GetReligion: Warping the Anglican wars

Friday, April 24, 2009

Back in the 1980s, when I was at the Rocky Mountain News, I covered the long legal battle between St. Mary’s Parish and the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado.

That important church-property case focused on the ordination of women, the 1928 Book of Common Prayer and related issues, with a group of Anglo-Catholics colliding with an evangelical-charismatic bishop who was a conservative on moral and cultural issues. The parish lost, but the congregation is still in the building today because former Bishop William C. Frey was willing to work with them to reach a settlement. Ah, another era.

The key to that whole case was that, as church tradition has held for ages and ages, “Where the bishop is, there is the Church.” The bishop and the diocese was the heart of the church and the crucial legal authority.

Obviously, the Anglican/Episcopal wars have become much more complex in recent years here in the United States. The Episcopal Church, for example, has taken legal action to make the national church the prevailing legal authority, over the diocese, although that shatters centuries of tradition. Meanwhile, the Church of England is trying to stay neutral (sort of) and the largest Anglican churches in the world — think Africa — are backing the doctrinal conservatives who, in the American context, are a small body of rebels. the rest