| PLANO, TX —
Dissidents in the Episcopal Church, angered by last year’s
consecration of an openly gay bishop, formally launched a new
“network” Jan. 20 to act as a church-within-a-church
for conservatives.
Some 100 conservative leaders from 12 dioceses met at Christ
Church in here to approve a charter for the Network of Anglican
Communion Dioceses and Parishes. The group hopes one day to be
recognized as a “true and legitimate” expression of
Anglicanism on U.S. soil.
Bishop Robert Duncan of Pittsburgh, who was elected the group’s
first moderator, said the new network is a “significant
and joyful moment” for conservatives who feel besieged in
the 2.3 million-member church.
“There is now no reason for orthodox Episcopalians to leave
Anglicanism,” he said, referring to the 77 million-member
Anglican Communion, which includes the Episcopal Church.
The group’s constitution said the decision to ordain the
openly gay V. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire has caused
“immense harm.” The group vowed to maintain a “faithful
Anglican witness in submission to the sovereign authority of Holy
Scripture.”
The 12 dioceses supporting the new network are Pittsburgh; Albany,
NY; Central Florida; Dallas; Florida (Jacksonville, FL; Fort Worth,
TX; Quincy, IL; Rio Grande (New Mexico); San Joaquin, CA; South
Carolina; Springfield, IL; and Western Kansas.
Under the framework adopted in Plano, the network will be divided
into five regional “convocations,” each overseen by
a bishop. That presumes that the network’s bishops would
cross traditional lines of authority and jurisdiction held by
other Episcopal bishops.
At the same time, a heated war of words has erupted between the
group’s patrons in the Washington, D.C.-based American Anglican
Council and progressive Episcopalians who support the church.
A leaked memo written on Dec. 28 by the Rev. Geoff Chapman, an
AAC leader in Sewickley, PA, said the network was prepared to
mount “faithful disobedience ... on a widespread basis”
in an effort to “replace” the Episcopal Church.
AAC leaders downplayed the memo as “nothing new,”
but critics say the memo reveals the group’s intentions
to “create anarchy” in the church.
“I will use all the power of my office to see to it that
our clergy and congregations will not be in any formal membership
arrangement with this or any other such group seeking to destroy
the Episcopal Church,” Bishop Don Johnson of Memphis, TN,
said in a stinging rebuke of the memo.
A fledgling coalition of “Via Media” progressives
in the 12 dioceses said “the letter speaks for itself. Property,
not piety, is keeping dissident parishes in the Episcopal Church.”
The Rev. Ephraim Radner, director of the conservative Anglican
Communion Institute in Colorado Springs, CO, said the “process
for deciding who is ‘the real Episcopal Church’ is
well under way.”
“If any of this comes as a surprise to bishops of (the
Episcopal Church), it can only be because they once again closed
their eyes to what the majority of the Anglican Communion is actually
saying, doing and committed to being,” he said. |
