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CENTRAL FLORIDA BISHOP SAYS BENNISON SHOULD BACK OFF VISITATION
Dear +Charles,
I write to request and urge you to relinquish your demand to visit the Church of the Good Samaritan, Paoli, Pennsylvania on June 6, 2004.
First of all, as you know, you are able to fulfill the canonical responsibility we have as bishops to visit our congregations every three years with meetings that are not on Sundays, and do not include all of the elements of preaching, celebrating, and confirming.
Thus, it seems to me, that your insistence on doing all of the above is provocative, to say the least, with a congregation that regards your position on so many issues to be heretical.
You have denied the authority of scripture ("the Church wrote the Bible, and the Church can rewrite it"), the divinity of Christ ("he is a forgiven sinner"), and the arrangements of the last meeting of the House of Bishops (Delegated Episcopal Pastoral Oversight - "it will never happen here.")
I am saddened by all of this, Charles, and I hope you will reconsider. Greg Brewer was my priest before he was yours, and I know him to be an absolutely faithful, orthodox, Nicene Christian. It is a crisis of conscience to him, his vestry, and his congregation, to have you insist on coming on a Sunday morning to do a full-fledged Episcopal Visitation, when you no longer hold the Faith Once Delivered to the Saints.
Please allow +Clarence Coleridge, (or someone outside the Diocese, like myself) to visit on your behalf.
Warmly in our Lord,
+John W. Howe
Episcopal Bishop of Central Florida
1017 East Robinson Street
Orlando, Florida 32801
407-423-3567
