c. 2006 Religion News Service
Forbes to Leave New York’s Riverside Church
NEW YORK (RNS) The Rev. James A. Forbes Jr., one of the stalwarts of American religious liberalism, has announced his retirement as senior minister of Manhattan’s historic Riverside Church.
In an announcement Sunday (Sept. 17) to his interdenominational and multi-racial congregation, Forbes, 71, said it was time after nearly 18 years in Riverside’s pulpit to focus on new challenges.
Forbes said he plans to take a six-month sabbatical beginning in January to determine the next forum for his work, which is likely to involve ministry focused on “the nation’s spiritual revitalization.”
The possibility that Forbes, Riverside’s first African-American senior minister, may try to increase his profile nationally is hardly a surprise. In recent years, Forbes has been outspoken on a host of issues _ including war and peace concerns as well as support of same-sex marriage _ and has hosted a radio program on the liberal Air America Radio.
Such activism is part of a long tradition for the church, built with funds provided by John D. Rockefeller Jr. Among Forbes’ predecessors were Harry Emerson Fosdick, a prominent critic of American fundamentalism during the 1930s, and the late William Sloan Coffin, Forbes’ immediate predecessor and well-known peace activist who took up the cause of nuclear disarmament when he commanded the Riverside pulpit during the 1980s.
Controversy of other sorts have also marked Forbes’ tenure. Though Forbes is widely popular among many within the multi-racial church, others have not easily accepted Forbes’ impassioned preaching style which has roots in his Pentecostal background.
Still others have said the Forbes era has been marked by financial mismanagement and even took the church leadership to court, alleging $10 million in church funds had been lost, according to The New York Times. A New York State Supreme Court judge dismissed the suit in August.
Forbes was not available for an interview, but in an interview with the Times, he acknowledged that Riverside has had its “share of congregational squabbles and conflicts.”
“My approach has been to believe that I am here by divine appointment and that I should expect that I would be challenged, sometimes with merit and sometimes, perhaps, without,” he told the Times.
Forbes, who previously taught preaching at neighboring Union Theological Seminary before accepting the Riverside position in 1989, was named by Newsweek magazine in 1996 as one of the dozen “most effective preachers” in the English-speaking world.
_ Chris Herlinger
Breakaway Episcopal Church Pays $1.2 Million for Property
(RNS) One of the Episcopal Church’s largest parishes will pay $1.2 million to the Diocese of Dallas in order to retain its property as it breaks from the denomination.
“I came to the conclusion over time that there were irreconcilable differences between Christ Church and the Episcopal ChurchâÂ?¦” said Dallas Bishop James Stanton.
Christ Church and its rector, the Rev. David Roseberry, have been at odds with the national church over the authority of Scripture and the consecration of V. Gene Robinson, an openly gay man, as bishop of New Hampshire.
Soon after the Episcopal Church elected Nevada Bishop Katharine Jefferts Schori as its next presiding bishop last June, Roseberry said Christ Church was headed out the door. Jefferts Schori voted to approve Robinson’s consecration.
Stanton, a conservative ally of Roseberry’s, also objects to Jefferts Schori’s leadership and has asked to be put under the guidance of another prelate instead.
With 2,200 Sunday worshippers, Christ Church was one of the 2.1-million denomination’s largest U.S. parishes. Under the agreement with Stanton, Christ Church will assume the parish’s $6.8 million debt and make a lump sum payment of $1.2 million to the diocese. Stanton has asked the bishop of Peru to oversee Christ Church.
“This arrangement secures their title and helps our diocese continue to pursue our mission,” Stanton said.
Roseberry said the move allows Christ Church to align with conservatives in the 77-million member worldwide Anglican Communion.
“In God’s perfect timing, these positive steps have cleared the way for Christ Church to find a new home within the Anglican Communion,” Roseberry said in a statement.
_ Daniel Burke
Nevada Senator Seeks Anti-Polygamy Task Force
WASHINGTON (RNS) Sen. Minority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., has asked U.S. Attorney General Alberto Gonzales to crack down on polygamy.
Reid, a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons), urged the Justice Department in a letter to create a task force to investigate interstate polygamist activity.
He also called on the department to aid Utah and Arizona officials in prosecuting alleged polygamist Warren Jeffs, who is charged with two felony counts of rape as an accomplice for arranging a marriage between an underage girl and an older man.
The Jeffs case has heightened Reid’s concern about polygamy, according to a spokesman for the senator.
“With this latest case, it has drawn more attention,” spokesman Jon Summers said in an interview. “We’re getting glimpses into how bad these cases can be. And that’s why he thought it was important to make this recommendation.”
Reid lambasted polygamy in the Sept. 12 letter.
“For too long, this outrageous activity has been masked in the guise of religious freedom,” he wrote. “But child abuse and human servitude have nothing to do with religious freedom and must not be tolerated. Individuals who force minors into adult relationships and marriage must be brought to justice.”
The Justice Department has received the letter and is “currently in the process of reviewing it,” spokesman Brian Roehrkasse said.
