NEWPORT BEACH, October 10, 2007 ”“ Hundreds of Anglicans from across the southwest will gather at 10 am this Saturday at St. James Anglican Church in Newport Beach to witness three ordinations which will be overseen by Bishop Evans Kisekka of the Anglican Church of Uganda and by Bishop John Guernsey, U.S.-based missionary bishop from the Anglican Church of Uganda. Kisekka will officiate at the service and Guernsey will preach.
Ordination services are not a frequent occurrence in any Anglican congregation. Being ordained priests will be St. James’s Brian Schulz and from Flagstaff, Arizona, Chuck McKinney. At the same service, St. James’s Discipleship Pastor Cathie Young will be ordained to the transitional deaconate.
In the Anglican tradition, there are three distinct orders of ordained ministry: deacon, priest and bishop. Following graduation from seminary, the first step toward becoming a priest is to be ordained a deacon. Deacons typically serve in that capacity for six months to one year before they are ordained to the priesthood. Deacons typically read the Gospel at worship services, help serve during Holy Communion, and help direct the order of worship services. They are able to preach, teach and aid in pastoral care as directed by their bishop and overseeing clergy. As priests Schulz and McKinney will assume more responsibility which will include serving as the primary celebrant during Holy Communion as well as administering other sacraments such as presiding at baptisms and weddings, as well as blessing and declaring pardon in God’s name.
Brian Schulz and his wife Julie arrived at St. James several years ago when his journey to ordained ministry brought the newlyweds to Southern California for Brian’s seminary education at Fuller Theological Seminary in Pasadena. During their time at St. James, Brian and Julie welcomed their first child, Simeon, age two. Prior to entering seminary Brian was marketing director for Coca-Cola in Beijing, China. Brian was ordained on the East Coast to the transitional deaconate about a year ago and began immediately to serve at Christ’s Church, a St. James church plant in Highland.
Cathie Young is well-known at St. James as she and her husband Philip have been members for more than 20 years and Cathie has served on the fulltime staff of St. James for 16 years. Cathie was raised in a Christian home and received her call to fulltime ministry when she was a teenager. “Interestingly, my call came as a result of the testimony of a visiting American woman missionary who was serving in Africa. She showed her slides of her ministry in Africa one night at our church and was led to specifically invite young people to give their lives to Christ for fulltime service. My heart burned within me and I received my call that night. It’s God’s great irony that the call issued by a woman who served in Africa should culminate almost 40 years later in an African ordination!” The change from lay ministry to ordained ministry follows the completion of her Masters of Divinity degree through Fuller Seminary in June 2007. At the completion of her time as a transitional deacon, she will be ordained a priest.
St. James Anglican Church is a community dedicated to loving and serving Jesus Christ as Savior and Lord. Worship services with Holy Eucharist are held Sunday mornings: 7:30 am ”“ traditional; 9 am ”“ contemporary; 11 am charismatic. Holy Eucharist is also held Wednesdays at noon. St. James is located at 3209 Via Lido, Newport Beach, CA 92663. Visit www.stjamesnb.org for more information about the church.
Great to see Bp. Guernsey swinging into action.
Sounds like a talented, highly motivated group of new clergy being ordained here.
U.S. Anglicans have some difficult days ahead as we face weakness or worse in Lambeth Palace and increasingly militant hostility from 815.
New leaders like these should serve as yet another reminder of God’s faithful and loving provision for us.
One of those to be ordained is Chuck McKinney, one of my old TESM profs. He’s a good man and will be a wonderful asset to the church. Congrats, Chuck!
Looking forward to meeting Chuck McKinney and to seeing John Guernsey again, and to renewing old ties with Brian Schulz and Cathie Young. Br_er Rabbit will be there for the ordinations.
So, no lessons have been learned from TEC history, and women will continue to be ordained in defiance of scripture in TEC’s new offshoot.
I had the pleasure of meeting many of these folks at the Anglican Clergy retreat in North Carolina earlier this week. Everything that Irenaeus says in #1 is true.
