The Diocese of Southwest Florida has acted on its responsibilities by taking steps to better control the buildings, grounds and mission of one of its member congregations, St. Dunstan’s Episcopal Church in Largo.
This is in response to a Sept. 13, 2009 decision by some members of the congregation, led by Ed Sellers, their former Episcopal priest, to sever their relationship with The Episcopal Church and affiliate with the Anglican Church in North America.
Since that decision, Sellers and his congregation have been allowed to continue to worship at St. Dunstan’s property, which is wholly owned by the Diocese of Southwest Florida, while Bishop Dabney Smith conferred with chancellors and the elected leadership of the diocese, including the Standing Committee and the Diocesan Council.
How many is “some members”? I suspect the true number is a large majority.
The article stated that St. Dunstan’s is “wholly owned” by the Diocese of SW Florida…Is that true? The only diocesan-owned churches I’ve ever encountered have been church-plants (rare, in TEC) and missions. The Denis Canon notwithstanding, don’t dioceses tend to shy away from outright ownership of parishes because of the liabilities associated with ownership – e.g. maintenence, insurance, utilities, etc?
Virtueonline did a story and it was 7 out about 200 who were loyal to TEC. Another case of the Diocese pretending to negotiate and then changing the locks and locking the congregation out of its building.
#1 and 3,
Actually, Virtue reported that the vote to leave TEC was 173 to 13 back in September. The parish restricted voting to (adult) active communicants, which meant that 205 people were eligible to vote, and only 19 failed to participate. So yes, it was a truly overwhelming majority that departed.
But as usual, the TEC spin is that only some members chose to leave. After all, it’s a Law of the Medes and the Persians that a whole congregation simply can’t depart.
David Handy+
As a libertarian I defend all religions’ rights to govern themselves and to defend their property. That said, of course I sympathise with a congregation that has orthodox beliefs and, given Episcopalianism’s semi-congregationalism, the understandable but usually wrong idea many of them have that they own the building.
As usual in the affairs of human beings, the story sounds complicated. Here’s how the diocese’s web site describes the post-vote situation:
“Since September, both congregations had been coexisting at the church at 126th Avenue North, holding separate services and sharing the parish hall. By late March, however, the breakaway Anglican congregation had begun to limit the Episcopalians’ access to their property, Senor Warden Nancy Campbell said.
The church’s website was altered; the word ‘Episcopal’ and the Episcopal logo were removed from signs. Then the Episcopalians discovered the locks to the building had been changed. They were also told they could no longer worship in their church on Sunday morning because the Anglican choir needed the sanctuary for rehearsal. ‘They told us we had to worship at three in the afternoon,’ Campbell said. At that point, she recalled, ‘We felt we could not have two churches here.'”
No doubt there are other perspectives!