God bless you, Bishop McLaughlin, and may these congregations in Ghana be a blessing to you also!

(If you have a moment, check out the research at the link below for research that traces Abraham’s ancestors back to west Africa.)

I wish Bishop McLaughlin well, I suppose, but if you look at the web site of the Orthodox Anglican Communion, there’s a lot to wonder about. There are only 17 churches in the US, several of them missions, despite the fact that the OAC has been around since 1967. Why so few? How did so many overseas churches get hooked up with them? In fact, how do we even know there anything like the kind of numbers attached to the OAC as they claim? Their “seminary” is accredited—in Italy. Truth be told, Scott McLaughlin looks like a run-of-the-mill vagrante bishop, especially given the claim that the OAC is “The Orthodox Anglican Communion is the Orthodox Church of the West.” I’m sure the Greeks, Antiochians, and OCA would be interested to here that.

According to the Wikipedia article McLaughlin’s group is the result of a division in Bishop Dees’ Anglican Orthodox Church, one of the groups that rejected the authority of the General Convention in the 1960’s. Dees was rector in Statesville, NC, and politically as well as theologically conservative. His followers were Southern evangelical in liturgical style.

Tom Rightmyer in Asheville, NC

Like David and Tom, I also found the statistics of this article puzzling. There are Episcopalian churches in Ghana? What, exactly, does that mean? And 2,000 parishes in India are joining the denomination? I hope Tom R., David and others can do some further fact-checking on this piece.

Anglicans On Line in one link lists a couple of dozen splinter Anglican groups, mostly originating in the USA. Those that claim large growth do so by listing lots of mission activity mostly in the third world. There doesn’t appear to me much growth in the US. I once did a rough estimate of US membership, and it seemed to me that in toto their numbers didn’t go much beyond 200,000. I would want to get the latest copy of the Directory of Denominations to see what their stated membership is, while keeping in mind that membership lists are sometimes left unpurged over the years.

The claim about parishes in India is very interesting.  Following Indira Gandhi’s “emergency” in 1975, Indian churches are no longer allowed to receive funds for church work from abroad.  (Foreigners can send money for social services, which must be strictly separated from evangelism.)  Most of the Protestant churches began to struggle financially, resulting in their merger in the Church of North India and the Church of South India.  I have some small experience on the ground with the CNI.  While my pastor here is an ordained Anglican priest, his son and that generation are heavily influenced by television evangelists and are not even intending to be Anglican.  And the CNI has splintered as well.  An ACA (US) bishop told me some years ago that they had received a large group of Indian parishes.  What “large” means, I have no idea.  Is there some connection there?

The Church of South India was inaugurated as a uniting church in 1947, the Church of North India in 1970. I’m not up on the situation in CNI, but the Diocese of Dargapur is a sister diocese of my own, the Diocese of Western North Carolina.  Our diocese has exchanged episcopal visits (I met the bishop, his chancellor, and one of the priests at a visit to our deanery), and last year our diocese raised over $20,000 to to fund the building of a school in the docese; so perhaps the prohibition of 1975 has been lifted. A friend of ours who is a member of a neighboring parish left yesterday for Dargapur as a missionary from the national church and our diocese. She will be teaching in a school there.

It hasn’t been lifted to my knowledge.  It could be that your money was sent as a “gift” to an individual.  That way they skate around the laws.