Protestants to wrestle with issue of ordaining gay clergy

All signs point to a less acrimonious outcome than at Grace Episcopal in 2007
By Bill Thompson
Staff writer
Sunday, March 8, 2009

Thirteen months ago the controversy over allowing openly gay clergy to minister to the faithful literally tore one of the city's oldest churches in two.

Led by the Rev. Don Curran, more than 400 members of Grace Episcopal Church, a fixture on Ocala's religious landscape for 155 years, divorced themselves from the national Episcopal Church of the U.S.A. because of deviations from biblical teaching and tradition.

Specifically, the local discontent was rooted in decisions by national church elders to consecrate an openly homosexual bishop, bless same-sex unions and shrink away from evangelizing to non-Christians. The dissidents later settled elsewhere in town as Christ the King Anglican Church. the rest