By Jeffrey Walton, Juicy Ecumenism.
In 2024, the Church of the Good Shepherd received an extraordinary gift from the oldest Baptist congregation in Lynchburg, Virginia. The Anglican church first planted in 2011 that met across 15 years in homes and modest storefronts in the central Virginia city now worships under the tallest spire downtown, in what the Virginia Department of Historic Resources describes as “perhaps Virginia’s best representative of the High Victorian Gothic style.”
Most remarkable was the purchase price: when the deed was transferred from First Baptist Church to Church of the Good Shepherd in the fall of 2024, it was given free of charge.
Good Shepherd is among an increasing number of Anglican Church in North America (ACNA) congregations expressing gratitude to congregations of other Christian traditions that have entrusted buildings they long stewarded to Anglicans. These Baptist, Lutheran, Presbyterian and other churches prepared to conclude ministry or merge into other congregations and wished to facilitate continued Christian ministry in those places for the benefit of future generations.
The Lynchburg congregation isn’t the first local Anglican church to receive such a gift. In 2013, Second Baptist Church in Greenville, South Carolina transferred the deed for their downtown property to St. Paul’s Church, a parish of the ACNA Diocese of the Carolinas. Additionally, there are instances in which congregations with an existing property merged with Anglican church plants, such as Ashland Emmanuel Church in Ashland, Ohio. That congregation disaffiliated from the United Methodist Church and, in 2025, merged with St. Augustine’s Ashland Mission, part of the ACNA Diocese of the Living Word. The merger formed Emmanuel Anglican Church in an historic 1914 church building.