The Rt Rev Stephen Duane Strawn

is Anthony Morello's boss, since as we saw yesterday, Morello is his Canon to the Ordinary. An Anglican Canon to the Ordinary is an ecclesiastical officer who performs tasks as assigned by the Ordinary or Diocesan Bishop. Since even Anglican priests take vows of obedience to bishops, the bishop's assignments must be considered as compulsory as military orders.

Bishop Strawn's background is slightly easier to find than Canon Morello's, though the record also raises troubling questions. He is one of two remaining diocesan bishops in the Anglican Church in America following a series of retirements and what can only be characterized as a purge between 2010 and 2012. He was originally elected ACA Bishop of the Missouri Valley (a diocese which covers the entire midwest down to Texas) in 2007. I'm told that the election was contentious, with 17 ballots, and Strawn was not elected until late in the day when many qualified electors had already left the meeting. On the sudden retirement of Daren Williams, ACA Bishop of the West, in late 2010, Strawn also became the episcopal visitor (a sort of flying bishop) to that diocese as well, which covers a scattered group of tiny parishes on the West Coast. St Mary of the Angels, however, was not originally among those that Strawn took over -- that story will come in due course.

Bishop Strawn apparently had a bad reputation among his fellow priests in Texas before he was consecrated ACA Bishop of the Missouri Valley. An MS Word document on the web site of the (former ACA) St Stephen’s Anglican parish in Athens, TX begins,

The election of Stephen Strawn as Bishop of the Missouri Valley was accepted with much emotion here in Texas. At All Saints San Antonio Father Chip Harper who had served as Rector at St Stephen’s Athens after Strawn’s move to Quincy as well as had been a candidate for ordination in the old Southwest diocese when Strawn was a priest at St Stephen’s, and other parishioners who knew Strawn in the diocese realized they had to get out of the diocese immediately and so they did.

Some at St. Stephen’s were delighted that the priest they considered even to that day as ‘a real priest’ had been elected. Others who knew him before his move to Quincy or saw his activities during Harper’s and my tenure wished to leave and urged me to seek quick exit like Chip’s parish. One such very active family immediately left St Stephen’s and is now happily ensconced in another jurisdiction.

Neither All Saints San Antonio nor St Stephen's Athens appears on the current ACA Diocese of the Missouri Valley web site; they are in different denominations now and no longer in the ACA. In fact, the ACA now lists only one parish in the entire state of Texas. A news story on the eventual split by St Stephen’s from the ACA in 2009 says

A seven-month struggle for power — punctuated by heated words and constant disagreement between a priest and his bishop — has resulted in St. Stephen’s Anglican Church and the Anglican Church of America splitting up.

The announcement came earlier this week in a press release issued by the Bishop of the Diocese of the Missouri Valley, Right Reverend Stephen D. Strawn.

Strawn was the priest at St. Stephen's Anglican Church and left in 2003.

The cases of St Stephen's Athens and St Mary of the Angels Hollywood are remarkably similar in their contentiousness and complexity. The clearest factor they have in common is the personal style of Bishop Strawn. For instance, the Athens newspaper article contains a timeline:

• February 2009 to June 3 — according to Pardue, the standing committee of the diocese passed a resolution taking the parish to mission status.
• June 4 — the Synod voted unanimously to table the resolution for one year.
• June 14 — the parish vestry called a special session to disassociate.
• June 16 — Bishop Strawn suspends Pardue.
  “He said I spoke badly of him to other priests in the diocese after he tried to Shanghai the church,” Pardue said.
• June 17 — the parish is declared a mission and the Bishop makes himself the rector.
• June 28 — Bishop Strawn fires the entire vestry and names Father Holland Priest in charge.
• July 5 — the parish votes to disassociate from the diocese.

The parishioners at St Mary of the Angels have put up a very similar timeline at the Freedom for St Mary of the Angels website. In both cases, Strawn is accused of going outside the canons of his denomination and the corporation laws of the respective states in summarily removing members of the vestries, or lay governing boards, of the two parishes, and replacing them with his own loyalists, some of whom were not even eligible for service on a vestry. In both cases, he violated the ACA's canons by threatening or initiating legal action to resolve the disputes. In both cases, he suspended or inhibited the priests of the parishes and replaced them with his own loyalists. In both cases, the parishes responded by voting to disassociate from the ACA -- and in both cases, Strawn contested the votes. In the St Stephen's case, his actions were completely counterproductive, resulting in the loss of one more parish to his steadily shrinking denomination. While the St Mary of the Angels case hasn't been resolved as conclusively, it constitutes a continuing scandal that damages the reputation of Strawn and the ACA.

Tomorrow we'll look at other parts of Strawn's background and behavior that are cause for concern.