Posted on 05/19/2007 6:31:38 AM PDT by Huber
KINGSPORT - The president of the Anglican Mission in the Americas will speak at a meeting Tuesday on establishing an Anglican Mission in the Americas (AMiA) church or churches in the region.
The meeting is open to interested members of the public.
The meeting begins at 7 p.m., Tuesday at Meadow View Conference Resort and Convention Center and will include a service of Evening Prayer and an informational talk by the AMiA president, the Rev. Canon Ellis Brust, of Pawley’s Island, S.C.
The Rev. Chris Cairns, vicar of Apostles Anglican Church in Knoxville, which is affiliated with the AMiA, also will participate in the service and in the presentation.
The meeting will be held in Salon 3, and light refreshments will be served.
Brust and Cairns also will speak at 7 a.m., Wednesday, during continental breakfast informational event at the General Morgan Inn & Conference Center, 111 N. Main St., Greeneville. That event is scheduled to end by 8:30 a.m.
Apostles Anglican Church is hosting both events. No reservations are required for either meeting.
The Anglican Mission in the Americas was established in 2000 and is described by a spokesman as “a missionary movement of the Anglican Province of Rwanda, one of 38 provinces in the Anglican Communion.” The AMiA operates under the oversight of the Anglican Archbishop of Rwanda.
Often referred to as the Anglican Mission, the AMiA is one of several groups in the United States, which identify themselves with the worldwide Anglican Communion but not with The Episcopal Church, the traditional U.S. affiliate of the Anglican Communion.
The spokesman said that, during the last seven years, the Anglican Mission in the Americas “has added on average one church every three weeks and now numbers 111 congregations” in the United States and Canada, with another 60 in various stages of formation.
The AMiA Web site states that the AMiA “is focused on reaching out to the 130 million unchurched in the United States with the transforming reality of Jesus Christ.”
“There is a pressing need in the Tri-Cities area for a missional, evangelical, orthodox Anglican presence,” Cairns said, “which is the reason we are gathering together like-minded, missional people to serve as a launch team for a new church which will then plant other churches in the area.
“The people of the Anglican Mission in America have no interest in engaging in internecine church politics. We believe that the 130 million unchurched people in the United States are the mission field.
“We are not reinventing the gospel and Christian discipleship to make it less challenging or more palatable. We are taking the uncompromising content of apostolic Christian faith and translating it into a language that everyone can understand, holding out Jesus’ own words of life to our generation.
“The meeting on May 22 is designed to provide a way for interested people in the Northeast Tennessee region to come together and learn more about what the Anglican Mission in the Americas is and how it might establish a presence in this area.”
Brust, president of the AMiA, also operates as its chief executive officer, with responsibility for overseeing day-to-day operations.
He serves as president of the Anglican Mission board of directors and appoints as well as supervises all field staff.
Both Brust and Cairns are graduates of Virginia Theological Seminary.
Ordained to the Episcopal priesthood in 1984, Brust has served parishes in Midland, Crockett, Katy and Longview, Texas. Prior to accepting his current position with the Anglican Mission in 2006, he served as chief operating officer and chaplain to the president of the American Anglican Council (AAC), and as Canon to the Ordinary for the Episcopal Diocese of Florida.
In the latter capacity, he assisted Bishop Stephen Jecko in administration, strategic planning and congregational development of the 75 churches in the diocese.
Prior to accepting the position with AMiA last year, he was also one of three finalists for the post of bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of South Carolina.
Widely known internationally in Anglican circles, he has been a conference speaker in the United States, the United Kingdom, Cuba and Nigeria. He and his wife, Cynthia, have a daughter, 20, and a son, 17.
Cairns, born into a military family of generations of West Point graduates, was born at West Point, N.Y., and has since lived in Virginia, Kansas, Peru, Georgia and Tennessee. Ordained an Episcopal deacon in May 2006, he was ordained an Anglican priest in the Anglican Province of Rwanda in November 2006.
He has also served on the staff of Young Life, on the staff of two churches in Chattanooga as a youth minister, and as the program coordinator for Crossroads Missions, a short-term missions organization founded at Milligan College.
Cairns also has been program coordinator for the Urban Art Institute in Chattanooga, and the director of Hispanic Ministry for the Salvation Army in Chattanooga.
Apostles Anglican Church in Knoxville, of which he is vicar, was established in the summer of 2006. It now includes, he said, more than 100 active participants and some 50 more who attend regularly.
Cairns and his wife, Elizabeth, are the parents of a daughter, 3, and a son, 2.
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I sincerely hope and pray AMiA will cooperate and get along well with CANA—as the current splintering of orthodox groups is disturbing.
At least online, the conspicuous absence of any acknowledgment, let alone congratulations, by the AMiA of the consecration of Bishop Minns of CANA was deafening.
Your point is well taken. Additionally, both CANA and AMiA are pretty much ignoring all of the higher church continuing Anglican churches, who I believe are in turn, reciprocating. It is time for us to collectively get our act together!
Based on this story, it isn’t clear that they are following the best model for church planting. It could be, however, that they already have a core group and are now ready to take the ministry public.
I was also going to say that that isn’t a strong area for Anglicans, but I see that Kingsport has three Episcopal parishes (only one large enough for a web site, apparently).
My experience with AMiA is that it does not particularly target current or former Episcopalians and seems to prefer the unchurched and evangelicals from various backgrounds. I was clearly given the impression that AMiA did not see its core ministry as providing a safe orthodox haven for alienated US Anglicans as CANA does.
Perhaps, but they are willing to do so. Christ Church Plano looked at several options, including CANA, before going with AMiA.
From the AMiA folk who are friends of mine, and from what I’ve heard and read from other sources, the AMiA made a lot of ECUSA folk mad, even many orthodox, when it first started...and they were accused of trying to steal churches and members away. Some of the several property disputes didn’t help matters either.
As a result of that—and evidently God’s direction—AMiA has moved away from the ECUSA battles, and focused more on church planting. They claim 3/4 or so of their membership are NOT former Episcopalians (though that other quarter surely is).
Not a few of the priests in AMiA were (and are) treated very badly by their former bishops. Being defrocked or having one’s pension revoked or other forms of retribution is de rigur treatment by TEC bishops to faithful departing AMiA priests. This has resulted in understandable impatience and even bitterness towards those who’ve remained with TEC. As the CANA folk are getting the same sort of treatment, it will be interesting to see how much patience they will have too, with orthodox who stay in TEC...
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