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Bishop Duncan Testifies on ECUSA's response to the Windsor Report
Bishop Robert Duncan offered testimony tonight to the committee dealing with the Episcopal Church’s response to the Windsor Report. The committee took testimony for nearly three hours from scores of individuals in a packed ballroom at the Hyatt Regency in downtown Columbus.
STATEMENT OF BISHOP ROBERT DUNCAN
To the Special Committee HearingWednesday, 14th June, A.D. 2006
I thank the Special Commission and the members of the Committee for the impossible work that you have attempted to do in keeping the conserving and progressive wings of this Church together: a task I fear that became impossible with the 2003 tear in our fabric.
I stand to speak about the inadequacy of the resolution as presented. I do so chiefly in the words of my friend and colleague N.T. Wright, the Bishop of Durham and a member of the Lambeth Commission:
It is very important not to let the plethora of material, in [the Special Commission Report] and in all the various commentaries upon it, detract attention from the central question: Will ECUSA comply with the specific and detailed recommendations of Windsor, or will it not? As the resolutions stand, only one answer is possible: if these are placed without amendment, ECUSA will have specifically, deliberately and knowingly decided not to comply with Windsor. Only if the crucial Resolutions, especially A160 and A161, are amended in line with Windsor paragraph 134, can there be any claim of compliance….If the resolutions are not amended, then, with great sadness and with complete uncertainty about what way ahead might be found, the rest of the Communion will have to conclude that, despite every opportunity, ECUSA has declined to comply with Windsor, in other words, to ‘walk apart’ (Windsor 157).
I believe, with the greatest of heartbreak and sadness, that the day has arrived where those who have chosen the Episcopal Church because of its catholic and evangelical reliability, and those who have chosen the Episcopal Church for its revolutionary character, can no longer be held together. For which Episcopal Church will the Committee, and then this Convention, decide? The future in Communion rests only with the former of the two. It cannot be both ways into the future.