The iconoclastic attacks began after the Presbyterian Moderator, the Revd David Githii, appointed a commission to look at the symbols used throughout its historic churches. The 14-man team, chaired by the Revd Eustace Kabue of Loresho, Nairobi, concluded that 56 art works in churches, including stained-glass windows and other furnishings, were not Christian.

Hewett shepherds a small-town parish, the independent Anglican Church of the Transfiguration, but he has a fresh rank and uniform to help him as he pursues his bold national plan. Earlier this month, he was consecrated a suffragan bishop in the Diocese of the Holy Cross, one of the very breakaway groups he hopes will be absorbed into a single, as-yet-uncreated American church jurisdiction, known as a province.

“While I understand the hostility that Father Moyer and all Anglo-Catholics have faced from much of the Episcopal Church, I regret that his decision raises difficulties in his relationship to the broader Anglican Communion,” said ACN Moderator Bishop Robert Duncan. “Forward in Faith and the Anglo-Catholic wing of the Church are a highly-valued and important part of the Anglican Communion Network, and Father Moyer’s departure from his leadership position is a loss.

The split at Church of the Good Shepherd is an example of the possible rupture within the Episcopal Church USA, whose 2.4 million members make up about 3 percent of the 77 million members of what is often called the "worldwide Anglican Communion." The Communion is the global network of parishes affiliated with the church of Canterbury in England, the ecclesiastical center of the Anglican world.