Before being arrested in late August, Jeffs had been wanted for 11/2 years for arranging similar marriages. He is the leader of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, a splinter group of mainstream Mormonism.
Mainstream Mormonism has disavowed Jeffs’ sect, and Latter-day Saints officially renounced the practice of polygamy in 1890.
_ Kat Glass
IRS Requests Documents Related to Anti-War Sermon at California Church
(RNS) Officials at All Saints Church, a liberal Episcopal church in Pasadena, Calif., said Sunday (Sept. 17) they are considering whether to comply with a pair of summonses issued Friday by the Internal Revenue Service.
The church came under IRS scrutiny after the Rev. George Regas, the church’s former rector, delivered a guest sermon on Oct. 31, 2004, called “If Jesus Debated Sen. Kerry and President Bush,” in which he depicted Jesus addressing Bush.
Regas suggested Jesus would have said, “Mr. President, your doctrine of a pre-emptive war is a failed doctrine. Forcibly changing the regime of an enemy that posed no imminent threat has led to disaster.”
Coming just two days before the 2004 presidential election, the sermon prompted an IRS investigation even though it did not endorse a particular candidate. IRS regulations prohibit nonprofits, including churches, from participating in any political campaign on behalf of one candidate.
In June 2005, the IRS sent a letter to All Saints stating that “a reasonable belief exists that you may not be a tax-exempt church.”
One of the new IRS summonses demanded the church produce all electronic and oral communication materials with political references created between Jan. 1, 2004 and Nov. 2, 2004. The other demanded that the church’s pastor, the Rev. Ed Bacon, appear at an IRS hearing in October.
In his sermon on Sunday, Bacon said there is no objective basis for the IRS to have a reasonable belief that All Saints Church has participated in campaign intervention.
“We would argue that this entire case has been an intrusion, in fact an attack upon this church’s first amendment rights to the exercise of freedom of religion and freedom of speech,” he said.
After his sermon, Bacon received a three-minute standing ovation from the congregation.
“It was one of the weirdest things I’ve ever seen,” said Keith Holeman, director of communications at All Saints Church. “We’ve had standing ovations occasionally at church, but it’s rare. It was very heartfelt. The congregation is very much in support of Ed and whatever decision he will make.”
IRS officials declined to comment on the matter.
_ Chansin Bird
Muslims Say Attacks, Harrassment Up 29 Percent Last Year
(RNS) A woman in Freeport, Ill., hits a Muslim woman for wearing a head scarf; a Texas man firebombs a mosque in El Paso, and a Quran is stuffed in university library toilet in Stockton, Calif.
Those were just three of the 1,972 acts of violence, harassment and discrimination committed against Muslims in America in 2005, according to the Council on American-Islamic Relations, which on Monday (Sep. 18) released “The Struggle for Equality,” a report examining Muslim civil rights in America.
The Washington-based civil rights group has conducted such a report since 1995, when violence against Muslims spiked after Timothy McVeigh bombed the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
The 2005 figure represents a 29.6 percent jump over 2004, when 1,522 cases were reported. The report also found that anti-Muslim “hate crimes” (physical assault) in 2005 rose 8.6 percent from the previous year, increasing to 153 last year from 141 in 2004.
“We believe the biggest factor contributing to anti-Muslim feeling and the resulting acts of bias is the growth in Islamophobic rhetoric that has flooded the Internet and talk radio in the post-9/11 era,” said Arsalan Iftikhar, CAIR’s legal director and author of the report.
Iftikhar added that the rise in reported incidents can also be attributed to more Muslim Americans stepping forward to report such crimes.
The new figures likely represent only a fraction of the number of hate crimes actually committed against Muslims, said Mark Potok, a researcher with the Southern Poverty Law Center in Mobile, Ala., which studies hate crimes in America.
“Statistics are generally very shaky,” Potok said, citing a recent Department of Justice study that found some 191,000 hate crimes take place annually against ethnic, religious and other groups in America, but that only 44 percent are actually reported.
Iftikhar credited the FBI and local law enforcement agencies “for responding very quickly to these crimes.” He added: “We hope that the U.S. Attorney General’s office will prosecute these types of crimes vigorously.”
Overall, nine states and the District of Columbia accounted for almost 79 percent of all civil rights complaints to CAIR in 2005, including California (19 percent); Illinois (13 percent); New York (9 percent); Texas (8 percent); Virginia (7 percent); Florida (6 percent); District of Columbia (5 percent); Maryland (4 percent); Ohio (4 percent); and New Jersey (4 percent).
_ Omar Sacirbey
Quote of the Day: “Emerging Church” Leader Brian McLaren
(RNS) “When we present Jesus as a pro-war, anti-poor, anti-homosexual, anti-environment, pro-nuclear weapons authority figure draped in an American flag, I think we are making a travesty of the portrait of Jesus we find in the gospels.”
_ Brian McLaren, leader of the “emerging church” movement and founding pastor of Cedar Ridge Community Church in Montgomery County, Md. He was quoted by The Washington Post.
KRE/JL END RNS
