c. 2007 Religion News Service
Church Wants IRS Apology After Probe Into 2004 Sermon
LOS ANGELES (RNS) A prominent liberal Episcopal church wants an apology and clarification after a two-year Internal Revenue Service probe that threatened the church’s tax-exempt status because of an anti-war sermon just before the 2004 elections.
The IRS told All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena that its tax-exempt status would remain intact despite the sermon that officials said “constituted prohibited political campaign intervention,” according to a press release issued by the church.
On Sunday (Sept. 23), the church’s rector, the Rev. J. Edwin Bacon Jr., said the letter did “not clarify what in the sermon … was a transgression.”
“While we are pleased that the IRS examination is finally over, the IRS has failed to explain its conclusion regarding the single sermon at issue. Synagogues, mosques, and churches across America have no more guidance about the IRS rules now than when we started this process over two long years ago,” Bacon said.
In June of 2005, the IRS began to investigate the church after the Rev. George Regas delivered a sermon titled “If Jesus debated Senator Kerry and President Bush” on the Sunday before the 2004 election.
In the sermon, Regas said that “good people of profound faith will be for either George Bush or John Kerry.” Regas went on to refer to both candidates as “devout Christians” and made it clear that his intention was not to instruct people how to vote.
But in a Nov. 1, 2004, article, the Los Angeles Times referred to the anti-war, anti-poverty speech as “a searing indictment of the Bush administration’s policies on Iraq.” According to church attorneys, it was the newspaper article that prompted the IRS investigation.
Through documents obtained by means of the Freedom of Information Act, All Saints also learned that by February 2006, the Department of Justice may have been working with the IRS on the investigation, which attorneys said “may have violated the rules intended to prevent inter-agency disclosure … to insure taxpayers’ privacy.” It also heightened concerns that the probe may have been politically motivated.
Although the church admits it would not have been difficult for the congregation to surmise Regas’ political leanings, Bacon said the pulpit was never intended “to advocate for or against any candidate.”
Steven T. Miller, who directs the IRS Tax Exempt and Government Entities Division, said the agency “will continue to work with charities and churches during the 2008 political season about the federal law’s guidelines on political activity. Our goal is to ensure that charities meet their responsibilities under the law and avoid becoming involved in campaign activity.”
_ Lilly Fowler
New Mexico Episcopal Bishop Plans to Leave for Catholic Church
(RNS) As Episcopal bishops gather in New Orleans this week for a critical meeting, the bishop of Rio Grande said he plans to resign and convert to Roman Catholicism, becoming the third Episcopal bishop to join the Catholic Church this year.
Bishop Jeffrey Steenson, whose Albuquerque, N.M.-based diocese includes churches in Texas and New Mexico, was expected to announce his decision to the Episcopal Church’s House of Bishops Monday (Sept. 24).
Steenson will be the first active bishop to convert to Catholicism this year. The two other bishop converts, Daniel Herzog of Albany, N.Y., and Clarence C. Pope of Fort Worth, Texas, were retired.
“My conscience is deeply troubled about where the Episcopal Church is heading, and this has become a crisis for me because of my ordination vow to uphold its doctrine, discipline, and worship,” Steenson said in a letter to Rio Grande clergy.
Steenson was elected bishop of Rio Grande in 2004 and installed a year later.
In an interview Thursday with Stand Firm, a conservative Episcopal Web site, Steenson said he was raised in the Evangelical Free Church before becoming an Episcopalian during his 20s, in 1975. He was ordained an Episcopal priest in 1980, he said.
“I yearn for a passionate commitment to Christian truth and to the Catholic faith and I realize on so many levels that I just can’t go where the Episcopal Church is going,” Steenson told the Web site.
The bishop and other conservatives have lamented the liberal drift of the Episcopal Church, including its 2003 election of an openly gay man as bishop of New Hampshire.
_ Daniel Burke
Protesters Meet Nigerian Archbishop Outside Chicago
WHEATON, Ill. (RNS) As Nigerian Anglican Archbishop Peter Akinola preached against sexual sin on Sunday (Sept. 23) to more than 2,000 Chicago-area Anglicans, a group outside the chapel protested his stance on homosexuality.
In a service mixing traditional liturgy with praise music and West African dancing, the leader of the Anglican Communion’s largest province said Christians must be obedient to God in their personal lives before they can unite internationally to end poverty or support missionary work.
“Fornication is fornication. Adultery is adultery,” Akinola said. “These are the areas of primary evangelism.”
Midwest Anglican Awakening, a multicultural group of 20 churches in the broader Chicago area, organized the service and rented a chapel for it at Wheaton College, an evangelical Christian college. Wheaton spokeswoman Sarah Clark said Akinola would speak with students on Monday (Sept. 24), but the Sunday service was not an official college event.
Chief Jimmy Delano, a Nigerian-American who is the group’s secretary, said the group had not been aware during planning that Episcopal leaders would be meeting the same week with Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams, the head of the Anglican Communion.
He also said that fighting poverty is a greater concern than homosexuality. “I just want the whole of Africa to have water,” Delano said.
During the service, about 25 religious and secular gay rights activists gathered on the street outside to protest what they see as Akinola’s support for legislation in Nigeria that would jail gays and lesbians as well as a recent comment by a Nigerian bishop that gays and lesbians are “not fit to live.”
