The mission: Save U.S. Christians

Missionaries for Third World countries and breakaway groups within American congregations concur: Many mainstream U.S. religions have moved away from their roots.

By SHARON TUBBS, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published May 16, 2002

[Times photos : Krystal Kinnunen] Bishop Charles Murphy of the Anglican Mission in America preaches at Tampa Garden Center on April 28 during the first service for the newly formed Church of the Resurrection. The American Episcopal church is suffering a “crisis in faith and leadership,” Murphy told church members.

Still recovering from an ethnic bloodbath in the 1990s that was perhaps the world's worst case of genocide since the Holocaust, the tiny nation of Rwanda defines impoverishment as much as the United States epitomizes wealth.

With one exception, the Rwandans might say: religion.

Despite his country's humble disposition, Rwanda's Anglican archbishop teamed with another bishop in Southeast Asia two years ago to declare the United States of America -- the world's superpower -- a mission field.

Some overseas Christians, it seems, believe their American brethren are wavering in their spiritual beliefs.

Increasingly, they say, American mainline religions -- Episcopalians, United Methodists, Lutherans, Presbyterians -- are growing so politically correct on homosexuality and becoming so cozy with Buddhists, Jews, Muslims and other non-Protestants that they no longer proclaim what used to be a given for Christians: that Jesus Christ is the Savior and the only way to heaven.

So in 2000, the Rwandan and Southeast Asian archbishops established the Anglican Mission in America, which offers an alternative to Episcopalians in the United States. Now, across majestic mountains and amber waves of grain, missionaries are establishing churches to root out what they see as compromised religion.

Recently, a splinter group from St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Tampa aligned itself with the AMiA after Episcopal Bishop John B. Lipscomb suspended the rector of St. Mary's against their wishes. The suspension touched off a three-month dispute and ended with the Rev. Kevin F. Donlon and a group of supporters renouncing their affiliation with the Episcopal church, in part, Donlon said, because the church lacked leadership and the spiritual foundation of what AMiA leaders call the "uniqueness of Christ."

April 28 was the most calm worship service many of the 300 in attendance at Church of the Resurrection had seen since Feb. 6.

That was the day Lipscomb suspended Donlon. Eight St. Mary's members filed a 26-page complaint against him. The complaint has never been made public, but Donlon and his supporters said it accused him of having an inappropriate supervisory relationship with a former staff member; of abusive conduct toward staff members; of having a conflict with the church-affiliated school's headmaster; and of having inappropriate interaction with members of the parish community.

Donlon denied the charges, and the Diocese of Southwest Florida launched a review of the situation. The charges were still under investigation by the church when Donlon renounced his affiliation with the Episcopal church and joined the AMiA.

The AMiA now boasts about 40 churches in the United States, most of them splinter groups of Episcopalians who grew disenchanted with the Episcopal Church USA.

Bishop Charles Murphy, one of several American organizers of the AMiA movement, flew in from Pawley's Island, S.C., to give the sermon at Church of the Resurrection.

"We have to meet in unusual places, and we have to go to the effort of preparing for this service, and we have to roll up our sleeves," Murphy said, standing at a portable lectern in a cream robe and red sash.

He was a cradle Episcopalian, Murphy said. His father was an Episcopal minister and, for many years, so was he.

But in recent years, Murphy sought help from Christians overseas. He said he could no longer stomach the transformations in his faith.

In stepped the Most Rev. Emmanuel Kolini, archbishop of the Anglican Province of the Episcopal Church of Rwanda, and the Most Rev. Moses Tay, archbishop of the Anglican Province of South East Asia. In January 2000, the archbishops consecrated Murphy and another priest, John Rodgers, in Singapore as missionaries to the United States. Rodgers and Murphy now operate as Anglican missionaries under the authority of those provinces.

At least four other priests -- all of them American -- have since been consecrated "missionary bishops." Donlon renounced his priesthood with the Episcopal church and is now considered an Anglican priest.

But the AMiA has been gravely criticized among Episcopalians. The archbishops in Rwanda and Southeast Asia are members of the Anglican Communion, the religious umbrella that started in England and has 38 provinces worldwide, including the Episcopal Church USA. The American bishops say Tay and Kolini invaded their turf.

The American Episcopal church suffers a "crisis in faith and leadership," Murphy said during the service at Church of the Resurrection. Christianity no longer means what it used to in many places, he said, and people are being fed different messages. He has stayed in hotel rooms all over the world. In the United States, it used to be that the Bible was the only religious book in a room. Nowadays, it sits alongside the Book of Mormon and literature on Buddhism.

"Where are we going with this?" Murphy asks rhetorically. "How are we going to decide in this day and in this age? That's the question I want to provide with this launching of the Church of the Resurrection."

Bishop Charles Murphy, left, of the Anglican Mission in America sits next to the Rev. Kevin Donlon, the former rector of St. Mary Episcopal Church, who was suspended. Donlon renounced his affiliation with the Episcopal church and joined the AMiA.

In the past three decades, many mainline Christian denominations have re-examined their fundamental beliefs.

Lutherans, United Methodists and Episcopalians have debated same-sex unions and the ordination of gay clergy. At a national assembly meeting in June, Presbyterians will discuss the denomination's understanding of Christ's "saving grace," after a speaker at a conference suggested faith in Jesus may not be the only means of salvation.

The shifts have birthed what is called "the confessing movement," made up of groups within mainline denominations that want to maintain long-held Christian doctrine that decries homosexuality and upholds that Jesus is the son of God.

"We are a group that's trying to bring our church into renewal," said Patricia Miller, an Indiana state senator who is also executive director for the United Methodists Confessing Movement.

Some people don't believe that Jesus Christ is the only way to heaven, Miller says. "There are people who openly indicate that and do not believe in the Bible."

