Posted on 12/06/2006 6:18:17 PM PST by sionnsar
This past Sunday Rev. Al Kimel of Pontifications was ordained as a priest of the Roman Catholic Church. I, for one, am happy for him and wish him a long and fruitful ministry in the Roman Church. It is a hard thing to leave behind the security of a ministry in one church and enter another church with the possibility of not being ordained in that new church. How does one make a living? How do you put food on the table for the family? It is all very risky, and one cannot help but admire someone like him who lives according to his conscience despite the difficulties that it can bring.
So on that note, I want to take this time to pay tribute to other priests who left ECUSA long before people like Al Kimel did. I want to remember the men who left to join the American Episcopal Church, and the Anglican Catholic Church, the APCK, and other continuing churches, who never received any recognition from anyone. These men were faithful to God and to their consciences. They were faithful catholics who understood the nature of the church as a communio, and that they could not be in communion with "womenpriests" and the bishops who ordained them. And they were faithful Anglicans, who recognized the catholicity of the English Reformation and the Book of Common Prayer, and who sought to preserve the great Anglican tradition. These men gave up rectories, secure livings, and pensions long before Gene Robinson, Barbara Harris, and all of the other yahoos came along, and long before these more recent people have. They saw the writing on the wall back in the late 60's. They were prophets, and like the prophets of old, they were often laughed at, and scorned by everyone else. But in the end, they were right... ECUSA ended up exactly where they said it would. Maybe one of the reasons continuing Anglicans are so maligned by others sometimes is because we were right about these things all along. And if these men were right about that, then maybe they were also right about the catholicity of Anglicanism, and how Anglicans always have been, and always will be a branch of Christ's one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church. We would do well to listen to their witness. May the sacrifice that these brave men made for the Kingdom of God never be forgotten. Who knows how their lives and ministries have borne fruit, and will continue to bear fruit for the glory of Jesus Christ until He comes again.
I know I was pinged to this ordination earlier, but searches aren't showing it. Could you provide a link, please?
Fr. Kimel has several pictures on his blog:
http://catholica.pontifications.net/?p=2096
I'm assuming this is what you're looking for.
"How does one make a living? How do you put food on the table for the family?"
One has Faith.
Memories of an Ordination - Anglican convert and well known blogger Fr. Al Kimel
As Kolokotronis astutely notes, "One has Faith".
At Easter, 2001, Evangelical minister Alex Jones and his flock, were received into the Catholic Church. Each journey is unique. Jones' wife was also worried about how he would support the family. But Alex entrusted it to our Lord. The experience was bittersweet.
Although he has given up his job, prestige, and the congregation he built to become Catholic, Jones said the hardest loss of all has been the family and friends who rejected him because of his decision."To see those that have worshiped with and prayed with me for over 40 years walk away and have no contact with them is sad."
It was especially painful, he said, when his mother, who had helped him start Maranatha, left to go to Detroit's Perfecting Church, where his cousin, gospel singer Marvin Winans, is the pastor.
Neither Winans nor the pastor of the church that bought Maranatha's building would comment on Jones' conversion. Jones also is troubled that those he left behind do not understand his decision.
"To them, I have apostasized into error. And that's painful for me because we all want to be looked at as being right and correct, but now you have the stigma of being mentally unbalanced, changeable, being looked at as though you've just walked away from God."
Jones said when his group was considering converting, prayer groups were formed to stop them. "People fasted and prayed that God would stop us from making this terrible mistake. When we did it, it was as though we had died."
"How does one make a living? How do you put food on the table for the family?"
http://www.chnetwork.org/
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