American Muslim-Anglican priest is deposed

Thursday, 2nd April 2009
By George Conger

The Episcopal Church’s “Muslim-Anglican” priest has been deposed from holy orders. In a statement released on April 1, the Diocese of Rhode Island said the Rt Rev Geralyn Wolf had “imposed a sentence of deposition” upon Dr Ann Holmes Redding as a “priest of the Church cannot be both a Christian and a Muslim.”

In a June 2007 interview with the Episcopal Voice, the Seattle-based Diocese of Olympia’s newspaper, the Dr. Redding announced she was both a Christian and a Muslim. “The way I understand Jesus is compatible with Islam,” she said. “I was following Jesus and he led me into Islam.”

The former director of Christian Formation at St Mark’s Episcopal Cathedral in Seattle, Redding began to study Islam in the wake of 9/11 after hearing Muslim imams speak at inter-faith events at the cathedral. A personal crisis spurred her onto a spiritual quest that ended with her publicly reciting the Shahada, the Muslim profession of faith. the rest