The Shrinking ACA Diocese Of The West

A visitor pointed out that the ACA Church of the Epiphany parish in Phoenix, AZ, no longer appears on the ACA-DOW parish list -- there are in fact no longer any parishes listed in Arizona. The site was last updated in June, so this appears to be recent. Its pastor, Frederick Rivers, previously on the diocesan site as vicar general, no longer appears there. Until some months after the Bush group was evicted in 2016, Rivers also appeared on the DOW site as rector of St Mary of the Angels. A web site for the Church of the Epiphany in Phoenix still exists, but it has been edited to remove any mention of the ACA or the DOW.

Rivers continues as a defendant in the vestry's lawsuit against the ACA, the DOW, and individual parties. A reasonable conclusion might be that the defendants have been aware of their deteriorating legal situation for some months and have been moving to protect assets. (Good luck.)

Separately, an ACA California parish, St Columba Lancaster, has announced on its website,

Due to our inability to find a replacement priest, St. Columba's is now closed and there will be no further scheduled services. All of the parish property is being donated to the ACA Diocese of the West and other local area churches and monasteries. . . . Fr. Angus Bower is now retired but can be reached by phone for pastoral emergencies.

The inability to find a replacement priest is probably, at least in part, an indication of perception about the future of the ACA. However, Lancaster is also a hardscrabble place in the Mojave Desert with the usual methamphetamine problem and not an attractive post for anyone. The ACA Diocese of the West is now down to two full California parishes, both small, and a very marginal mission. There is a parish in Portland, OR that meets in another denomination's facility and a marginal mission in Montana.

St Columba is notable for having applied to join the OCSP in the first wave of optimism in 2011. However, Fr Bower, according to what I was told in early 2012, had been ordained in an Anglican-rite Orthodox denomination but had incurred some sort of discipline there on the basis of being "too Western" or some such, from what I hear a common problem in "continuing" Orthodox bodies. Either the CDF or the OCSP then told Fr Bower that it was not its policy to ordain men who were under discipline in former denominations. The parish then withdrew its application to join the OCSP and remained with the ACA, though I'm told that Fr Bower mostly did not return phone calls from the DOW vicars general.

As I've said here, the CDF or the OCSP has in fact approved candidacies from men under discipline in former denominations as it's suited them. Fr Bower and St Columba's parish basically came out on the wrong side of games that were being played.