The Gaps In The Story Revisited -- II

Falk's Wikipedia entry says only that after leaving The Episcopal Church, he "became a businessman". It then says that from 1976 to 1981,he was President of the General Growth Management Company in Des Moines, Iowa. Even here there are puzzles. General Growth Management, now General Growth Properties, was founded in 1954 by two brothers, Martin and Matthew Bucksbaum. However, the Wikipedia entry says that Martin Bucksbaum remained CEO until his death in 1995. In addition, the company is now headquartered in Chicago, not Des Moines, and it's not clear if its headquarters were ever in Des Moines. It did have retail mall properties in various Iowa locations. Falk may have been President of a Des Moines subsidiary. However, the gaps persist.

But now we come to an even more poorly documented interlude: Divided We Stand doesn't cover the four-year period between the 1977 Congress of St Louis and Falk's consecration as ACC Bishop of the Missouri Valley in 1981. I've heard at second hand a version that Falk appears to give informally -- the Wikipedia entry, almost certainly by Falk himself, doesn't cover the period, either. In the hearsay version passed to me, he attended the 1977 Congress of St. Louis as a layman, but that had not led him to do anything concrete about leaving The Episcopal Church. It was only a couple of years later that, while driving his family to Colorado for a skiing vacation, he decided to stay over in Denver one Saturday and attend services at St Mary's Anglican, James Mote's parish. He met Mote after the service, Mote persuaded Falk to re-involve himself in the priesthood, and things went on from there.

The actual chronology doesn't appear to sustain this version. A Texas paper carried a story in connection with Falk's final visit to St Stephen's Anglican,

In 1978, then Father Louis Wahl Falk, III helped to establish the first continuing Church in Iowa. He was the first Rector of St. Aidan's Parish in Des Moines, Iowa. At that time St. Aidan's was a part of the Diocese of the Holy Trinity (of the Anglican Catholic Church). He later was named Dean of that Diocese.

This site says that St Aidan's is "close by a substantial shopping area which houses one of Des Moines' largest shopping malls." The lot may well have been donated by General Growth Properties during Falk's years there. It appears that the wheels for establishing St Aidan's as a de novo "continuing" parish were in motion within a year of the Congress, much sooner than is implied in Falk's informal account, and Falk may have made direct contacts in the Congress itself.

Regarding the trip to Colorado in Falk's informal account, the Falks appear to own property in Nederland, CO, a winter sports area about an hour from Denver. This also makes a spur-of-the-moment visit to Mote's Denver parish less than fully credible. Falk's interest in Colorado skiing also raises the intriguing question of how Owen Rhys Williams, a Colorado ski instructor in the 1990s and apparently something of a drifter, may have been steered to Oregon to undertake clerical studies under Falk's protégé Robin Connors.

It's plain that Falk began steadily to ingratiate himself with Mote, starting either during the Congress of St Louis itself, or within months afterward. At some point not long after 1978, Falk was named Dean of the ACC Diocese of the Holy Trinity under Bishop Mote. In 1980 at the Provincial Synod, the ACC Diocese of the Missouri Valley was formed. On February 14, 1981, in Des Moines, Falk was consecrated ACC Bishop of the Missouri Valley.

In 1983, Falk succeeded Mote as Primate and "Archbishop" of the ACC. The circumstances here are not covered in Bess's Divided We Stand and remain unknown, and Mote appears to have effectively withdrawn from active participation in the ACC. At the same time, according to Douglas Bess and others, Falk surrounded himself with his own clique, which included Robin Connors and Andrew Stahl.

In August 1991, ACC bishops, responding to Falk's attempt to bypass the ACC via his new superdenominational Traditional Anglican Communion, brought formal charges against Falk. James Mote was still Rector of St Mary's ACC Denver, but his position on this development is not currently known. In September 1991, the ACC bishops attempted to try Falk on ecclesiastical charges, but couldn't achieve a quorum. A compromise was worked out that allowed Falk to take his diocese out of the ACC. In October 1991, some ACA dioceses and "peculier" parishes under Falk left the ACC and merged with the AEC to form the ACA, while the majority of ACC parishes stayed out.

In August 1994 James Mote retired from St Mary's ACC Church Denver. He appears to have stayed with the remnant ACC and, following his retirement to Florida, withdrawn from active involvement in the "continuing" movement. So far, my attempts to contact people who may have known Mote in his final years have been unsuccessful.