Anglicans welcome unhappy Episcopalians

HANCOCK – Three members of the Episcopal Church in Millinocket this week accepted the Anglican Church’s invitation to attend a diocesan meeting at the White Birches Resort, but say they aren’t planning to switch denominations yet.

Mary Dore, Lorranine Leavitt and Gene Pease, all members of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, are displeased with the recent election of an openly gay bishop in New Hampshire.

All three members said Friday they are not ready to leave the Episcopal Church and start an Anglican mission in the Katahdin region, but they expressed concern that the denomination is making decisions based on secular humanism rather than scripture.

About 80 delegates are attending the 12th annual synod of the Anglican Church’s Diocese of the Northeast, made up of the New England states and New York. The meeting, being held at the resort just outside Ellsworth, was scheduled more than two years ago, according to organizers.

“It’s really a refugee situation for us now,” Bishop George Langberg of Tuxedo, N.Y., said at a news conference Friday afternoon. “People feel dispossessed. They feel they are being forced to leave the Episcopal Church. Our message to them is: If you’ve arrived at the decision that you can’t remain where you are, we represent what your church used to be. You are welcome.”

The Anglican Church in America was created when members left the Episcopal Church over that denomination’s ordination of women in the late 1970s.

Anglicans use the 1928 Book of Common Prayer for worship and have not “modernized” their liturgy the way Episcopalians have.

The denomination is small in the Northeast, with just 21 parishes in the diocese.

Maine has five Anglican Churches located in Portland, Raymond, Augusta, Brooksville and Ellsworth, with a total membership of about 100.

New Hampshire’s election the Rev. V. Gene Robinson as the Episcopal Church’s first openly gay bishop was endorsed in early August at that denomination’s convention in Minneapolis. The delegation from the Maine diocese and its leader, Bishop Chilton Knudsen, voted to confirm Robinson, whose consecration has been scheduled for November.

Knudsen has been holding a series of meetings throughout the state to discuss her vote and whether the action taken by Episcopalians in the United States would cause a schism in the Worldwide Anglican Communion. Bishops in Africa, Asia and South America oppose the action taken in Minneapolis.

Upset parishioners at St. Andrew’s have drafted a letter of protest to Knudsen and members of the delegation who attended the convention last month.

So far, 29 parishioners, or about half the church members, have signed the letter expected to be mailed next week, according to Leavitt.

The Rev. Lance Almeida, rector of St. Andrew’s in Millinocket, said Friday that his parish is “pretty evenly divided” over the issues of the ordination of homosexuals and the blessing of same sex unions. He said there are “many traditionally minded Episcopalians in Millinocket,” but Almeida predicted that most would not leave the church.

Dore, Leavitt and Pease said Friday they would wait for further discussion before deciding whether to leave the Episcopal Church and join the Anglicans.