Large historic church joins the realignment

From savannahnow.com via TitusOneNine:

Christ Church aligns with new Anglican group
Dana Clark Felty | Sunday, December 7, 2008 at 12:30 am

Eight members of Christ Church in Savannah attended an event in Chicago last week unveiling the constitution and laws of a proposed new North American arm of the Anglican Communion.

Christ Church spokeswoman Stephanie Lynch said the group signed a symbolic statement marking the congregation's intention to join the new organization once membership details have been worked out.

"It's really more of a symbolic gesture. Nothing is binding," Lynch said. "At some point we'll be released from (the Anglican province of) Uganda and transferred to this new North American province."

The new association comes more than a year after Christ Church split from the Episcopal Church. Members voted to align with the Province of Uganda, a member of the 77-million-member global Anglican Communion.

The Rev. Marc Robertson, pastor of Christ Church, has said the move was temporary until a North American Anglican body was formed for churches and parishes that disagree with the Episcopal Church on issues such as scriptural interpretation and homosexuality.

Last week, Robertson was in Uganda visiting a missionary family from Savannah, Lynch said.

In 2007, the Episcopal Church filed a lawsuit in Chatham County Superior Court, seeking to take control of Christ Church's historic property, valued at about $3 million. The Diocese of Georgia also stripped Robertson and Christ Church's deacon, the Rev. Sally Lufburrow, of their roles as priests in the Episcopal Church.

Central to the constitution of the Common Cause Partnership is a declaration that the Bible is regarded as the "final authority and unchangeable standard."

The new organization says the Bible's complex messages about issues such as the ordination of women call for conversation. But the group says the Bible gives a clear message that homosexuality is a sin.

Observers in the Episcopal Church say the Chicago event does not hold much significance for the rest of the Anglican Communion.

"I do not think Wednesday's event is as big a deal as the organizers think it is," said the Rev. Ian Douglas of the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. "Yet another threatened line in the sand."

The new church is the first province to be drawn according to theological and not geographic boundaries - a dramatic departure from Anglican policy and procedure that might not win approval from the Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams, or other bodies that normally would approve the new province.

"While claiming more conservative tradition on human sexuality and biblical interpretation, their approach is radical and contrary to church polity," Douglas said.

The new denomination will include four Episcopal dioceses that recently voted to break away from the Episcopal church - Pittsburgh, Fort Worth, Texas, Quincy, Ill., and San Joaquin, Calif. However, not all the parishes and Episcopalians in those four dioceses agreed to leave the Episcopal Church.

The new denomination also includes dozens of breakaway parishes in the U.S. and Canada that voted to do the same. The new church also will absorb a handful of other splinter groups that left the Episcopal Church decades ago over theological differences.

Manya A. Brachear of the Chicago Tribune contributed to this article.