Friday, November 14, 2008

WICHITA FALLS: Church split Episcopalian realignment vote will affect local church properties

Via VirtueOnline:

By Ann Work
Times Record News
http://www.timesrecordnews.com/news/2008/nov/14/church-split-episcopalian-realignment-vote-will/
November 14, 2008

A vote this weekend will determine where Wichita Falls' Episcopalians sit in church Sunday.

Disagreements that have been festering for years in the Episcopal Church will be addressed today and Saturday at the annual convention of the Diocese of Fort Worth at St. Vincent's Cathedral in Bedford, Texas.

The published agenda includes a vote on a constitutional amendment that would remove the Fort Worth diocese - including its church property in the diocese - from the Episcopal Church and tuck it under the South American-based Anglican Province of the Southern Cone, a realignment under the branch of the church that is headquartered in Argentina.

Who will own the actual buildings in Wichita Falls - All Saints Episcopal at 2606 Southwest Parkway, Church of the Good Shepherd at 1007 Burnett, and St. Stephen's Episocopal Church at 5023 Lindale Drive near Rider High School - is in question and may require a court to decide, officials say.

The Very Rev. Scott Wooten, who favors the move, said his parishioners are not leaving the Episcopal Church but realigning themselves under the Archbishop Gregory Venebles, who supports a set of traditional beliefs, such as the inerrancy of the Bible, the divinity of Christ, and that the Bible says homosexuality is sin.

"We really feel that the Episcopal Church has left us," he said. "If you look at the changes in the church over the years, look at us. We haven't gone anywhere. We haven't changed since it was founded in 1885. But the Episcopal Church has attempted to take us somewhere else. We are saying, 'We can't go where you're going.' The only way we can do that is to realign ourselves with the Southern Cone."

Brent Walker, a layman and delegate from St. Stephen's to the diocesan convention, disagrees that such a realignment can be made.

"While individuals may leave the church, dioceses cannot," he said Thursday. "Propositions to do so are invalid because they are inconsistent with the Constitution and Canons of the Episcopal Church, to which the Diocese of Fort Worth acceded in 1982 when it was created from the Diocese of Dallas."

Wooten said the Fort Worth group originally petitioned for membership in 1982 when its diocese was formed, and this weekend the same group will withdraw that petition and be welcomed into the province of the Southern Cone. "It's not leaving at all," he said.

Leaving or not leaving is only one of the church's many disagreements.

The Episcopal Church's decision to elect an openly homosexual man, the Rev. V. Gene Robinson, as bishop of New Hampshire in 2003 only fueled a division that had already been under way for decades, Wooten said.

"This is not a fight that has cropped up overnight, and not a reaction to a single issue," Wooten said Thursday. "In the late 1960s, several of the bishops in the Episcopal church began denying basic tenets of the Christian faith."

Some denied belief in the Trinity, he said. Another denied that Jesus was divine, that he did not rise from the dead, and that the resurrection was a modern-day myth.

The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church, Katharine Jefferts Scholri, has said openly that there are many ways to find salvation other than Jesus Christ.

Some bishops believe that so completely they simultaneously serve as clergy to Muslims, Wiccans, and Druids, Wooten said.

Wooten also objects to church leaders who proclaim one thing but practice another. "Katharine Schori has said we will not bless same-sex marriages. But bishops in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., have said they will, and they have. Which is it? The action or the statement?"

On the issue of homosexuality in the church, Wooten said he believes the biblical response is to hate the sin but love the sinner. "Homosexuals are welcome in the church. My problem with them is we've been told by God that that lifestyle, by biblical standards, is a sin. If they're involving themselves openly in a sin, they should not be rightfully ordained and set up as an example for all to follow."

When officials in the Fort Worth diocese protested the election of Robinson as the denomination's first gay bishop and asked how they could possibly believe in the Bible and in Gene Robinson's ministry and justify both, Wooten said they were told, "Put the Bible down." Wooten said.

"I've been told, 'Saint Paul was simply wrong, and you have to ignore him. Saint John was wrong. Ignore him.' "

To Wooten's way of thinking, bishops following the new dogma should move on into another religion. "I'm all for religious freedom. Go, be happy somewhere else. But don't try to hijack my faith and coerce me through legal proceedings that go against my conscience and faith."

Walker said the disagreements have been overblown. "It's a lot of hyperbole. If you differ, you leave," he said. "We all have that right to leave. Nobody's quibbling about that. The quibble is with trying to take a building or things with them. They're claiming the church is theirs. They feel like they can take the property. It's happening in various places in the United States. Things like that are going to court."

Each church in Wichita Falls will deal with the issue in its own way, Walker said, because there are people of both persuasions in each church.

Owanah Anderson, a 40-year member of All Saints, supports the more modern views of the national leaders in the Episcopal Church and said that the vocal group that wants to leave "are opposed to most things that have happened in the 20th century," including at one time birth control, divorce, and the ordaining of women.

"We have been ordaining women for 30 years," Anderson said. "They are very, very, very opposed to, really, a Christian attitude, in my opinion, toward homosexuals.

"I think God loves all of his children, regardless of whether they were born with differences. That is my opinion," she said. "The Episcopal Church has come to think very similar to what I'm thinking."

She and others like her have been called heretics, she said. "Katharine Jefferts Schori said once, 'It would be putting God in a very small box if we believed that there were not other ways to God than the way that had been revealed to us.' They call us heretics for supporting her."

Whether the new views are supported by the Bible doesn't bother Anderson, she said. "I just trust God to take care of that."

If you follow the Bible, you won't eat rare meat or wear mixed fibers in clothes, according to verses in Leviticus, Anderson said. "Do you think I'm going to go to Hell because I wear nylon and wool mixed?"

At Wooten's Church of the Good Shepherd, he estimates 98 percent of the church favors realignment under the Southern Cone. "There are those who say, 'We don't want to do that, and we want the building, too. You can't take the church.' In effect, we're not taking it anywhere. We're what we've always been."

Wooten said this remaining small group that supports the national church intend to drain all their pockets in legal proceedings, fighting to gain control of property that they will be too small to finance alone. "It will end up on the courthouse steps being auctioned. To me, that is authentic spite," Wooten said.

Anderson said she is saddened the bishop not only wants to leave the Church but take all the property also. "We're just going to take all that money that should be going to the children who are dying of hunger - it distresses me that we can't be generous to them all - and spend all that money on litigation. Isn't that sinful? That is a sin."

She sees no chance of the differences being worked out at the weekend's convention.

Wooten said, like any separation, it can be done nicely and the property passed along with God's blessing.

"It doesn't have to be such a nasty affair," he said. "The Episcopal church wants to make this a nasty public affair. It betrays their true motives, quite honestly."

Walker disagrees. "People can leave, but institutions or buildings cannot. That's the issue. They're contending just the reverse. So we'll see. I wish them well, and I wish us well."

END

No comments: