Nearly 80 years ago, leaders at Grace Church joined and, in writing, invoked “the name of God.”
With a few pen strokes, Grace’s rector, wardens and vestry ”” its board ”” signed away their grand, young church, placing it under the “spiritual jurisdiction and authority” of Bishop Irving P. Johnson, then the highest Episcopal authority in Colorado.
The leaders relinquished “all claim to any right of disposing” the building at 601 N. Tejon St. in Colorado Springs without Johnson’s consent or that of his successors, according to the “instrument of donation,” signed on Nov. 15, 1929.
The one-page form could be a Holy Grail for a diocese eager to return to the building now being used by hundreds of entrenched Episcopal secessionists and their embattled patriarch, the Rev. Don Armstrong.
Martin Nussbaum, an attorney for the diocese, says the form, which surfaced as part of the legal battle for the building, bodes well for hundreds of exiled Episcopal loyalists hoping to return to the gray building described when it opened in 1926 as perhaps the most beautiful church west of the Mississippi River.
Alan Crippen, a spokesman for the secessionists, downplayed the document’s significance, saying only that it “looks ceremonial, but not legal.”