The Archbishop of Canterbury has written the primates of the Anglican Communion seeking their reflections on the response to the Windsor Report by the 75th General Convention of The Episcopal Church.

“In order to inform my own thinking as the Windsor process moves forward, I should be grateful if you would give me your personal responses to the following three questions, both at this point and again in September,” said the Most Rev. Rowan Williams in a letter dated June 30. In addition to the cover letter, the document sent to the primates included a number of reference materials, among them a copy of the Windsor Report and the text of all the resolutions approved by bishops and deputies at General Convention in response to the Windsor Report.

The letter asks the primates for their personal “reaction” to the approved resolutions as well as the likely reaction “within your province as a whole.” The final question asked “How do you expect the Anglican Communion as a whole to view the resolutions passed at General Convention?”

Archbishop Williams issued a brief public statement on June 21 at the conclusion of Convention in which he noted that the Joint Standing Committee of the primates and Anglican Consultative Council had already appointed a small working group to advise him “on these matters in the months leading up to the next Primates’ Meeting,” scheduled to be held in Tanzania next February.

In a longer report published on June 27, he outlined his thinking on the best way forward, endorsing a Windsor Report proposal calling for the development of a covenant and the possibility that provinces which endorse the covenant would be accorded constituent membership while those which did not would hold associate membership. In an address to the Church of England’s General Synod on July 7, Archbishop Williams denied that the covenant proposal was either a “capitulation to fundamentalism” or “a cunning plan to entrench total doctrinal indifferentism.”

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