FIC Blog

Yesterday’s Waterbury Republican-American had a front page story (subscriber only) quoting the “Connecticut six” on why state Anglicans will likely remain Anglican and not become Catholic, despite Rome’s recent outreach to them. Given the coalition of like-minded Christians of various denominations that FIC has assembled over the years, it was this quote that warmed my heart:

[The Rev. Bryan Bywater, of the New Hope Anglican Church in Watertown] called the offer a beautiful gesture. “For a long time the churches have been fighting each other over the small things and not focusing on the greater things; now we’re seeing the churches being unified over the larger things. That’s great to see.”

Those “larger things” include, of course, the nature of marriage as the union of a man and a woman and the authority of scripture–the issues that are causing conservative Anglicans to leave the liberal Episcopal Church. As our friend Christopher Leighton–pastor of St. Paul’s in Darien–says in the same article, Rome’s outreach further “isolates the national Episcopal Church as a minority view as far as world Christianity.”

And not only the Episcopal Church. Today’s Courant has a nice write-up on Deryk Richenburg, the new pastor at First Church of Christ in Wethersfield–an historic church that had a very public break with the UCC over same-sex “marriage” and related issues. “The First Church of Christ is well-known throughout New England because of its size and its 2004 separation from the United Church of Christ,” writes The Courant–without, of course, bothering to explain the cause of the separation.