The Rev. Martyn Minns, a former Episcopal rector who helped lead a handful of local congregations in a split from the national church, will be appointed leader of a missionary group on Saturday despite protest from the nation’s top Episcopal official.
Minns plans to accept the title of missionary bishop of CANA, or Convocation of Anglicans in North America, a wing of the Anglican Church of Nigeria that oversees the dissident flock.
The Rev. Katharine Jefferts Schori, bishop of the Episcopal Church, sent a letter to Nigerian Bishop Peter Akinola late last month urging him to reconsider installing Minns. The move, she wrote, would harm reconciliation efforts, violate church customs and “display to the world division and disunity that are not part of the mind of Christ.”
Akinola, in a reply letter, declined.
Eight Northern Virginia congregations broke away from the Episcopal Church and joined with CANA in December after decades of growing ideological tension. The tipping point came, some congregates say, at the church’s ordination of a gay bishop in 2003. Three other churches have also left the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia.
Minns is now Rector of Truro Church in Fairfax, which along with The Falls Church in Falls Church were the largest bodies to join in the split. About 30 dissident churches in the United States, including those in Northern Virginia, will come under Minns’ leadership on Saturday.
“It’s a terrible time for me [with] 40 years in the Episcopal Church … it’s been tearing us apart to see it changing in a direction that we simply can’t go,” he said in a news conference Thursday.
His appointment comes amid an unresolved legal dispute between the new CANA churches and the Episcopal Diocese of Virginia, each of which have staked a claim to the church properties. He said the 23 separate lawsuits have been consolidated into a single suit that will be heard in Fairfax County court on May 21.
