Secessionist parish leads bishop on a steeple chase.

• Position: St. Andrews Church - Brief Article

A spat between an Episcopal parish in Morehead City and a bishop sprang from lofty concerns about the meaning of Scripture. But it's boiling down to an earthly matter of real-estate law.

St. Andrews Church bolted from the Episcopal Diocese of East Carolina in February. "We believe the leadership in the Episcopal Church is heretical," says the Rev. King Cole, St. Andrews' rector. The split was several years coming, he says. His parish is conservative; the Episcopal hierarchy has been drifting left. What finally made King and his followers leave was the Kinston-based bishop, Clifton Daniel, saying "he would ordain homosexuals and would bless homosexual unions."

In March, the parish allied itself with conservative Archbishop Emmanuel Mbona Kolini of Rwanda. Along with like-minded bishops abroad, he has taken it upon himself to correct what he sees as apostasy in America by inviting conservative parishes to join his "missionary diocese." Fair enough. This country was founded on the premise that people should worship as they please. Trouble is, Cole and his crew want to keep their church and the rest of its assets.

A suit filed May 12 in Superior Court contends all that stuff belongs to the diocese. Daniel wants a judge to throw out the schismatics, who've taken to calling themselves St. Andrews Anglican Church. The bishop's suit says all property in an Episcopal church belongs to the hierarchy. But Cole says the then-bishop gave St. Andrews' management committee a deed in 1952. "We don't have any documentation on how that came about, but it's a very clear deed that says the church is given to the vestry for a fee of $1."

Chances are, the bishop did that so the parish could get a loan from a local bank, says a Raleigh real-estate lawyer who's an Episcopalian. "Banks sometimes have trouble with the notion of a diocese owning property." Even with the deed, the diocese should trump the parish because "any vestry is just a subdivision of the diocese." But the deed makes things fuzzy enough it will likely have to be resolved in a court.

But which one? The bishop seems to think his chief justice has spoken. As he said in a letter to St. Andrews' parishioners, some of them "have forgotten the Eighth Commandment." Which says, "Thou shalt not steal."

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