When a priest in his diocese, a Rev. Phil Ashey said he was leaving the diocese and the Episcopal Church, Lee stated that Mr. Ashey had renounced his priesthood. Ashey denied the renunciation, saying that he had merely resigned from the Diocese of Virginia, but had not renounced the priesthood.

Fr. Ashey placed himself under the authority of a Ugandan Bishop and walked away from the parish's assets. But for Lee that was not enough, he said Ashey had walked away from his priestly office and so he withdrew his orders. Ashey refused to sign a letter of renunciation during a meeting with Church officials.

This angered the Archbishop of Uganda, Henry Luke Orombi who wrote a letter to Lee saying that the Rev. Ashey was now canonically resident in Rwenzori Diocese and is a priest in good standing with the Church of Uganda. "We have asked him to continue the good work of church planting he has been doing in the South Riding community in Virginia," he wrote.

Then Orombi lit into Lee saying, "I must object, in the most strenuous terms, to your characterization of Rev. Ashey's decision to resign as a Missioner of the Diocese of Virginia as a renunciation of his holy orders. I have seen his letter to Bishop Jones. Even those of us for whom English is a second language understand his plain English to mean that he has resigned from the staff of the Diocese of Virginia, but not from his priestly orders."

The Archbishop then dealt a body blow to Lee saying, "This kind of re-inventing of the plain meaning of a text is the same problem we are facing today throughout the Anglican Communion with regard to bishops and leaders in ECUSA reinventing the plain meaning of Scripture."

This shot across the bows was not only aimed at Lee it sent a resounding message to Presiding Bishop Frank Griswold who, along with other revisionist bishops, have often suggested that the Africans are just not up to snuff on issues of sexuality because they don't understand the language or who won't interpret the Bible to mean what it plainly says and means.

They understand it perfectly well thank you very much. There are more earned PhDs in the Province of Nigeria than there are in the ECUSA and Anglican Church in Canada put together.

Lee then fired back a response to Orombi completely ignoring what the archbishop said.

Lee wrote, "My decisions with regard to Mr. Ashey [is] based upon his letter to Bishop Jones, his comments to me and to the Standing Committee of the diocese, concerning Mr. Ashey's clear and unambiguous desire to be removed from the Episcopal Church."

But Mr. Ashey's desire to leave the ECUSA had nothing to do with any desire he had to leave the priesthood, and he did not sign a statement that he would. He merely moved from one ecclesiastical jurisdiction to another. That has happened in numerous other dioceses around the country. Ashey is not the first and he certainly won't be the last.

It is no different from what the Rev. Sandy Millar, a London-based Church of England priest did when he went to Uganda and was consecrated a bishop then returned to London to serve as an Evangelical bishop in a diocese run by an Anglo-Catholic bishop - and all with the blessing of the Archbishop of Canterbury!

In a particularly manipulative note, Lee wrote to Orombi saying, "I am disappointed that you and the Church of the Province of Uganda have chosen to exercise episcopal acts outside the jurisdiction of your Province without collaboration with me, and contrary to my understanding of traditional Anglican principles."

Now let us be very clear about this. The Uganda Archbishop was invited by the Rev. Ashey, he did not force his way into America or the Episcopal Church. It was the choice of Ashey to leave ECUSA not Orombi and it was Ashey who asked for oversight. This is the old saw of blaming the messenger. Ashey requested it and Orombi was glad to fulfill that request, as has Bolivian Bishop Frank Lyons, Recife Bishop Robinson Cavilcanti and many other overseas bishops. Orombi did not come uninvited and he did not force his way in.

The only archbishop who might be said to have forced his way onto the American scene is Nigerian Archbishop Peter Akinola, who formed the Convocation for Anglican Nigerian Churches in America (CANA), but even this was in response to hundreds of thousands of Nigerian Anglicans who found they could not worship at revisionist ECUSA parishes that preached 'another gospel'.

If Orombi performed ecclesiastical acts outside of his province, then Sandy Millar's consecration must also be viewed as "contrary to...Anglican principles." But apparently not. At least Dr. Rowan Williams doesn't think so.

Lee then yanks Orombi around emotionally by citing his diocese' relationship with Uganda, describing it as long and affectionate with the Church of Uganda when the Most Rev. Yona Okoth was the archbishop back in 1984. Lee listed some projects that his diocese was involved with in Uganda.

