Rectory and Church Moves

At noon on Saturday June 30 I left the St David’s rectory for the last time leaving behind one set of keys and two garage door openers.  The house was empty save a few items that had been there when we moved in over three and one-half years ago.  It was a nice house albeit a weird layout but it was convenient to the church and it had a fenced in back yard for our dog Sherman.

The rectory move last Wednesday June 27 was a bit more tedious and challenging than the Church move on May 24.  The move from the rectory was our third move in four years.  And each house was smaller than then the one we moved from so that we had more stuff to fit into less space.  Even though we inundated the trash collector with large amounts of trash each Thursday in May and we made at least a dozen trips to Goodwill we still are dealing with more than we can possibly put to use.  The new garage is full of stuff we have to deal with if we want to be able to park a car in it before winter.   Plus we moved during the worse heat wave of the summer this far -- four days of  90+ degree heat.

To complicate matter I had a wedding rehearsal on Friday with the wedding service in Saturday.  The wedding should have been at St. David’s Anglican Church but when we were planning the affair last fall I couldn’t guarantee the couple they could be married at our church given the fluid situation with TEC.   The groom had been baptized and confirmed at St David’s.  His mother had been buried from there just a year ago which made this very sad for the family.  Fortunately the Rev. Karen Stevenson and the good people of Trinity Church Washington allowed us to use their church.  We were very grateful.     

As part of the church move we left everything behind except for personal property (mainly the contents of my office and Rege Turocy’s Healing Room).  We rented a U-Haul truck and a half-dozen guys loaded it up in one hour.  This was part of the legal definition of relinquishment –we hand it all over to TEC.

I had made sure over the preceding weeks that everyone who had personal property at the church had an opportunity to remove it.  In fact I had provided a bulletin insert which stated:

Please note the following distinctions and act accordingly: personal property as it relates to this church is any item that belongs to you and may currently reside at this facility. It may include something you have brought here and left here or something you have loaned to this church for the church’s use.  If you want to keep your personal property, please take it home before we vacate on May 31^st.

Church property is something that you may have donated to this church for use by the church and or something you have been given a receipt for in monetary value as a gift-in-kind -- usually for income tax deduction purposes.  These items are church property and cannot be removed for any reason.  Removal of church property from these premises without the expressed agreement of Christ the Redeemer Parish and the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh is absolutely prohibited and could be the cause of a dispute in the transition process into which we have now entered.

If you have questions about these distinctions please see any vestry person or clergy.   

Christ the Redeemer Clergy, Staff, Wardens and Vestry


The long and short of it is we have completed the last aspect of relinquishment and we no longer have to deal with TEC, -- we are gone, gone, gone, solid gone.  Rick Warren at the ACNA inaugural Assembly at Bedford TX in June 2009 said (Bishop John Rodgers used these quotes of Rick in a letter to our parish as we left our church building in May 2012) "They get the steeple, but you get the people" and "They get the buildings, but you get the blessing."  Amen.