Dear Editor,

As a native of Detroit, ordained in one of its historic churches more than 40 years ago, having served in three Detroit parishes for a total of 18 years, having been an adult resident and taxpayer in the city of my birth from 1967 to 1988, I was appalled and saddened to read the pastoral letter of January 15, 2008—the 79th birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.—in which Bishop Gibbs announced the removal of the diocesan offices to Plymouth.

I told the bishop in an e-mail that I respectfully declined to read the pastoral letter to my congregation on Sunday, January 20 just as the Detroit-area community was poised to join the nation in celebrating the ministry of the late Dr. King. I did not wish to be party to such colossally insensitive timing.

Moving out of the space at 4800 Woodward Avenue, which the diocese has shared with the Cathedral Church of St. Paul since 1959, is not so much the issue as moving out of the city of Detroit somewhere within which there are surely adequate quarters for the administrative staff of the diocese.

Detroit has been the see city of the diocese since the time of Bishop McCoskry beginning in 1836. Some of its later bishops, notably Charles D. Williams (1906-1923) and Richard S.M. Emrich (1945-1973), were as closely identified with the city as with the diocese.

Bishop Williams was a pioneer in what we would now call "prophetic ministry" as he stood with Reinhold Niebuhr, at that time a Protestant minister in Detroit, against the de-humanization of workers on the assembly lines of the city's then burgeoning automobile industry. Bishop Emrich, friend of Dr. King, was a major advocate of what we then called racial integration. Both Bishop Williams and Bishop Emrich were intensely focused on the city's life and welfare.

Their successors in the last third of the 20th Century, H. Coleman McGehee and R. Stewart Wood in their own ways became friends and supporters of the city. Bishop McGehee remains known for his commitment to economic and social justice. Bishop Wood and his wife Kristin deliberately cast their lot with the city as residents for the entirety of his episcopal tenure -- their home during that time being fewer than two miles from where Bishop and Mrs. Gibbs now live.

If ever there was a moment in time when it was critical for a such a major entity as the Episcopal Church to be a real and vital presence in Detroit, it is surely now as the city struggles to overcome the burdens the years have laid upon it.

We ought to be proud that not only the Cathedral but the Office of the Bishop have long been situated at one of Detroit's major crossroads , a mere block from the campus of Wayne State University and in the heart of the Cultural Center. It has been a statement well worth making. The removal of the diocesan offices to Plymouth will make a different and more discouraging statement that ought not to be made.

Of course, the maintenance of the Bishop's ecclesiastical seat (cathedra) in that edifice at 4800 Woodward Avenue  in Detroit will allow the place to continue to be called a "cathedral" and its rector "dean." But occasional ceremonial stop-ins are one thing, and daily presence is quite another.

I am quite certain that the plan to move the diocesan offices to Plymouth is irrevocable, yet it seemed important to register my principled objections to it.

Two further comments: 1) As people have begun to talk about the news in the pastoral letter, it is ever more apparent that the decision to move out of 4800 Woodward was taken almost by stealth. I wish the laity and clergy of the diocese as a whole might at least have been a part of the process;

2) The scriptural preface to the pastoral letter (Isaiah 43:19) seems both inapt and inept. To compare the moving of offices to Isaiah's "new thing" and the move to Plymouth to making "a way in the wilderness" is the one of the strangest cases of proof-texting I have ever seen.

Finally, I will be identified below as the rector of a suburban Detroit parish, as indeed I have been for 20 years. However, let the record show that I made every attempt to return to ministry in the city as rector of Christ Church, Detroit more than a decade ago. I was one of three finalists for the position, but, in the end, was passed over.