Anglican Group Severs Ties with Breakway Megachurch, Embattled Leader

http://www.christianpost.com/article/20070416/26918_Anglican_Group_Severs_Ties_with_Breakway_Megachurch,_Embattled_Leader.htm

[The Christian Post] 17 Apr 2007--An Anglican think tank severed ties with a breakaway Colorado megachurch and its rector, according to a statement on Saturday.

"In consequence of the legal and ecclesiastical struggles Grace Church and Fr. Armstrong are now engaged with, we judge it proper to dissolve our relationship with the Web site and all activities of Grace Church ... so that the charges of the Presentment and other matters of public trust and ecclesiastical jurisdiction might be resolved without interference,” stated the Anglican Communion Institute (ACI), an international theological think tank, according to Colorado Springs' The Gazette.

The institute had largely been funded by Grace Church & St. Stephen’s - a parish of the Convocation of Anglicans in North America (CANA), a missionary diocese of the Church of Nigeria. The leaders of Grace Church & St. Stephen’s Parish had voted in March to leave the Episcopal Diocese of Colorado and the national body and join CANA in dissension over the liberal theological direction of the Episcopal Church.

"They just walked away from 85 percent of their funding," Alan Crippen, spokesman for Grace, told The Gazette. "I don't know what ACI is without that."

Crippen thinks the main issue is the institute has not been pleased with Grace Church's departure to CANA.