The "battle" culminated in a 38-year-old Presbyterian pastor confronting an Anglican bishop nearly twice his age to ask why the bishop hadn't informed the Presbyterians that the Anglicans were making off with two of the Presbyterians' prized Seattle congregations.

And it's continuing with an unusual open plea from the Presbyterians about a "famine" of pastors for one of the country's most unchurched regions.

In the past two years, three churches belonging to the Pacific Northwest Presbytery of the Presbyterian Church of America (PCA) have left for the Anglican Church in North America (ACNA). Two other men who were on the staffs of local PCA churches left to form their own ACNA congregations.

The departure of 5 clergy has led to local Anglicanism having a decided Reformed tilt.

"They leave for a multitude of reasons," said Kris McDaniel, canon for church development for Churches for the Sake of Others, an Anglican diocese that recently took on two Seattle PCA churches. "They had less to do with angst or anger and more to do with a sense of being drawn to something."
Allowing women into leadership was one of the issues that galvanized the recent exits, he added, as the PCA does not allow female pastors or deacons.

"People may be looking for something a little broader than where they've been," he said.

"The pandemic accelerated our church's move," said John Haralson, 56, the pastor of Grace Church, Seattle in the city's tony Capitol Hill neighborhood.

"We were looking for a denomination we were in better alignment with. Like what we think is important and what our church is called to pursue and whether our denomination is helping with that. Like, were they giving us a tailwind? We felt more and more like they weren't."

He has great "love and affection" for the PCA, he added, and he met his wife at a PCA seminary.

"When I came into the PCA in the 90s, it was centrist, politically and culturally," he said. "Nowadays everything is polarized. The PCA is not as centrist as it used to be."

Haralson was one of the fortunate PCA clergy to have interned with Redeemer Presbyterian/New York, a famous congregation that inspired urban church plants starting in the 1990s. Soon after he took over as pastor of Grace in 2004, the church began allowing women to be deacons. The Northwest Presbytery signed off on that arrangement, he said.

"But in 2019 they said, 'We don't know if we want you to do that.' We spent from then to 2021 debating that at the presbytery level. We felt we were spending an awful lot of energy defending this practice and not [doing] mission."

He conferred with Casey Bedell, a former pastor with the Northwest Presbytery who had left to enter the ACNA and begin St. Ambrose Anglican, also on Capitol Hill. Bedell's parting from the PCA was amicable, said Eric Irwin, former pastor of Covenant Presbyterian Church in Issaquah, Wash., under whom Bedell worked. Irwin even preached at Bedell's 2019 ordination service into the ACNA.

(Another former Covenant employee, Matthew Lanser, also left for the ACNA, becoming pastor of Emmanuel Anglican in north Seattle in 2021. Emmanuel is the spiritual child of the famous St. Luke's Episcopal Church in Seattle's Ballard neighborhood, a world-renowned pioneer in the charismatic movement when pastored by the late Dennis Bennett. A number of orthodox parishioners left St. Luke's in 2011 to join the ACNA).

Haralson was interested in why Bedell switched.

"I was like, 'What you can tell me about the ACNA?' " Haralson said. "The more I talked with him, I was drawn to it." His congregation voted overwhelmingly (84%) to leave in April 2022. As for the reaction of the Northwest Presbytery to losing one of its churches?

"They were saddened but not surprised," he said. "It was collegial and warm. We left giving blessings and receiving blessings."

The Presbyterians, who were still smarting from two earlier church departures to the ACNA (Christ Central in Corvallis, Ore. and All Souls in west Seattle) saw things a bit differently. It was at this point that Nathan Chambers, Clerk of the Pacific Northwest Presbytery (a clerk serves as an administrator for a geographic area) decided to call Todd Hunter, bishop for Churches of the Sake of Others.

"The PCA is a free association of churches," he said. "They can vote to join or leave and take their assets with them. But there are less disruptive ways to do that."

He says he offered Hunter some tips on making the transitions easier.

"It was more the churches that were leaving that were not as being as up front with the presbytery that they were leaving," he said.

The bishop, Chambers said, "was very gracious. He explained they hadn't realized the churches were connected. He had thought they were orphan churches," which are congregations abandoned by a parent denomination.

"I said they aren't orphan churches -- they already have a body caring for them."

Andy Pelander, pastor of All Souls, which left the Presbytery in 2020, felt he gave more than enough notice.

"Folks have different opinions about the timing when that happened," he said. "The presbytery is a bit idealistic when these conversations begin. It's been a disruptive and relationally costly process."

The church began interior discussions in 2018 about leaving, he said, "where we either wanted to end up in a place where we could take ownership of being a PCA parish or be honest with ourselves that we can't remain in this space. The main rock in the shoe was men and women in leadership."

(Shortly after the above interview, Pelander resigned from All Souls. He declined to tell this reporter why, but in a message taped in early February for the Churches for the Sake of Others diocesan prayer cycle, he said he was "carrying some weight, some heaviness, I think, not fear, but am coming before Jesus and asking him to push back the forces of darkness and evil ...")

Currently, the Northwest Presbytery is suffering a dearth of pastors, according to an unusual plea that landed in church bulletins around the Pacific Northwest Presbytery last December.

"The North American Church is facing a famine of rising leaders called to ministry," the notice said. "Complex cultural and ecclesiastical factors are pushing men who may have considered vocational ministry in another age toward other fields.

"Presbyteries, church planting networks and seminaries across the continent are feeling the drought and considering measures to address it."

Michael Kelly, founder of the Northwest Church Planting Network for the PCA, described how desperate the local situation is.

"We are way out here in the hinterlands," he said. "It is my impression that we do not have a replaceable number of ministers in the system," adding that seminary statistics now show higher enrollment figures non-clergy degrees in areas such as counseling -- than for the traditional master's in divinity degree for clergy.

"There's a stronger inclination among rising leaders in their 20s to enter the world of people care through counseling and therapy rather than the pastorate," he said. Moreover, " The rising generation is hesitant to be under authority and hesitant to exercise authority," which are two prerequisites for the pastorship.

Currently there are four openings for pastors around the Northwest. Part of the problem with attracting candidates, he said, was the notoriously rainy climate and the region's blue-state politics.

"The weather has been a factor for some of our leaders," he said. "And the culture is very countercultural -- you have to be willing to be in a subset culture and love the prevailing culture."

Chambers said institutions across the board are struggling to find emerging leadership.

"Congress took 15 votes to get a speaker for the House; compared to some institutions we're doing well," he said. "There's a population decline of younger generations being smaller than other generations. There's a conflict of larger cultural trends that make humble day to day ministry less attractive."

Bryan Chapell, Stated Clerk of the PCA nationwide, says the 400,000-member denomination is able to attract candidates to popular Bible- and Sunbelt locales partly than the west coast. It will celebrate the 50th anniversary of its founding in June.

"We know the ordinand pool is not as strong as it was in the 1990s and 2000s," he said. "It is smaller than it was 10 years ago." But there was a bump of interest in 2021, he said, adding the Northwest is a "pocket" in the opposite direction.

But the three Anglican dioceses that claim jurisdiction in the Northwest seem to be growing. Only founded in 2009, the ACNA is close to 1,000 churches, said Bishop Alan Hawkins, COO of the ACNA.

"We are adding new churches and church plants all the time," he said. "We've had a range: Presbyterians, non-denominational, Methodist churches joining us."

As for All Souls, it ordained its first female deacon last fall.

Anglicanism, said Pelander, "was a beauty to move toward."

Julia Duin is a former NEWSWEEK contributing editor. She resides in Seattle, Washington