Well Bishop Lee, times have changed. This is 2006 not 1984 and since then the Episcopal Church has done things that have gone against Scripture including (many believe) the illegal ordination women; the ordination of avowed non-celibate gays and lesbians to the priesthood, the open repudiation of a number of doctrines of the faith once held, the HOB failure to repudiate Spong's 12 Theses, and, most importantly, the public consecration of a man who divorced his wife and entered into a homoerotic relationship with another man and made bishop.

A lot of water has gone under the bridge sine 1984 and Lee knows it. To yank Archbishop Orombi around with manipulative statements like this serves no good purpose at all, and all it really succeeds in doing is alienating the orthodox mega-churches in the northern half of Lee's diocese which, even as I write, many are contemplating leaving the diocese. Lee might well find that he has a situation on his hands that parallels the Diocese of Florida where Bishop Samuel Johnson Howard finds himself with some 20 parishes in revolt against his rule.

Bishop Lee hasn't seen anything yet, and when he does, he and his revisionist bishop pals may well see the biggest exodus from The Episcopal Church in its history, right after the next General Convention, that will shake him and them to the core.

But Lee is not the only revisionist bishop (he can no longer be classified as liberal) guilty of bad faith and viciously attacking fleeing orthodox priests.

Maryland Bishop Robert Ihloff and his suffragan John Rabb allegedly got a Presbyterian Church that was acting as a host to oust a new Anglican congregation from their premises in a spiteful act to force the parish out of the area.

The 100-member Anglican Church of the Resurrection which is under the Diocese of Chile was forced to vacate Brown Memorial Woodbrook Presbyterian Church after being there for less than three weeks. The majority of the parishioners were once members of St. John's Episcopal Church in Glyndon, Maryland, but left the church, the diocese and the Episcopal Church over the denomination's gradual slide over many years into a revisionist theology which embraces the culture rather than standing firm on historic Biblical Christianity as stated in the creeds.

These revisionist bishops had no business doing this. None. A newsletter put out by the "servant council" of the Church of the Resurrection said that as they became more successful, the bigger target they became for the misguided.

A member of the church's servant council had a conversation with a member of the Presbyterian Church's session (vestry) in which he was told that their Executive Presbyter (bishop) was being pressured by the bishops of the Episcopal Diocese of Maryland not to take them in.

Fr. Eliot Winks had been duly ordained in Pittsburgh recently by Bolivian Bishop Frank Lyons and that got Ihloff's ire up and he ordered Winks to 'cease and desist' from clerical activity in his diocese."

The truth is Ihloff had no ecclesiastical authority to do that. Winks was now under Bolivia and out from under Ihloff. Even calling Wink's ordination "irregular" changes nothing.

So the question must be asked, what is Ihloff afraid of? What are they (both bishops) afraid of? Why would they attempt to bring the full weight of their temporal power, authority, and influence to hurt this rector and his small thriving parish.

The answer, of course, is fear, fear that they are losing power and they have no gospel to proclaim. It is also fear that they are losing members and money and seeing the diminution of their power and authority.

ECUSA has been wasting away for some time from its own self-inflicted wounds, and if these actions are any indication, that process is accelerating, wrote Winks.

When this story appeared at VirtueOnline's website I got a note from a reader in Chicago to say that Bishop William D. Persell had done much the same thing. An orthodox Anglican Church was launched last fall in a room at the First United Church of Rogers Park. When the parish started to take off, the ECUSA bishop pressured the pastor into making life difficult for them -- so much so they had to leave the space. "This seems to be ECUSA's strategy," he wrote.

Clearly there is no room in the inn for groups like this. What is happening is the use of raw naked power against small growing orthodox Anglican parishes in the U.S. that dare to defy Taliban revisionist ECUSA bishops. While one solution is to worship in private homes and hotel rooms where ECUSA has no influence or power to stop them, it is clear that orthodox Primates from the Global South will now see what is going on, and be even more willing to take fleeing ECUSA priests under their protection and fight more openly for the Panel of Reference to discipline errant bishops like Lee, Ihloff and Persell.

If that does not happen Dr. Williams must either intervene with the moral authority he has and demand that ECUSA's revisionist bishops ease up, or face himself being ostracized at Lambeth 2008. To do nothing is to abrogate his own authority and for the Anglican Communion to be left ecclesiastically and theologically rudderless.

END