After Presbyterian church reneges on deal, Anglican group settles into mansion
By John H. Adams, The Layman Online, April 18, 2006
A traditional Anglican congregation, organized by lay people concerned about the theological and moral direction of the Episcopal Church (USA), has moved past its eviction from a Baltimore Presbyterian church and settled into a mansion.
Resurrection Church has been welcomed to mansion.The members of the Church of the Resurrection had to make a brief stop at a hotel for services and prayer between being ousted from Brown Memorial Woodbrook Presbyterian Church and gaining admittance to Rainbow Hill Mansion in Stevenson, Md., about 15 miles north of Baltimore.
Rainbow Hill has a rich history, just as Resurrection Church is trying to recapture the Biblical and orthodox history of the Anglican Church. The mansion was given by a prominent investor to his stepdaughter, Henriette Louise Cromwell Brooks, who met and married Gen. Douglas MacArthur in 1921 when MacArthur was the superintendent of West Point and a hero of the First World War.
The Church of the Resurrection held Easter services Sunday in the mansion’s ballroom.
Both Peter Nord, the executive in the Presbytery of Baltimore, and John Rabb, bishop suffragan of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland, pooled their power to prevent the Church of the Resurrection from worshipping at Woodbrook, a congregation that had allowed other religious groups, including a Jewish congregation, to meet there without intervention.
Under pressure from Nord and Rabb, Woodbrook canceled its agreement with the Church of the Resurrection.
Nord said he intervened as a witness to church unity. “We have in this world an effort to divide denominations and churches and this effort troubles me because I think the unity of the church is important,” Nord told The Baltimore Messenger. “I think the church is best served when we have a wide variety of theologies and people within it to represent a fuller picture of who God is. So when one group decides to leave the church, I believe that is both unscriptural and harmful to the body.”
Nord said he personally asked Woodbrook’s clerk of session to renege on the agreement with “a group of people who rejected the appropriate leadership of their church.”
In Presbyterian affairs, Nord has not always seemed that devoted to “appropriate leadership” or church unity. When the Synod of the Mid-Atlantic was considering the appointment of an administrative commission to respond to his presbytery’s decision to approve as a member a homosexual activist minister, Nord supported the minister, Don Stroud, and threatened suit against the synod. The synod named the commission anyway and directed it to require the presbytery to review Stroud’s membership.
The Rev. Eliot Winks serves communion.Baltimore Presbytery has been in the vanguard of the movement to repeal and/or ignore the Presbyterian Church (USA) constitutional prohibition against ordaining practicing homosexuals – the same issue that prompted the Church of the Resurrection’s members to leave the Episcopal Church (USA) and organize a traditional Anglican community.
Despite Nord’s view of a big-tent church with “a wide variety of theologies and people,” the presbytery has shown little patience with evangelicals. After one, Ernest Smart, was ousted from the pulpit by the presbytery, Dr. Ronald Scates fired off an angry statement.
“For 11 years, I was a member of Baltimore Presbytery as Senior Pastor of Central Presbyterian Church,” said Scates, now the pastor of Highland Park Presbyterian Church in Dallas. “In more than one instance, I witnessed how the presbytery played fast and loose with the Book of Order and the Constitution of the Presbyterian Church (USA). In particular, I watched a presbytery go after Ernest Smart, make a mockery of justice, and make fools of themselves in doing so. The way Rev. Smart was treated was both a travesty and a tragedy.”
The pastor of the Church of the Resurrection, which now has about 100 members, is Eliot Winks. The congregation’s lay governing body is called the Servant Council.