American congregations join foreign Anglican branches
By Martha T. Moore, USA TODAY

Each Sunday before beginning the main service at Grace Church in Orange Park, Fla., the Rev. Sam Pascoe tells the assembled congregation that after 125 years, the church they worship in is no longer part of the American Episcopal Church.

On the first of the year, Pascoe and most of his 350-member congregation left one of the oldest and wealthiest U.S. denominations and joined the Episcopal Church of Rwanda, a poor, genocide-scarred African nation 7,600 miles away.

The hymns are the same, the prayer book is the same, and the U.S. and Rwandan churches are both branches of the worldwide Anglican Communion, headquartered in England and led by the archbishop of Canterbury. But the U.S. church accepts openly gay priests and bishops, and the Rwandan church, like Grace, emphatically does not. Story