The chair of the Lambeth Commission on Communion which authored the Windsor Report, retired Archbishop of Armagh and Primate of Ireland, Lord Robin Eames, said that he was very encouraged that what was said in the Windsor Report was taken very seriously by the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops, and believes that the content of their responses to the Primates was also “very encouraging” in terms of the possibility of agreement in the Anglican Communion.
In an interview on the BBC-Northern Ireland/Radio Ulster program “Sunday Sequence”, Eames, who was interviewed along with Guardian reporter Stephen Bates, said that while he was taken to task by some Global South bishops for saying this in the past, he still believes that the is issue of authority is central in the debates within Anglicanism. Issues of Biblical interpretation are important but not at the heart of the situation.
Eames explained that Anglicanism has been successful in reaching out to and bringing together people from all over the globe with a wide variety of cultures into one family, but that in doing this there are bound to be tensions. These tensions, Eames asserts, are a sign of Anglicanism’s success.
Bates, in an answer to a question about the relative relevance of sexuality questions when there are so many other issues pressing for attention, said that in his view homosexuality is the chosen instrument that is being used to unite certain constituencies around a common cause so that control may be exercised by these groups seeking a kind of realignment in the Communion. He describes the worldwide Anglican Communion as something of a new discovery especially among conservative and evangelical groups.
Reflecting on his experience with the Windsor Report and the earlier Eames Commission, Lord Eames said that acceptance of the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops work will depend on response of the other churches and that a difficulty is that it is hard to get the leaders of the Global South movement to say precisely “what is their bottom line?” Without that kind of clarity, it is hard to know what the threshold for the unity of the communion will actually be.