The former Presiding Bishop for the American Anglican Church has accepted a call to become the rector of an Episcopal church, and he is calling on others in the “Continuum” to follow his lead.

“The game is inside the Anglican Communion,” he said in a telephone interview with The Living Church. “It is now time to separate the sheep from the wolves in the Continuum. It’s time to get our act together.”

The Continuum, according to the Rev. Donald R. Perschall, Jr., are those individuals and churches estranged from the Episcopal Church but still attempting to maintain an Anglican expression of the Christian faith.

“During my episcopate I have been active in attempts to bring about unity in the disparate parts of Anglicanism in the United States,” wrote Fr. Perschall in an open letter titled “Coming Home.” “The outcome of these efforts led me to understand that I had no choice but to enter the ministry of ECUSA if I was in fact to be faithful to what I said I believed.”

On March 1, Fr. Perschall became rector of Trinity Church in Mt. Vernon, Ill., in the Diocese of Springfield. Prior to that, he was Presiding Bishop of the American Anglican Church and Bishop of the Diocese of the Nativity, with 28 congregations and headquarters in St. Louis.