The marquee outside St. Luke’s Anglican Church in La Crescenta was a bit sardonic in its scripture from the Book of Hebrews: “You joyfully accepted confiscation of your property.”
That was the message delivered Sunday by the Rev. Rob Holman, in his last sermon at the Foothill Boulevard church that has been entangled in a legal dispute with the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles.
“Next Sunday, as many of you know, we will be worshiping in a different building,” Holman said. “All because we have chosen to stand for the gospel and the authority of God’s word over our lives.”
Good for you, Rob! You have stood up for the Gospel and have been willing to pay the price. Many of us here back in Albany salute you.
Would that there were the same courage among us!
You are in our thoughts and prayers as you go forward into a new place and into new ministry opportunities. God is surely blessing your faithfulness.
God bless this congregation and their clergy as they set off. May his face shine on them and lead them to a home where they will grow and flourish and lead others to Christ.
Church buildings can be idols.
bl
I loved the Scriptural text chosen, Heb. 10:34. How wonderfully apt. Yes, they JOYFULLY accepted the confiscation of their property. The passage continues, “for you knew you had a better possession and an abiding one.”
Perhaps things will work out as well for them as they did for Matt Kennedy and his congregation in Binghamton, NY, where they were likewise forced out by a local judge, and ended up a few months later in a much larger church that had been abandoned by the Roman Catholics a few years earlier. The forced move turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
Maybe the local judge’s decision will be reversed someday on appeal. But meanwhile, this relatively small congregation has been faithful. Good for them!
David Handy+
The secular Marxists closed down churches in Russia during the 1920s and used the empty churches to store grain and as horse stables. Rats ravaged through the stored grain and manure covered the floors of the deliberately abused churches.
But, at least, those secularists chose to totally disassociate themselves from the Church Catholic.
The secularists of ECUSA’s leadership have chosen to co-opt the hierarchy of ECUSA and maintain a pretense of being in communion with the Anglican Communion while attacking and dismantling and converting the ‘core teaching’ of the Church Catholic to fit their secular agenda.
It appears that their goals do not match those of either the Great Commission or the Great Commandment.
Imagine what the secular world would say if U.S. military units desecrated Muslim mosques in the same manner as the Soviets desecrated Russian churches or ECUSA’s leadership is desecrating ECUSA.
Its indignation would be impossible to contain.
Fr. Rob also said, “Bishop Jon Bruno said next Sunday he will be holding a Service of Reconciliation here….you can’t sue people into Reconciliation.”
I believe Fr. Rob said he was quoting the spokesman for the Diocese of Pittsburgh on that bit about “suing people into reconciliation.”
Also, because Susan Russell makes a characteristic snipe on her blog about there being only 75 in attendance —- there were actually a near capacity 160 at the second service.
I don’t know why it surprises me, but whenever the LA Times gets a number wrong, it is always in the negative direction.