Splitting up: Anglican angst

I missed this article last year. It is about Anglicanism in the western suburbs of Chicago and includes information about a parish I once served, St. Mark's in Glen Ellyn, IL. ed.

Christian Century, May 20, 2008 by Jason Byassee

LAST YEAR THE Church of the Resurrection in suburban West Chicago closed its doors and put its building up for sale. The Episcopal congregation had suffered membership losses 14 years earlier when some conservative members left to start their own church, also called the Church of the Resurrection, in nearby Glen Ellyn. The new congregation later aligned itself with the Anglican Mission in the Americas (AMIA), which is connected to the Anglican Church in Rwanda.

The new Church of the Resurrection later experienced its own split, with some members leaving to launch the Church of the Great Shepherd--also affiliated with AMIA--in Wheaton. The Church of the Great Shepherd eventually closed its doors, but not before a 2004 split led to the formation of the Church of the Savior back in West Chicago. During this time the ranks of St. Mark's, an Episcopal congregation in Glen Ellyn, had been swelling--until the Episcopal Church consecrated an openly gay bishop in 2003, whereupon many St. Mark's members left to form All Souls, still another AMIA church, in Wheaton. Meanwhile, another split at the original Church of the Resurrection in West Chicago, which had experienced renewed growth, led to the creation of the Church of the Resurrection Anglican, a church which is overseen by the archbishop of Uganda. So now there are two Resurrection churches in the area, both formed in exodus from the original--now defunct--Church of the Resurrection, and both affiliated with African Anglican bodies, not with the Episcopal Church in the United States, sometimes abbreviated as TEC.

Got all that?

Even for Anglicans in the vicinity it takes a long memory or a flow chart to keep straight all the Episcopal-Anglican divisions and acronyms that have developed in the well-heeled suburbs of DuPage County, just west of Chicago.

Many observers of the Anglican splits assume that the key issue is homosexuality, but a closer look reveals that several other factors are also at work. In fact, the local Anglican story is largely about charismatic leaders coming and going, and congregations growing in their presence or folding in their absence. Among the AMIA folks, the juiciest disagreements have been over the ordination of women rather than the ordination of gays. And the biggest fight to date has been over the relationship between church and state in Rwanda, not in the U.S.

The energy in all these churches comes to a great extent from the many evangelicals who have converted to Anglicanism, a phenomenon outlined some 20 years ago by Robert Webber in Evangelicals on the Canterbury Trail. For the most part, evangelicals joined the Episcopal Church out of an appreciation for its liturgy and tradition, not for its generally liberal approach to sexual ethics and scripture. Many of these people have an association with evangelically oriented Wheaton College, where Webber taught for many years.

The various conservative groups that have broken away from the Episcopal Church in the U.S. have conglomerated into Common Cause, a group that has formed an alliance with churches in the global South in an effort to reverse the long liberal trend of the Anglican Communion in the Northern Hemisphere. Its advocates champion a thesis advanced by historian Philip Jenkins and others: Christianity's axis of power is tilting south and east, with church membership growing rapidly in the developing world while it declines in Europe and America. The late Diane Knippers, a leader among conservative Anglicans, summarized the situation this way: "Today's statistically typical Anglican is not drinking tea in an English vicarage. She is a 26-year-old African mother of four."

And, Knippers might have added, the typical Anglican is strongly opposed to homosexuality. One of the leaders of Common Cause is Archbishop Peter Akinola of Nigeria, who readily uses the word abomination in reference to homosexuality. He likens homosexuality in the church to a "cancerous lump," compares same-sex coupling to animal behavior, and supports severe prison sentences for homosexual practice.

The alliance that conservative Anglicans in the U.S. have made with African Anglicans presents an unusual challenge to the liberal Episcopalian mainstream. It's hard to accuse AMIA members of being bigoted malcontents when they are, in effect, members of African churches. At the 1998 Lambeth Conference of world Anglican leaders, John Shelby Spong, the now retired uber-liberal bishop of Newark, dismissed his African colleagues who were adamantly opposed to liberalizing the church's rules on homosexuality as "superstitious, fundamentalist Christians." In remarks that have been frequently cited by his detractors, Spong complained that African Anglicans had "moved out of animism into a very superstitious kind of Christianity" and had yet to face "the intellectual revolution of Copernicus and Einstein that we've had to face in the developing world." For AMIA and its friends, here was evidence that white so-called progressives were the real bigots.

You can read the rest of the article at: http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m1058/is_10_125/ai_n25453426/