Baltimore Presbytery voids church’s agreement with new Anglican congregation
The Layman Online, January 3, 2006
Presbyterian churches have shared their worship facilities with a number of groups – including Jewish congregations – but the Presbytery of Baltimore recently decided to nullify a local church’s invitation to allow an orthodox Anglican group to hold services on its property.
Church of the Resurrection was allowed to hold Christmas Eve service at Brown Memorial in Baltimore.The session of Brown Memorial Woodbrook Presbyterian Church had entered into a “gentlemen’s agreement” to rent worship space for two months to the Church of the Resurrection, an Anglican start-up congregation in Baltimore.
But the Presbytery of Baltimore jettisoned the agreement, declaring that the Anglican congregation could meet at Brown Memorial only for three weeks and then must go elsewhere.
The presbytery’s intervention was not surprising. One of the most liberal presbyteries in the Presbyterian Church (USA), Baltimore has a long history of removing evangelicals from its pulpits, forcing some of them out of the ministry.
Last November, the Synod of the Mid-Atlantic declared that the presbytery is “heavily liberal,” has not lived up to its own commitment to “inclusiveness” and “its conservative minority has felt, over the years, unheard and uncared for … we have been witness to the playing out of the resulting loss of trust.”
The Church of the Resurrection announced the presbytery’s action in its Dec. 26 newsletter, declaring that “all of this runaround resulted from a conversation or conversations between their executive presbyter, Peter Nord, and the suffragan bishop of the Diocese of Maryland, John Rabb. We firmly believe that Brown Memorial Woodbrook acted in good faith and are saddened that they were pushed into this untenable position. We thank them for doing their best to take us in.”
The Church of the Resurrection was organized in the spring of 2005 under the authority of the Anglican Diocese of Chile. The congregation’s pastor, the Rev. Eliot Winks, formerly a minister in the Episcopal Church (USA), was ordained last November by Bishop Frank Lyons of Bolivia.
In a news release, the American Anglican Council, an orthodox group that opposes the ECUSA’s acceptance of unrepentant, practicing homosexuals as Episcopal leaders, said the Church of the Resurrection was informed of the intervention by the presbytery and the diocese on Dec. 22. The council compared the situation to the gospel account of Joseph and Mary finding “no room at the inn.”
The council said Robert Ilhoff, the bishop of the Diocese of Maryland, dismissed Winks and the new Anglican congregation in “denigrating terms” in a Nov. 12 letter to Episcopal ministers in the diocese. The letter said Winks “will serve a small group of former Episcopalians who have left St. John’s Church, Glyndon, now meeting in a private home and calling themselves The Church of the Resurrection, Baltimore County. Since this may be in newspapers, you should be aware that Church of the Resurrection is not an Episcopal congregation (nor even a proper Anglican one) and has no relationship with this Diocese.”
Ilhoff’s reference to the Church of the Resurrection not being “even a proper Anglican” congregation is debatable. It is fully affiliated with an Anglican province in the worldwide 70-million-member World Anglican Communion. The overwhelming majority of the members of that communion believe the 2.2-million-member ECUSA violated apostolic teaching by ordaining as a bishop an Episcopal minister who left his wife and children to live with a homosexual partner.
Episcopalians who are leaving the 2.2-million-member ECUSA say they are remaining faithful to the Anglican tradition by affiliating with orthodox provinces in the World Anglican Communion.
The Church of the Resurrection newsletter expressed dismay over the diocese’s efforts to portray the congregation as illegitimate. “We ask that all of you pray for the misguided men in power who for some reason see us as a threat,” the newsletter said. “Why would they attempt to bring the full weight of their temporal power, authority, and influence to hurt us? We left ECUSA in peace. We have never spoken ill of our former parishes, the Diocese of Maryland or ECUSA. They are in our past and, when we have looked back, it has only been to pray for those that we left behind. We have no interest in tearing anything down, but rather building something new.”
The congregation said it would be strengthened, not diminished, by the turn of events.
The Rev. Canon David C. Anderson, president the American Anglican Council, noted that similar hostile actions by revisionist bishops are occurring across the nation.
“Does it not seem inconsistent and hypocritical that those in ECUSA who champion diversity and inclusivity are the very individuals who aggressively attack Biblically faithful congregations?” Anderson asked. “Apparently, Bishop Ilhoff has interfered with a verbal agreement between Brown Church and Church of the Resurrection – an Anglican congregation that simply sought to worship and proclaim Christ in Baltimore. He has not only deliberately harmed the people of Resurrection Church in a mean-spirited way, but he has also challenged the authority of the Bishop of Chile. Left unanswered in all of this is, what are the Episcopal bishops of Maryland afraid of?”