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(Tiburon, California) A Presbyterian minister in Marin County, is facing an internal church trial for presiding over the marriage of two gay men earlier this year in Canada.
The Rev. Janie Sparh performed the ceremony for Douglas Potter and Gregory Partridge, in a ceremony last February and announced the wedding on a Web site she operates.
Until now no one at Westminster Presbyterian Church, where Sparh is a pastor, minded. The Presbytery of the Redwoods, the church's regional governing body in Napa, knew but also did not object.
However, the announcement caught the eye of the Rev. James Berkley, a traditionalist church official in Bellevue, Wash. After Berkley demanded to know why nothing had been done, officials at the Napa presbytery opened an investigation.
The Church forbids churches from solemnizing same-sex relationships and does not allow openly gay clergy.
A team of five church investigators will present the case against Sparh at a pretrial hearing next month. If the case goes to a Church trial, it would likely take place in January a spokesperson for the presbytery said.
The judicial commission will choose between four possible censures: rebuke, rebuke with rehabilitation, temporary removal from the church or permanent removal from church office or membership. Rebuke is the mildest censure.
In July the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) legislative assembly narrowly rejected a measure Friday to allow regional governing bodies to ordain gay clergy and lay officers.
Conservative Presbyterians had warned that a vote for gay ordination at the denomination's national meeting could cause the largest split in the church since the Civil War, when slavery split the church into Northern and Southern factions.
Opponents of the proposal said a network of 1,300 congregations with 450,000 members was poised to break away. The network, called the Confessing Church Movement, holds as a central doctrine the sanctity of marriage between a man and a woman.
Last week, despite Church rules, the Baltimore, Maryland district of the Presbyterian Church voted to support a suit by same-sex couples seeking the right to wed in Maryland.
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