Roseberry said the polity of the Episcopal Church is such that he has come to believe that the church can only be as strong as the people sitting in the pews plus 20 years. "Voters today at that annual meeting and the diocesan convention and the general convention deputies were in congregational pews as children or in Sunday Schools 20 or 30 years ago, and I know what the state of the church was 20 or 30 years ago in terms of biblical teaching, biblical preaching, biblically based Sunday School.

"I'm a product of it. It isn't there. It wasn't there. Now it may be in your parish, but it just isn't there. So, the voters are standing with their feet in the culture, and the culture is headed toward complete tolerance and acceptance of many, many things, and I don't think there's anything that's going to stop the Episcopal Church from the continuous embrace of whatever the culture finds acceptable plus 20 years."

Roseberry said the issue that triggered the crisis and lost the battle for The Episcopal Church was the Righter trial in 1996, when the judges of the ecclesiastical Court declared that there is no core doctrine on the issues of human sexuality. The Episcopal Church had really nothing to say, nothing that it could rest upon, he said.

"The outward working of that is essentially what we're experiencing today, that no matter what a person's sexual identity, practices, as long as there is, in the language of previous general conventions, particularly Phoenix...justice, love, that that lifestyle is going to be held up and not only tolerated, not only celebrated, but consecrated. I believe that we were living in the aftermath of a church that really had decided that it had no core doctrine."

Roseberry criticized Episcopal Church polity, (the way we govern ourselves,) and said that the way bishops are elected works against the faith once delivered to the saints. "Episcopal elections are democratically controlled, which means that if you have democracy, you have caucuses, you have pressure groups, you have interest groups, and you've got a candidate who feels a call to not only become the bishop of the faith but the bishop of the whole church, including the caucuses and the pressure groups and all the other agencies that work within the diocese to get somebody elected."

As a result, he said, the church can easily adopt a pro-abortion stance because of the pressure groups within it. "I could easily see that in the coming years there would be such a cry from the culture to tolerate, for example, Islam that our church would be called upon to dial down its core Christian doctrine where they intersect or confront Islam and really become more of an accepting congregational approach to Islam."

The flash point, said Roseberry, is about the authority of scripture and also how we govern ourselves.

Saying that the road he took was his own, Roseberry said, "I am not an Episcopalian anymore because when you read the documents from the pressure group, called "Integrity," you'll find that it's not just homosexuality that needs to be affirmed and consecrated, but bisexual relationships, transgendered relationships that are being celebrated, because that's where the culture is going. We all know it and we see that it's being played out in our own Anglican Episcopal Church."

Roseberry cited, as an example. the Minneapolis General Convention. "For me this was the watershed. The House of Deputies had approved the bishop-elect of New Hampshire to become a fully endorsed bishop in the Episcopal Church. I then waited three more years to see if there might be another chance, but the Minneapolis convention was the watershed, and that was the moment I surrendered my credentials and resigned as a deputy from the (Diocese of Dallas)."

Roseberry cited the VOL story concerning Gene Robinson's association with the New Hampshire chapter of Outright, a recruiting agency for young homosexual men who were struggling with identity issues and its "two clicks away" from pornographic websites.

Roseberry said the other thing he learned about polity was that, in a congregational system, your congregation does not vote at all except to vote a vestry and a delegation. "So if this issue became a congregational vote whether to stay or leave and your bishop or your state law said we want everybody, the whole church to vote, you'd split the church.

"We are not set up in Anglican polity to take congregational votes. We don't know how to do it. There's no mechanism in any canons for a congregation to vote to leave, nothing. Congregational congregations do it all the time. Baptists and bible churches vote like this all the time."

Roseberry said he tried to take a global view of what was taking place, and realized that there were only two kinds of churches in the whole world - one hierarchical ,the other congregational. "A hierarchical church is essentially a pyramid that depends on what you put at the top. These are people who have authority over people, who have authority over people, who have authority over people and the whole system is interlinked together. That's the kind of church the Anglican Church is, and what's at the top is a council, not a person. The other kind of church is congregational church where it's self-governed."

The orthodox priest said that in the year 2000, when churches began to pull up stakes and threaten to leave and lawsuits and property disputes started, a friend of his came to him and said these churches were looking for congregational solutions in a hierarchical system. "In a hierarchy the hierarchy essentially has dibs on the property because it's there for the benefit and welfare of everybody within the hierarchy."

Roseberry decided to detach himself from the hierarchy and that he would do it as the congregational leader at Christ Church. "I love Anglicanism. I am not an independent individual. I have a bishop. I've always had a bishop. I wouldn't conceive of spending a day of my priesthood out from underneath the authority, the protective authority, of a bishop. In fact when the whole deal with Christ Church was done the only dilemma for me is where do I go? Through God's grace I was able to hear from the Rt. Rev. Bill Godfrey Bishop of Peru. He was my bishop for a period of eight months until we found a place (AMiA)."

During a question and answer period, Roseberry said his church was identified as the church that wouldn't stay. "Somebody had to leave. It was clear our bishop was not going to leave. The diocese was not going to leave. I felt it's time for us to pull away." Roseberry said he kept it at the vestry level and did not submit it to the congregation because he had never preached a sermon against homosexuality. "I preached sermons on biblical purity, biblical holiness...I would preach on the positive side of the call for all disciples to live, but I decided I wanted to keep it at the vestry level. We had a congregation that was ripe and ready to go. We had buildings to build. We had debt to repay. We had staff to call. We had new leaders to bring in. We were a growing church. Every time we would take a major step forward in terms of having the capital campaign or announce a new program, the noise of the battle would just really bring everything else to a screeching halt."

Roseberry said he could not focus on any kind of positive forward mission. "We elected to sit down with our bishop and negotiate essentially a real estate deal. We wanted to buy our property. We were willing to walk. He knew that we couldn't stay. He knew that he couldn't hold us. He knew that he needed substantial consideration. He knew that our church had essentially bought and paid for everything to that point. And so we worked a real estate deal." The church and the diocese settled on a payout of $1.2 million.

"I'm extremely thankful for what we were able to do. When you come to our church, you know, the door is open. The welcome mat is always out. You'll see it was worth it. This is a wonderful facility. And that's been our story. It's been a year."

Roseberry said he didn't want Episcopalians at Christ Church. "We weren't there to create a congregation for lapsed Episcopalians or former Episcopalians. We were after the lost. In fact, for the first 15 years, 60-70% of our population was not from the Episcopal Church. It was all convert growth or people who had been unchurched or a category we thought of, de-churched people that had been involved in a church but for whatever reason had been turned off to it. There's a lot of people in that category. But we had to bring other people to know Christ, and finally getting back to that mission.

Roseberry said the impact on his church has not been inconsequential. "We lost some members. We lost one or two families from our core constituency, and we lost five to seven percent of our membership. The church went into a lull, a little valley which was really tied to my energy. But we're back. Attendance is up again. We finished last year strong. By God's grace we'll finish it strong this year."

Asked what he thought the national church will do about fleeing parishes, Roseberry said he thought the national church will have to make a judgment call as to how much litigation they're going to pursue. "I think there are dioceses that are ready to leave lock, stock and barrel, and the mechanism for leaving will be set in place and is being set in place in some dioceses."

Roseberry said he sees Nashotah [House] and Trinity [School for Ministry] becoming twin engines for the new face of Anglicanism in North America. "It's going to be Evangelical, and it's going to be Catholic."

END