A group of former Episcopalians who broke away from their denomination because of concern over blessings for homosexual couples, as well as other issues, have chosen a former Catholic church in this mill town on the New Hampshire border as regional headquarters for the more traditional Anglican denomination they are attempting to construct in the United States.
During the week of June 7, about 100 bishops and delegates from across North America will gather here at All Saints Anglican Church for a meeting of the year-old Anglican Church in North America, or ACNA. On the agenda: affirming Amesbury as seat of the New England diocese, home of the region’s bishop and site of the diocese’s cathedral.
Use of Amesbury, with a population of 12,500 and a location 40 miles from Boston, as a diocesan headquarters breaks with a centuries-old tradition of headquartering dioceses in major urban centers.
The cathedral will occupy the building formerly used by Sacred Heart Church, which for decades served as spiritual home to Roman Catholics, many of them French-Canadian mill workers and their descendants.
Scripture reminds us not to despise the day of small beginnings (Zech. 4:10, about the building of the Second Temple, which couldn’t compare in grandeur with Solomon’s). God often chooses the weak and small things of this world to shame the proud.
Little, out-of-the-way Amesbury may seem like an unlikely place to locate the diocesan center, but so was Nazareth. Can anything good come out of Amesbury? Well, look at the founding of TSM in Ambridge, PA. That depressed old steel mill town was an unlikely place too, but TSM has gone from strength to strength over the years and is thriving today.
Bishop Bill Murdoch is one of the most creative and imaginative thinkers and leaders I’ve ever come across. Despite its humble beginnings in highly deChristianized, ultra-liberal New England, I expect that this ACNA diocese has a bright future. As bright as the promises of God.
David Handy+
As usual, the Globe gets it wrong. It’s all about gays, they want us to believe though they do say “as well as other issues”. Which are, of course, trivial when compared with Gene Robinson’s consecration. At least, it wasn’t a complete hack job.
i thought it presented the issues pretty fairly and placed a very positive overall tone of the church and the area. i would love to visit there if i ever get up that way. i pray that they thrive.
The ACNA diocese for the six New England States will provide some very interesting data over the next few years. There are now 32 ACNA churches in these six states with 20 in Massachusetts. As the song goes, if the ACNA can make it in New England, it can make it anywhere. And the local TEC competitor, St. James, appears solid with Members, ASA, and Plate & Pledge all well up during the 2002 through 2008 time period. And I agree with Fr. Handy: it is refreshing to see the Cathedral in a small city and not in Boston. Statmann
Bless them on their new journey.
As some of you may remember, I come from a tiny town next to Amesbury, where I went to high school. At present, it is largely a middle class bedroom community – all mill-town-ness has long since disappeared. It is strongly divided between between deep blue and deep red, with the emphasis on deep blue. Sacre Coeur was a BIG church, for the town was largely French Canadian. I don’t know where they all went to.
I wish I could go to this meeting of the ACNA powers that be. I would very much like to see what is going on. My church, an ACA, is never going to get over its love affair with Romanism, and it may be time for me to look elsewhere.
I can tell you this much. This new cathedral is going to stir up some dust in a town where anything not left wing is regarded as suspicious. Larry