God & Country

Rick Warren Offers Saddleback to Breakaway Episcopal Parishes

January 9, 2009 RSS Feed Print

By Dan Gilgoff, God & Country

I reported this week on the national implications for the U.S. Episcopal Church in the wake of a California Supreme Court ruling denying the right of conservative breakaway Episcopal parishes to keep their churches and property. There's been a new twist in the case, at least in California: Evangelical megachurch pastor Rick Warren is offering his Saddleback church campus as a place for breakaway Episcopal congregations to meet, or even to start, new churches. Christianity Today has the story.

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California,
religion,
Supreme Court

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PsiCop, it may interest you to know that Rick Warren does not get paid by Saddleback, that he repaid all the salary that had been paid to him by Saddleback, and that he gives away 90% of all his income. He has started an interdenominational effort to help the poor in Africa, including projects to combat AIDS and other diseases.

He has no personal or organizational benefit in offering space to former Episcopalians who believe that the Episcopal Church has fatally compromised the Gospel. He simply wants to help them get on their feet, now that have been denied the property they built, paid for, and used for decades. He is a Baptist, they are Anglicans - but they worship the same Lord Jesus

AnglicanXn of MA 12:22PM January 14, 2009

Well good grief. So private property ownership is taking a beating these days. Hostile corporate takeovers are not unknown nor even illegal. TEC has morphed into an avaricious real estate scam in the name of a special interest. If they want to play that game they don't deserve a non-profit status. If they are a hierarchy of that sort where a central office owns everything, those assets should be part of any lawsuit that comes from flooding the priesthood with homosexuals on the make. Also, Ms. Schori, as thief executive officer should be legally answerable.

monologistos 11:31AM January 14, 2009

Somehow I don't see that capitalizing on a schism in another Christian denomination, for his own personal gain, is a very meaningful expression of Christian humility.

Then again, I don't suppose multimillionaires are known for having any humility, so this can hardly be expected of him. Still, I wonder what Jesus would say, if he were here now to see this?

http://www.agnostic-library.com/ma/2009/01/11/warrens-growing-empire/

PsiCop of CT 12:06PM January 11, 2009

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Dan Gilgoff covers religion for U.S. News & World Report. He is the author of The Jesus Machine: How James Dobson, Focus on the Family, and Evangelical America are Winning the Culture War, and is a former politics editor at beliefnet. E-mail Dan at godandcountry@usnews.com.

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