The Connecticut bishop said the plan now is to meet with local clergy to discuss how the building might best be used in the future. Everything is on the table, he said. "The plans we have at the moment are to take counsel with the clergy and lay leaders of the Diocese of Connecticut; to pray together and seek the leading of the Holy Spirit as to how God would want us to support the witness and service of Bishop Seabury Church in God's mission of restoration and reconciliation in Jesus Christ," he told VOL.

"What I want to do is begin the conversation with those clergy of the region, to pray together and take counsel together, and begin to say, 'What is it that God would have us do with this resource for God's mission in Groton?'" he said.

That's a very good question, Bishop Douglas, writes Canon lawyer Allan S. Haley of the popular Anglican Curmudgeon blog. "Perhaps you should have asked it earlier, before you told the parish that if they were to be allowed to stay in their own church, they could not affiliate with ACNA, or allow their senior rector to conduct services."

Writes Fr. Gauss; "What does he want to hear? Everything was said. The thirteen Vestry and rector had to leave, as the parish was not going to stay under Episcopal leadership. The Anglican clergy went with the parish. The parish followed the clergy and the Ven. Ron Gauss.

"What more was there to say to Bishop Douglas? He didn't want to negotiate. He gave options with no other provisions...they won. Everything the Bishop proposed revolved around my departure. There was no Ghost parish as with other congregations. Over and over again for more than six years 300+ people gathered at the parish meeting and in TOTAL unity agreed/voted to fight to win, or leave together.

"Bishop Douglas knows the words, but it is all spin. The words of Jesus and Christian charity/love have a different meaning to him than to Bishop Seabury Anglican Church," Gauss told VOL.

The Sunday after leaving the property, Gauss said that 250 people gathered for their first service at the Groton Inn and Suites. "It's a good thing that many were on vacation because we wouldn't have had the room. We had eight children in a child care center (nursery)."

Bishop Seabury Church is the latest victim of a Church property lawsuit "resolved" by an illogical and incoherent judgment, naturally in favor of the Episcopal Church and its supporters.

The Church was built after the parish acquired the property (by gift and by purchase) in 1966. At that time it cost $1.75 million to build. Its estimated value today is $3.5 million and its insurance and replacement value is $4.5 million, Gauss told VOL.

The parish, originally founded as a mission in 1875, was named after Connecticut's first Episcopal bishop, Samuel Seabury, who was born in Groton in 1729. In 1956, the Diocese of Connecticut admitted Bishop Seabury Church into full union. Its current Senior Associate Rector, the Ven. Ronald Gauss, has been with the parish for over 37 years.

And now he and the flock who built the church nearly four decades ago have gone.

Fr. Gauss was one of the original 'Connecticut Six.' "We did not sue TEC, we responded to the diocese's lawsuits. We just kept on appealing when the diocese filed a suit in 2007 to establish their title to our property. The Dennis Canon won. The trial court ruled against us in 2010, the Connecticut Supreme Court upheld the trial court's decision in September 2011, and the United States Supreme Court declined to review that decision earlier this year."

Haley said the opinion by the Supreme Court of Connecticut was a travesty of justice -- it nonsensically reads the United States Supreme Court's majority decision in Jones v. Wolf as granting the Episcopal Church (USA) the unique power to bypass the trust laws and requirements in all fifty States, by the enactment of a mere national canon which purported at one stroke to place all Episcopal parish properties throughout the Church in trust for the denomination.

"A proper reading of Jones v. Wolf, however, was denied to the rectors, vestry and members of Bishop Seabury Church, and so they conducted their last Sunday services in their building on August 12. A parish of some 750 members, with an average Sunday attendance of between 250-300 has now been forced out of its own property."

Luke records in Acts 7:48 "....the Most High does not live in houses made by men." That's a hard lesson to learn when you walk away from property worth millions of dollar after nearly four decades, but the integrity of the gospel and the souls of men, women and children matters more than the pansexual drive of The Episcopal Church, a drive that leads only to spiritual death. That is a price worth paying.

END