“We want to stand up for gay and lesbian Nigerians, Rwandans and Ugandans,” said Josh Thomas, a gay Episcopalian from northwest Indiana.
The Rev. Elizabeth Stedman, Episcopal chaplain of Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill., and a lesbian with a partner and two children, said she could agree with Akinola on the need for transformation through the gospel.
“I wish that Archbishop Akinola could experience that transformation by being in conversation with gays and lesbians,” she said.
_ Celeste Kennel-Shank
Televangelist Rex Humbard Dies at 88
(RNS) The Rev. Rex Humbard, a pioneer Southern gospel minister who launched what would become a worldwide empire of broadcast evangelism from Akron, Ohio, in the 1950s, died Friday (Sept. 21) at age 88.
From his earliest years, Humbard knew he would be a minister. He once said he was proclaiming biblical Scriptures by the time he was 2 years old.
By the 1960s, his voice and image as a preacher had spread over the globe, and he was influencing a generation of future charismatic ministers to employ broadcasting as the most powerful medium of religious communication.
Born to traveling evangelist parents, Humbard developed a folksy, storytelling revival style that drew millions of listeners and viewers to the radio and television sermons he became so adept at conducting.
U.S. News & World Report in 1999 called Humbard one of the 25 Shapers of the Modern Era for his influence in redirecting Christian evangelism into television and incorporating entertainment features into the broadcast of sermons.
For 24 years, until his departure from Ohio in 1982, Humbard oversaw television and radio broadcasts of a then-unprecedented scope from the sprawling, domed Cathedral of Tomorrow he built in Cuyahoga Falls in 1958; the building was sold to another evangelist in 1994.
At the height of Humbard’s popularity and influence, in the 1960s and early ’70s, his down-home messages of faith and redemption were syndicated on more than 600 television stations and, he claimed, to almost 20 million viewers worldwide.
One of Humbard’s loyal viewers was Elvis Presley, who regularly gathered his backup singers, the Imperials, in his hotel room on Sunday mornings to watch “his preacher,” according to a news release Friday from the Humbard family. Upon the singer’s death, Presley’s father asked Humbard to officiate at the funeral service.
Financial contributions that Humbard solicited on-air added up to what he estimated to be $25 million a year. And Humbard, who favored alligator shoes and $1,000 suits, got a reputation as a flamboyant big spender.
Humbard may have lived large, but he avoided the type of headline-screaming scandals suffered by some televangelists, including his friend Jim Bakker, Jerry Falwell and Jimmy Swaggart.
Humbard’s survivors include his wife, Maude Aimee, who had been a gospel singer with the ministry; sons Rex Jr., who worked for years with Rex Humbard Ministries in Boca Raton, Fla., Don, who worked with Humbard Ministries, and Charles, president of the Gospel Music Channel; and daughter Aimee Elizabeth Darling, a sometimes preacher living in Atlanta.
_ Frank Bentayou
Giuliani Adviser Under Fire for `Too Many Mosques’ Comment
(RNS) Presidential candidate Rudy Giuliani is rejecting calls to fire one his top homeland security advisers, Rep. Peter King, after the Long Island Republican said there are “too many mosques” in the United States.
“I’ve known Pete for 41 years, so I’m not about to do that,” Giuliani told reporters in Northern Virginia on Thursday (Sept. 20).
“We have, unfortunately, too many mosques in this country. There’s too many people sympathetic to radical Islam,” King, the senior Republican on the House Homeland Security Committee, said in an interview with Politico.com. “There’s been a lack of full cooperation from too many people in the Muslim community.”
After King said his comments were taken out of context, the news Web site posted the interview online. By Friday afternoon, the clip had received more than 20,200 views on YouTube.
Muslim and other religious leaders denounced King, who has been criticized in the past for controversial comments he has made about Muslims.
“It’s hard for me to see it as other than downright bigotry,” said Rev. Mark Lukens, president of the Long Island Chapter of the Interfaith Alliance. “I’m sure he could do a lot better in terms of a homeland security adviser, and I hope he gives this a hard look.”
The Council on American-Islamic Relations, the Muslim Public Affairs Council and the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee also called on Giuliani to take King off his campaign.
“Rep. King has had a history of racist and Islamophobic remarks that sanction racial profiling and the mistreatment of Muslim Americans,” MPAC said in a statement.
Democrats said King should apologize.
“Scapegoating a group of Americans to win elections is an ugly Republican campaign tactic Americans have already rejected,” said Democratic National Committee Press Secretary Stacie Paxton.
_ Omar Sacirbey
Quote of the Day: Pastor Brian Harris of Rock Springs, S.C.
(RNS) “There’s another church in our community that doesn’t have a baptistry and that pastor and I were talking. He has five folks. I have three. I told him we might want to wait just a little bit, and I’ve never had to do that.”
_ Pastor Brian Harris of Rock Springs Baptist Church in Rock Springs, S.C., who is praying about the drought in his town that has prevented church members from filling up their baptistry and delayed the baptism of new members. He was quoted by WYFF4.com, the Web site of the NBC affiliate in Greenville, S.C.
KRE/PH END RNS
