Some of you have asked, Why are we no longer under Bishop Murdoch in the Anglican Diocese in New England?
Some time ago I shot a video explaining the transition. You can watch that here. I understand that some have not been able to play the video so I thought I’d write up a brief explanation and send it along.
1. The Diocese of Cana East under Bishop Dobbs and our former diocese under Bishop Murdoch are both part of the same province (or denomination): the Anglican Church in North America. So we simply transferred from one bishop to another in the Anglican Church in North America. We did not leave the Anglican church.
2. Traditionally dioceses are arranged geographically. All the congregations in one region are grouped together under one bishop. But since the Anglican church was formed piece by piece with churches leaving the Episcopal Church at different times, the formation of dioceses did not take place in the regular way and as a consequence, there are now many dioceses that have congregations hundreds, sometimes even more than a thousand miles away. This has led to a lot of confusion.
3. Bishop Murdoch was appointed by Archbishop Duncan (now retired) to chair a committee to sort all of that out and try to create a more geographically consistent system by moving congregations that are far from their diocesan center to dioceses that are closer.
4. In our former diocese, the ADNE under Bishop Murdoch, we were almost 5 hours away from the closest ADNE congregation which was near Boston. But there is a CANA East congregation, St. Andrews, only 15 minutes away in Endicott. There is another in Syracuse and one more in Elmira.
5. So last year the vestry asked Bishop Murdoch if we might transfer to CANA East in order to be in the same diocese with our surrounding churches. Bishop Murdoch happily agreed. Together with Bishop Dobbs of CANA East, they worked out an arrangement and we were transferred this Spring.
So we remain in the same church as Bishop Murdoch, but now we are in a different diocese. I know it can be confusing but this is not at all strange given the fact that the Anglican Church in North America is only 5 years old and that it was formed as the result of the break-up of the Episcopal Church. Things tend to get messy after something like that happens.
In any case, I hope this helps. If you have any more questions about the transfer, please don’t hesitate to ask.