New York, USA - 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.
Leaving the fold
The congregation of Grace Church is one of more than three dozen across the country that have left the Episcopal Church USA since it approved in 2003 the election of New Hampshire Bishop Gene Robinson, who has a same-sex partner.
Pascoe and his flock joined the Diocese of Rwanda, which has been recruiting unhappy Episcopalian parishes since 2000. The Anglican Mission in America, a branch of the Rwandan church, claims 87 congregations, of which half were once members of the U.S. Episcopal Church, mission spokesman Jay Greener says.
Other U.S. congregations have joined Anglican dioceses in Uganda, Brazil and Bolivia.
By Easter, April 16, Grace's congregation will have to leave its church building and worship elsewhere. Pascoe will ultimately be defrocked, says Canon Kurt Dunkle of the Diocese of Florida, to which Grace Church belongs. The U.S. church does not recognize the authority of overseas bishops to oversee U.S. parishes.
"It makes me extremely, extremely sad" to leave the church building, says Sue Chatfield, a nurse who is a 15-year parish member. Her three daughters were baptized at Grace Church. "I would like them to be married there," she says. "But that's the price" of remaining true to her faith, she says.
Chatfield says the Episcopal Church is going against biblical teachings by appointing a gay man to lead the church. "You're saying that's not really what it says in the Bible," she says. "I and our church believe that the Bible is literal and true and live by it."
As a result of the split, a bishop appointed by Archbishop Emanuel Kolini of Rwanda, instead of the Rev. Samuel Howard, the bishop of Florida, will visit Pascoe's flock once a year to perform the sacrament of confirmation for teenagers. The money from the collection plate that once went to the Diocese of Florida — about $100,000 a year — will go to Rwanda instead.
The Florida Diocese turned down an offer from Pascoe and his congregation to buy Grace Church's buildings, some of which date to 1880, for $2 million. Grace Church will be assigned a new priest who will hold Episcopal services there, Dunkle says.
The African branches of the Anglican Church have taken strong stances against homosexuality, saying it is forbidden by the Bible. Because of the U.S. church's approval of an openly gay bishop, the churches of Uganda, Kenya and Nigeria refuse funding from American churches. Within the U.S. church, a group of conservative dioceses, the Pittsburgh-based Anglican Communion Network, has called for church leaders not only to change their policy but to repent.
"We've assumed that we're a minority position in the Episcopal Church," says Canon Daryl Fenton of the Diocese of Pittsburgh, whose bishop, Robert Duncan, is the leader of the network. "We are not, however, a minority within the worldwide Anglican Communion."
Those who are leaving say the issue of openly gay clergy could split the country's oldest denomination.
"It's the beginning of the tear. The tear will take a while to tear all the way across the fabric, but the rip has started and is moving," says David Anderson, director of the American Anglican Council, an advocacy group for the conservative churches.
'Country is changing'
Those who support the U.S. church's position say the controversy over openly gay priests is no different than the fight 30 years ago over the ordination of female priests or 25 years ago over a new prayer book. Both changes also caused Episcopalians to leave the church.
"Our understanding as Christians has evolved over the past 200 years concerning the acceptability of human slavery," Dunkle says. "We certainly didn't say it was wrong (then), and we certainly now do."
"In 50 years, this will blow over, and there will be attempts to reconcile," says the Rev. Bill Coats, a pastoral associate in the Diocese of Newark, N.J., which was one of the first to accept gay clergy. "The whole country is changing on the subject of gays and lesbians. You can't have Brokeback Mountain (a successful movie about gay cowboys) and think that America has not been shifting on this."