Quest for English Church Focuses Spotlight on Dissident Congregation

Their bold bid to import the ancient stones of a tiny English church has failed, but parishioners at St. Matthew-by-the-Sea say they may try again.

The bad news came a week and a half ago when Anglican Church officials in London ruled that the Corona del Mar congregation wouldn’t be allowed to acquire the crumbling St. Bartholomew’s Church building in Covenham, England. The reason: the Orange County churchgoers are dissidents, no longer in communion with the Anglican Church or the Archbishop of Canterbury.

Their quest, however, focused new attention on this tiny band of breakaway Episcopalians who left the mainstream Episcopal Church to, as their bishop says, “make a stand for values, faith and the traditional liturgy.”

Nationwide, about 70 congregations broke away. One was St. Matthew-by-the-Sea, formed in 1980.

“We tend to be less enamored with the current fads in secular society,” said the Rev. James Hohlfeld, leader of the Corona del Mar congregation.

Robert Sherwood Morse, bishop of the breakaway Christ the King diocese, called the mainstream church “trendy.” His own diocese, he said, is “traditional.”

“The trendy church has mistaken the flow of history, “ Morse said, “and we are fighting for a historic reality.” He said one sign of Americans’ growing interest in traditional values and ideals in this country was the great interest displayed in the recent royal wedding.

The split within the U.S. church has been described as one of the greatest schisms involving the Anglican Church since the original split between the Church of England and Catholicism during the reign of Henry the VIII.

The Episcopal Church in the United States today has female priests and has adopted an asexual liturgy. During a convention in September, 1985, the church only narrowly defeated a resolution stating that homosexuals could not be discriminated against in “access to the selection process for ordination.” The convention’s clerical delegation voted to approve the measure.

These are the sorts of developments that Hohlfeld and his fellow believers call the “theological softening” of the mainstream church. They find them unacceptable and say they illustrate how the Anglican Church has erred in responding to modern social and political currents. Hohlfeld said his church “doesn’t allow for secular society to set the agenda.”

For example, while Hohlfeld and his congregants cling to the traditional language used in the once-revered 1928 Anglican Book of Common Prayer, Episcopalians in the United States have chosen to incorporate more contemporary non-sexist language, calling God “Father and Mother.”

The Episcopalian Hymnal now includes a poem by the modern W.H. Auden, while 19th-Century poet James Russell Lowell has been edited out.

“The ‘modernization’ of the prayer book and so on just didn’t sit well with me,” said Jeff Welles, a member of St. Matthew. “I felt more comfortable with the doctrine of this (Christ the King) diocese.”

Mainstream Episcopalians--those who are even aware of the dissidents--take a dim view of them.

Los Angeles Episcopal Diocese Bishop Oliver Graber called the Christ the King diocese “minuscule.” Episcopalians interviewed in Orange County seemed largely unaware of the existence of the splinter group.

Said Hugh Gourdin of Newport Beach, a member of the St. Michael and All Angels Church in Corona del Mar: “I didn’t even know they existed until they started to get this publicity.”

Gourdin said that he is opposed in theory to the St. Matthew group. “It’s divisive,” he said of the dissident church. “It seems to be retrograde more than anything else.”

Victor Rumbello, a senior warden at St. Michael, said the dissidents’ actions didn’t bother him.

“If people feel unhappy, they have their own prerogative. Let them worship in their own sweet way.”

More than a few Episcopalians are unhappy, according to Christ the King’s Bishop Morse.

He believes that the mainstream Episcopal Church has become “very much victimized by the spirit of the age.”

“We’re almost radical in the original meaning of the word,” said Morse, speaking of his breakaway diocese. “We refuse to be completely captured in the age.”

Lamar Hill, a professor of history at UC Irvine, characterized the dissident Episcopalians as insular, not radical.

“The group tends to be very closed; they minister to themselves. They’re not out in the world ministering to the Christian community,” said Hill, who belongs to the mainstream St. Andrews Episcopal Church in Irvine.

Although St. Matthew said that it spends 10% of its annual revenues on charitable efforts, it is not among the 22 Episcopal churches in Orange County that have collectively assumed a highly visible role in the organization of relief efforts to the indigent and homeless under the blanket of the Episcopal Service Alliance.

ESA handles more than $600,000 annually in donations.

Hohlfeld and his parishioners said that they will continue to worship in a rented facility while searching for another “redundant” church to transplant to Corona del Mar.

The Anglican hierarchy identifies the crumbling shells of 13th-Century Gothic churches that dot the English countryside--and can no longer be maintained--as “redundant.”

The rejection of the Californians’ bid for the English country church was “a great disappointment, but it’s as much with the turn-down itself as with the reason,” said Julie Ryan, a St. Matthew congregant who went on a fact-finding trip in an effort to secure the deal. “I’m very disappointed to see people who are supposed to be walking in the path of Jesus Christ acting uncharitable towards others.”