Breakaway Episcopal Church Still Practicing Old-Time Religion

Thirteen years after tearing itself from the bosom of the Episcopal Church by theological schism and legal strife, the Church of Our Saviour and the Holy Apostles is still practicing old-time religion on Olympic Boulevard.

A sign on the outside wall identifies the small, mission-style edifice as Episcopal--Traditional, but most leaders of the Episcopal Church will have nothing to do with the breakaway parish.

Its hymnal dates from 1940, rejecting the gender-neutral and theologically updated edition that the Episcopal Church adopted in 1982, and its Standard Book of Common Prayer uses the stately language of the 1928 edition instead of the extensively revised 1979 version.

Built in 1923, the church was originally known as Amanda Chapel. Topped by a miniature cupola and small bell tower, it sits on a small, triangular city block of its own.

According to a worn marble cornerstone, it was dedicated in memory of Amanda Anderson McCarthy, the mother of J. Harvey McCarthy, who developed the nearby Carthay Circle residential area.

The church was nondenominational until 1947, when it was first identified as Episcopal and called the Church of Our Saviour, said its rector, the Rev. Donald M. Ashman.

Now, however, it offers a stucco-walled sanctuary for a small, old-fashioned congregation that could not tolerate the changes that the denomination went through in the 1970s.

The rector is a man who was raised in the Roman Catholic faith but found it too liberal for his tastes.

While still a layman, he sought a stricter, old-fashioned spiritual home, and found it at what used to be the Church of the Holy Apostles, an Episcopal parish in Glendale.

In the heat of the doctrinal disputes of the 1970s, that congregation left the Episcopal Diocese of Los Angeles, only to lose its building in a bitter court fight.

The diocese failed to hold on to the Church of Our Saviour, however, and the Glendale group, together with its pastor, merged with the remnants of the Olympic Boulevard parish in 1983.

With about 250 people on its rolls, it is linked to about 60 other congregations nationwide in the traditionalist Diocese of Christ the King, based in Berkeley.

A Romanian Orthodox congregation also uses the building, and so does a unit of the Philippine Independent Church.

Ashman, a former high school teacher of Latin and Greek, said he was recruited by the parish’s previous priest and ordained by a traditionalist seminary in Berkeley.

He said his flock rebelled against “secular humanism” in the Episcopal Church--the ordination of women, tolerance of homosexuality and “the lessened realm of personal sin.”

“We try to follow what God told us to do in Scripture. That’s why we don’t go along with changes in morality,” he said.

“We have people from all walks of life, from all socioeconomic classes, from all races, but we have a common attitude to God--we are here to do his will, not ours.”

Congregants come from as far away as the San Gabriel Valley and the South Bay for Mass, where Ashman, dressed in a white vestment and maroon robe, presides with the help of an adult acolyte.

On a recent Sunday, about 30 worshipers knelt for most of the service on worn, red plush footstools as the morning light made a stained glass figure of Christ glow on the eastern wall.

A bank of candles in red glass cups flickered under a crucifix against the side wall, and a small male choir upstairs, aided by an organist, made a brave try at the sacred chants.

“We are happy to report that (a congregant) has recovered from the shingles, but she’s feeling miserable, so please keep her in your prayers,” Ashman announced.

Then he launched into his sermon, saying that the wages of sin are death, and that “theologically Orthodox Christians . . . unlike many of our weaker and liberal brethren, will not be able to say nobody warned us.”

“Within the context of historic Anglicanism--the Catholic faith--we carry on that faith to the hard-hearted world,” he said. “We are here to call them to Jesus Christ their Lord and Savior. Everything else--all our works of mercy--comes afterward.”

As chimes rang out in the choir loft, members of the congregation knelt in front of the altar, and the priest, chanting, “Behold the Lamb of God . . . the Body of Our Lord Jesus Christ,” fed them Communion wafers and passed a chalice of wine.

In the social hall afterward, there was a modest brunch of coffee, punch, cookies and ham sandwiches.

Alex Dillebe, a real estate finance officer, said he drives in regularly from Monrovia in the San Gabriel Valley.

“It takes 35 minutes but that’s OK with me,” Dillebe said. “I looked at other churches, but I didn’t particularly agree with where they are or where they’re going.”

Raised an Anglican in his native Nigeria, he said, “I like the old church ways.”

Gerald Cohen of Highland Park, a convert from Judaism, said: “This is a very clean, honest church. And people here are very tolerant.”

Being married to a black woman, he said, he felt uncomfortable at several other churches: “We had to pray our way here.”

Susan Lambach, an account executive for a South Bay company, said she grew up in the old Church of the Holy Apostles in Glendale but moved with her family to Huntington Beach several years ago.

“We tried other churches and it wasn’t the same,” she said. “My mother is stubborn. They were just too liberal for us.” She plans to be married at the Church of Our Saviour next year.

Despite the doctrinal differences and the lingering bitterness over the court fights, Ashman said, “I have many friends within the mainline denomination who fight the same battle from within.”

Ruth Nicastro, a spokeswoman for the Episcopal Diocese, declined to comment on the fortunes of the Church of Our Saviour.

But she said that a “small but very vocal minority” of Episcopalians are indeed trying to steer the church in a more traditionalist direction. They were prompted in part by the ordination last year of a woman as suffragan (assistant) bishop in Massachusetts.

“Naturally,” she said, the presiding bishop of the national church, the Rt. Rev. Edmond L. Browning, “is not in favor of this, but . . . he encourages them to express themselves. This is the presiding bishop of the ‘Church of No Outcasts’. He’s used that phrase time and again.”

Despite that, traditional-minded Episcopalians feel that they are being “persecuted or marginalized,” said the Rev. David Baumann, Southern California president of the Episcopal Synod, a traditionalist movement within the larger church.