Falls and Truro Churches Announce Formal Split

[angli_fan]

[from the Washington Post]
By Bill Turque and Michelle Boorstein

Two large and historic Episcopal congregations in Northern Virginia have voted overwhelmingly to break away from the U.S. church and to seek to keep their property, setting up a conflict with their diocese that will be watched closely by other dissident Episcopalians around the country.

Officials at The Falls Church in Falls Church and Truro Church in Fairfax City announced the results of the week-long vote following their worship services this morning. Their leadership has been at the forefront of a national conservative movement that has been alienated from the Episcopal Church, the U.S. wing of the worldwide Anglican Communion, since the installation of a gay bishop in New Hampshire in 2003.

At both congregations, more than 90 percent of the members voted to split from the U.S. church and to retain their church property.

...Bishop Peter James Lee of the Diocese of Virginia had warned the voting churches that they could be in for a legal war over their property should they try to keep it. Truro and The Falls Church are worth at least $25 million in real estate, according to public records.

Lee is scheduled to meet with other diocesan leaders tomorrow to discuss possible negotiations with the dissident congregations....He said the meeting Monday willl "consider the full range of pastoral, canonical and legal obligations of the church and our responsibilities to those faithful Episcopalians in these congregations who do not choose to associate with the Church of Nigeria."

"In the interim, I have asked the leadership of these now Nigerian and Ugandan congregations occupying Episcopal churches to keep the spiritual needs of all concerned uppermost in their minds at this difficult moment in our Church history, especially continuing Episcopalians, Lee said.

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/17/AR2006121700289.html

If you don't mind the required (but free) registration, you may also want to read the New York Times: "Episcopalians Reach Point of Revolt".

www.nytimes.com/2006/12/17/us/17episcopal.html?_r=2&pagewanted=1&ei=5094&en=70416e45f97b7238&hp&ex=1166331600

[anglicansablaze]

Five other Virginia churches have voted to severe ties with The Episcopal Church and to become members of the Convocation of Nigerian Churches in America (CANA).

[angli_fan]

[from Episcopal News Service]

The Episcopal Diocese of Virginia said December 18 that it has the agreement of people who voted December 17 to leave the Episcopal Church that they will not attempt to transfer church property to their ownership for 30 days.

In return, the diocese promised not to initiate any litigation concerning the departures for the same amount of time, according to a statement issued after Bishop Peter Lee, the diocese's Executive Board and Standing Committee met in an emergency joint session the afternoon of December 18.

www.dfms.org/3577_80625_ENG_HTM.htm

[Swick]

The members of two prominent wealthy congregations have departed and are now occupying Episcopal Church property, and it sounds as though five or six more may follow. This is not good, and they'll be missed.

However, to keep things in perspective, there are 195 congregations in Virginia. Don't let the crisis mongers scare you.

[angli_fan]

A pair of editorials regarding this week's secession by several churches in the Diocese of Virginia:

Anglicans in America

[from "Comment Is Free" at the Guardian ( UK )]

by Bruce Bawer

For years now, antigay Episcopal leaders have been cultivating ties with people like that Nigerian bishop with an eye to eventually jumping ship. Now these two Virginia congregations have taken the plunge, placing themselves under the authority of Archbishop Peter Akinola, primate of the Church of Nigeria - a man who not only opposes gay bishops but enthusiastically supports a proposal by his nation's government to outlaw meetings of homosexuals. In doing so, these parishes - whose histories are wrapped up in the history of the founding of American democracy - have betrayed both their American and their Anglican roots.

For though they beat their breasts over their fealty to "traditional values," these secessionists have demonstrated quite dramatically that they don't know the first thing about Anglican tradition - which from the beginning has called on the faithful to focus on what brings them together, not on what divides them, and whose glory is not a book of discipline but a book of common prayer. They call themselves orthodox, but in an Anglican context they're anything but. They thunder that their denomination has been taken over by gays and their supporters; the fact is that third-world Anglicanism has largely fallen under the sway of reactionary demagogues who have left Anglican traditions and values far behind.

commentisfree.guardian.co.uk/bruce_bawer/2006/12/bruce_bawer_on_episcopal_rift.html

---------------------------------------

Episcopalians Against Equality

[from the Washington Post]
By Harold Meyerson

In 2003 an overwhelming majority of the nation's Episcopal bishops ratified the selection of a gay bishop by the New Hampshire diocese. This past June the church's general convention elevated Nevada Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori to the post of presiding U.S. bishop. Jefferts Schori is the first woman to head a national branch of the Anglican Church. Worse yet, she has allowed the blessing of same-sex couples within her diocese (which includes the ever theologically innovative Las Vegas ).

Whether it was the thought of a woman presiding over God's own country club or of gays snuggling under its eaves, it was all too much for a distinct minority of Episcopalians. The dissident parishes in the Virginia diocese contain only about 5 percent of the state's parishioners. But it's the church the defectors have latched on to that makes this schism news.

www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/12/19/AR2006121901282.html

[angli_fan]

[from the Episcopal News Service]

The 30 or so members of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Heathsville, Virginia, who opposed a recent vote by the majority of the congregation and the rector to join the Anglican Church of Nigeria say they want to continue as the Episcopal presence in their community.
"We are prepared to continue to operate St. Stephen's as an Episcopal Church, and I think we have people who will agree to accept leadership positions and to continue to carry on the work of St. Stephen's Episcopal Church," said Dawn Mahaffey, one of the people who voted against what some members are calling "the secession."

Sandra Kirkpatrick referred to that slowly organizing group as a "large, viable remnant."


...Both Mahaffey and Kirkpatrick said that the decision at the 2003 General Convention to consent to the election of Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire prompted a change in the attitude of St. Stephen's leadership, which only got more determined with time.

Mahaffey said that Cerar initially said at a congregational meeting late in 2003 that he would try to work within the framework of the Episcopal Church to make changes but that he would leave if he felt he could not continue in the church. He said at that meeting that if he left and if others joined him, they would not attempt to take over St. Stephen's property, she said.

In December 2003, Kirkpatrick said, a vestry survey showed that the majority of St. Stephen's members wanted to remain in the Episcopal Church.

However, Mahaffey recalled, the perceived failings of the Episcopal Church "became the topic of his sermons from that point forward. It did not matter what the liturgy was for any given Sunday or what the Gospel was, there was always a way to bring the topic around to that issue. We very often got the message that the Episcopal Church had sinned and needed to be repentant."

"It got to the point that our needs for pastoral oversight and ministry were not being met because of the single-minded focus on this issue. We were not hearing the Word and how that was applicable in our daily lives. I don't think we were being ministered to in all of our needs."

There was a "steady outgo of people who found this message intolerable," Kirkpatrick said, and a "steady influx" of people who approved of the leadership's position.

"Everyone down here knew that St. Stephen's was taking this stance," she said.

Mahaffey said the growing disaffection with the Episcopal Church "has been very well staged."

"I think it has been sold to the congregation," she said. "Three years of hearing it week after week after week."

www.episcopalchurch.org/3577_80654_ENG_HTM.htm