Episcopal Press and News
COLORADO: Colorado Springs congregation calls on 'secessionists' to return parish property
Episcopal News Service. June 21, 2007 [062107-04]
Mary Frances Schjonberg
The members of Grace and St. Stephen's Episcopal Church in Colorado Springs said June 20 that their former fellow parishioners have admitted that they have "no legal basis for seizing and occupying Episcopal Church property" unless the Colorado Supreme Court reverses its 1986 Mote decision concerning church property.
The congregation calling itself Grace Church and St. Stephen's in Colorado Springs announced May 26 that a majority of people voting in a week-long election agreed to affiliate with the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA), which calls itself a "missionary effort" of the Anglican Church in Nigeria.
The members of Grace and St. Stephen's Episcopal Church are reportedly 200-400 people who wanted to remain affiliated with the Episcopal Church following the vote.
The election formalized a decision made in March by what was then the vestry of Grace Church and St. Stephen's Episcopal Church. The group's announcement said that of the 370 votes cast (from a possible 822 voters), 342, or 93%, agreed with the decision.
The breakaway group is led by the Rev. Donald Armstrong, whom Episcopal Diocese of Colorado Bishop Rob O'Neill inhibited in January as part of an investigation into allegations of misappropriated church money. A presentment has since been filed against Armstrong, and the diocese has filed suit to regain possession of the parish's property.
The Episcopal congregation's June 20 news release included a screen shot from the Grace Church and St. Stephen's Parish website which was headed with a plea for people to "please make a donation to help us establish a new legal precedent and overturn the Colorado Mott [sic] decision that is used as the basis for differing [sic] to hierarchal [sic] structures." The website includes a link to PayPal, an online credit-card payment system.
On June 21 the same website contains this request: "please help us establish new legal precedent to preserve parish buildings for the purposes and faith for which they were intended. Our eyes are on you -- 2 Chronicles 20:12."
The issue to which the first version of the plea refers is the principle that the Episcopal Church is a hierarchical church and parishes and dioceses are not formed and dissolved at will but are created or dissolved by diocesan convention in the case of parishes and General Convention in the case of dioceses. The Mote case ruled that an Episcopal parish holds its property in trust "for the use of the general church."
"The Colorado Supreme Court Mote case squarely held that those leaving the Episcopal Church have no right to take Episcopal Church property with them," Grace and St. Stephen's Episcopal Church vestry member Timothy Fuller said in the news release. "If the secessionists understand that Mote is the controlling law, and Mote says they cannot take property when they leave the Episcopal Church, then they must understand that their continuing possession of the property is unlawful."
The news release included a letter it said was from the original vestry's attorney telling the members prior to their March vote that the parish holds its real and personal property in trust for the diocese and the Episcopal Church. The attorney and another vestry member, El Paso County District Attorney John Newsome, resigned from their vestry positions days before the March vote, according to the release.
On the evening of the vestry vote, the release claimed, Armstrong told the remaining members that "possession is nine-tenths of the law."
Grace and St. Stephen's Episcopal Church vestry member Robert McJimsey said in the congregation's news release that it was time for Armstrong and his allies to "stop playing legal games."
"We have a large congregation of faithful Episcopalians forced every Sunday to worship away from their own church," he said. "We want the secessionists to give it back now."
In an extensive question-and-answer column in Grace Church and St. Stephen's May/June newsletter, Armstrong predicted that the "inevitable division" of the parish would "cause our numbers and finances to diminish somewhat."
"That sort of clarity and purging of community membership, however, is hopeful to both sides of this split," he wrote.
Grace and St. Stephen's Episcopal Church congregants worship at First Christian Church near the Grace Church campus. At Pentecost, some of those parishioners told a Rocky Mountain News reporter that they are in exile. Some parishioners are attending the services of congregations until they can better sort out their allegiances, the Denver newspaper reported.