Episcopal Diocese of Tennessee - Recent Controversies

Recent Controversies

Beginning with the Herlong episcopate in the 1990s, the diocese embarked on an aggressive church extension program, particularly to the fast-growing suburbs of Nashville. Many of the clergy recruited to serve those missions were conservative evangelical in orientation, and some of them, along with their laity, expressed sympathy for the Anglican realignment movement after V. Gene Robinson, a practicing homosexual, was consecrated to the episcopacy of New Hampshire in 2003. Some established parishes and missions were served by conservative priests during this period also.

The diocese became highly polarized as these theologically conservative clergy and some of their laity, supported by the Bishop, objected to increased social and theological liberalism within the Episcopal church. Their positions brought them into conflict with other clergy and laity, mostly in the Nashville and Sewanee areas, who supported a more Broad Church tradition. Prior to that time, the general theological orientation among Tennessee Episcopalians had been toward liberalization and tolerance, especially since the 1960s, despite outspoken opposition by traditionalists.

Matters came to a head when the diocese attempted to a elect a successor bishop upon Herlong's retirement in 2006. With delegates to the diocesan convention sharply divided and thus unable to come to a decision from a first slate of nominees, another slate had to be submitted, and even then, the voting required numerous ballots and several adjourned sessions to complete, a situation highly unusual for an American Episcopal diocese. Finally, the diocesan convention settled on Bauerschmidt, a moderate.

Disappointed in the results of the election, and fueled by the national church's refusal to reconsider its socially liberal positions on numerous issues including homosexuality, some conservatives began to withdraw from the Diocese and align with alternate Anglican structures.

Some of the effects from the dismay on the part of conservatives include the following:

• Some communicants and members of St. Bartholomew's Church in Nashville, St. Barnabas' Church in Tullahoma, and All Saints' Church in Smyrna (the latter a recent new church start) left their respective congregations in order to form continuing Anglican churches. St. Bartholomew's had been noted as one of the first Southern parishes that embraced the charismatic movement in the 1970s, under then-rector Charles H. Murphy, Jr.; the legacy left behind was a conservative evangelicalism that was for years quite distinctive among the area's Episcopal congregations. Despite the defection, St. Bartholomew's remains strongly conservative in theology, however, while the other two have moved more toward a moderate-to-liberal stance.
• Most of the membership of two congregations, Winchester's Trinity Church and Murfreesboro's Holy Cross Church, left, including their rectors, to, again, establish continuing Anglican congregations. The remaining communicants are in the process of rebuilding their churches under new clerical leadership who are, unlike their predecessors, loyal to the national Episcopal Church. The Winchester church eventually joined the Southeast Tennessee Episcopal Ministry (STEM) group of small mission churches near Sewanee in order to provide regular clerical leadership.
• Three conservative-oriented missions started during the Herlong episcopate, located in Franklin, Thompson's Station, and Clarksville, closed due to membership defection and leadership changes. Another in Goodlettsville joined a nearby parish (officially a merger) in Hendersonville, several years after their planting priest resigned his orders and joined the Roman Catholic Church, and because of the effect the economic downturn had on mission funding in the Diocese.
• A small mission near Sewanee, St. Agnes' Church in Cowan, separated itself from the STEM group ministry (see above) in order to have a conservative vicar of its own.
• On October 30, 2009, the Diocese filed a complaint in the Chancery Court of Davidson County, seeking the property of St. Andrew's Church in Nashville, a historically Anglo-Catholic parish that has, according to the Diocese, discontinued participation in the Diocese in order to align itself with the Anglican Diocese of Quincy, based in Illinois. As of April 2010, the court ruled in favor of the Diocese, but the parish has appealed the ruling and presently remains at its location. After the 2004 approval of the Robinson consecration, the parish removed the word "Episcopal" from its signage and its official name, to signal its sharp disapproval of the actions of General Convention. The parish has a long history, as do many other Anglo-Catholic parishes in the U.S., in involvement in conservative protest against national policies, going to back to its opposition to the revision of the Book of Common Prayer and women's ordination in the 1970s.

Some conservatives have remained loyal to the Diocese, but it appears that the balance of power now rests with a coalition of liberals and moderates. It appears that, as of 2011, most of the forementioned controversies within the Diocese, except for the St. Andrew's property dispute, have been laid to rest.