A prime example of varying thought within the Episcopal church is found in the teachings of John Shelby Spong, a controversial priest who retired in 2000 as the bishop of Newark. Spong has called for a revolution in Christianity. He posted 12 issues for worldwide debate.

"Theism, as a way of defining God, is dead," according to Spong's first point. "So most theological God-talk is today meaningless. A new way to speak of God must be found."

Point No. 2: "Since God can no longer be conceived in theistic terms, it becomes nonsensical to seek to understand Jesus as the incarnation of the theistic deity. So the Christology of the ages is bankrupt."

Spong remains a popular figure within New Age Christian circles. The Episcopal Church USA never sought to sanction or silence Spong, who remains an Episcopal clergyman -- evidence to some fundamentalists that the denomination is slacking.

"The church refused to dismiss his (Spong's) teachings," said Jay Greener, communications officer for the AMiA. "He's had a lot of influence. . . . and people who don't believe him on everything followed him on half the things."

AMiA has ruffled feathers in the Episcopal church. Some breakaway congregations have fought legally to continue worshiping in their church facilities, which ECUSA has said belong to the denomination.

Still, the Rev. Jan Nunley, deputy director of the Episcopal News Service in New York City, says there is no "crisis" in the Episcopal Church.

Although people like Spong have expressed varying beliefs, official church doctrine still declares Jesus Christ the son of God. Canon law, however, does not forbid the ordination of homosexuals and women, Nunley said.

Lipscomb, regarded as a conservative bishop among Episcopalians nationally, said he saw the breakup at St. Mary's in Tampa and the formation of Church of the Resurrection as a response to a rift within that individual church. He saw little connection to what happened there and the issues that spearheaded the AMiA.

Without question, the number of Episcopalians has declined in the United States. At the height of membership in 1965, Episcopalians numbered 3.6-million, according to church records. By 1985, the figure had dropped below 3-million. In 1999, the total was about 2.3-million, with a slight jump in 2000.

Nunley says the decline is a result of various factors. In the mid-1960s, most mainline churches saw increases in membership because of the baby boom, so those numbers were bound to bottom out in the Episcopal church as they have in other denominations, Nunley said. Also, over the past decade, the Episcopal church has encouraged parishes to weed out people from their rolls who have left the church or died. The honing of records, then, created the image of a decline where one may not actually exist, Nunley said.

But AMiA leaders disagree. They say the numbers reflect the discontent among spiritual people tired of watered-down religion.

"What more and more we see is that the church is simply acting as a mirror to simply reflect society's image back to it," said the Rev. Mike Hesse, one of the first priests to renounce his affiliation with the Episcopal church to start an AMiA congregation, in Destin.

Hesse's old church, St. Andrews By-the-Sea, had a congregation of about 600 members within the Episcopal Diocese of Central Gulf Coast. In 2000, 412 members and three priests of that church voted to join the AMiA, according to the Episcopal News Service. More Episcopalians later requested to transfer to Hesse's new congregation, Immanuel Anglican Church.

"We believe we are engaged in a spiritual war where the stakes are people's salvation," reads Immanuel's Web site. The site quotes the Apostle Paul's letter to Timothy:

"For the time will come when men will not put up with sound doctrine. Instead to suit their own desires, they will gather around them a great number of teachers to say what their itching ears want to hear. They will turn away from the truth and turn aside to myths."

Although U.S. Episcopal membership has declined since the 1960s, Christianity has grown so much in Southeast Asia and Africa that for the first time in history, bishops of color outnumbered those of English and Anglo-Saxon descent during a 1998 conference of leaders in the Anglican Communion.

In 1900, 80 percent of Christians worldwide were either Europeans or North Americans, according to an article in the April 16 edition of Newsweek magazine. Today 60 percent are African, Asian and Latin American.

To some extent, Christians in Third World countries are reminiscent of America's Christians decades ago. There is no widespread battle in Rwanda, for instance, to allow same-sex unions. Christians are not pondering whether belief in Jesus is the only road leading to the pearly gates.

But in an article on the interfaith Web site Beliefnet.com, Spong attributes the growth in traditional Christianity overseas to ignorance:

"The decline of the European and North American churches is happening because the ancient presuppositions on which traditional Christianity rested have been all but destroyed by the expanding knowledge available in the Western world. The churches of the West have had to wrestle with the Enlightenment. . . . The fact is that Christians in the Third World have yet to be introduced to these insights -- but they will be, sooner or later. When that happens, their literal, magical, fundamentalist religious system will also come tumbling down."

At Church of the Resurrection, AMiA's mission moves forward. With a renewed congregation, Donlon said he intends to maintain the "authority of the Scripture."

Outside the window, joggers sauntered along South Tampa's Bayshore Boulevard. Million-dollar homes and condos stood like perfectly positioned statues on grassy shelves. Palms swayed in the breeze, as churchgoers in stylish summer dresses and sandals, khaki pants and suit jackets entered the first service for the Church of the Resurrection.

A core group of members plucked from Tampa's crop of lawyers and business executives rented the Tampa Garden Center because the church had no sanctuary of its own. Down the street, a reception with ripe strawberries and other fruits, submarine sandwiches and chocolate chip cookies awaited churchgoers after service.

Despite its folding chairs and hand-typed prayer books, the Church of the Resurrection would likely appear privileged to worshipers in Rwanda. But for the defunct St. Mary's members who only months before clapped their hands in a newly renovated sanctuary with a baptismal pool, these appeared hard times.

"The situation has devolved so greatly in the United States," Donlon said, shaking his head during an interview. "The United States once sent missionaries. Now missionaries are coming here."

© St. Petersburg Times. All rights reserved.