I’m afraid I agree with Vincent Coles. It is unfortunate that the Anglican Church of Uganda ordains women. Just one more hurdle to overcome in the hoped-for reunification of the Anglican diaspora in North America.
Re ##4 & 6: This is nothing new. Uganda was the sixth Anglican province (after Hong Kong, TEC, Canada, New Zealand, and Kenya) to ordain women priests. It has been doing so for almost 25 years. It would be rather irrational for the province to prevent women in its North American congregations from exercising the same ministries as their Ugandan sisters.
I assume that the same policy will apply to the Anglican Church of Kenya congregations in the US. Other provinces that might engage in church-planting that have women priests include South India and West Indies. North India, Bangladesh, Central America, and Sudan are among the geopolitically Global South provinces that explicitly allow women bishops, although none have been appointed as yet.
Those who oppose women priests are under no obligation to join any of these provinces, as there are certainly alternatives. Nigeria is one of only 7 provinces left that does not even ordain women to the diaconate. The Anglican Mission in America is a joint venture of South East Asia (which also bars women deacons) and Rwanda (which has women priests); the AMiA has compromised by allowing women deacons but not priests. Obviously, none of the Continuing Anglican groups that left TEC in the 1970s ordain women, and neither does the Reformed Episcopal Church.
This is obviously going to be a problem for any ultimate reunion of all these North American Anglican groups, since it makes a fully mutual recognition of ministries impossible.
Hi Dale,
the Anglican Church in the Region of Central America (IARCA) is considered Global Center, not Global South. But you are correct as far as WO here in Central America.
My Priest (of Christ’s Church – Anglican in Highland, CA) is being ordained at St. James on Saturday and then I’m being confirmed by one of those bishops on Sunday. I can’t wait!
I posted this in SF; I’ll repeat it here:
Last night I attended the gathering at which St. James met their new “Bishop for the American Congregations,†John Guernsey, who was introduced by their Diocesan Bishop, Evans Kisekka. +John talked about the Common Cause effort to build the new Anglican Church on American soil: not part-Uganda, part-Kenya, etc. but all-American. In the question and answer period it was asked, “Can you describe the organization chart for this new Anglican Church?â€
The short answer was, “No. It has not been figured out yet.â€
Then he encouraged us to think outside the structures that we have been used to, and gave us the example of the [url=http://www.anglican.org.nz/]Anglican Church in Aotearoa, New Zealand and Polynesia[/url]. This Church has three “[i]kitangas[/i],” or cultures, that coexist within a single province. Each [i]kitanga[/i] has its own archbishop, and they rotate the primate’s chair among the three [i]kitangas[/i]. Two of the [i]kitangas[/i] have dioceses that overlap and comingle geographically with one another.
+John said, “If they can do that, consider what we can do.†He was quite upbeat. He said that the Bishops of Common Cause are determined that our differences will not prevent us from building the Anglican Church in America.
I posted this on SF; I’ll repeat it here for the record:
Marvelous ordination service at St. James today. Besides the ordinands, my guess is there were 16 priests and 3 deacons in attendance to assist the two bishops. I was in the procession.
One moment that stood out for me was during the examination of Cathie Young, being ordained to the deaconate:
Bishop Kisekka: “Are you persuaded that the Holy Scriptures of the Old and New Testaments are the Word of God and contain all things necessary to salvationâ€
Cathie Young: â€[b]I am so persuaded[/b].â€
Cathie’s emphatic response to the question elicited an unscripted and spontaneous response from the congregation, which broke out in applause.
This was an uplifting time for Saint James as they met their new USA-resident bishop and faced forward to hopeful times ahead.
I learned this during the 3rd service sermon at St. James today:
When John Guernsey heard that he had been elected bishop for the churches in America under Uganda’s protection, there were 26 congregations that were to be imparted to his care. Now that he is here on the ground doing his new job, that number has grown to 36 congregations, with 10 more in the pipeline.
Two of those new church-plant congregations have priests that were ordained here yesterday: Highland, California; and Flagstaff, Arizona.