structures of the institution than the faith once for all delivered to the saints. The gospel of Jesus Christ is infinitely more valuable than the worldwide Anglican Communion. The failure to identify the behaviour of the Episcopal Church of America and the Diocese of New Westminster in Canada as the apostasy which it is (along with similar actions and declarations by bishops in other parts of the Communion) is a telling indictment on the institution's capacity to honour Christ in the third millennium.