THE SUNDAY PROFILE : A Guiding Force : In his 28 years with All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, the Rev. George F. Regas has made his congregation a dynamic center of religious expression and social reform.

George F. Regas is in his element.

The 800-seat All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena is nearly full. The organist, accompanied by trumpets, oboes and cello, finishes Handel’s “Hornpipe” from Water Music. The congregation stands.

The procession enters, led by the crucifers and the acolytes carrying lighted candles and waving banners, one saying “Coalition for a Nonviolent City” and another, “Amazing Grace, Amazing Church.” The choir comes next, then the assistants and the priests resplendent in white albs and full-length, richly embroidered chasubles--dress transmitted from the Roman Empire through the Middle Ages to downtown Pasadena.

At the end is Regas, loudly singing “All Creatures of Our God and King,” as the “parade,” as he calls it, winds through the English-style Gothic church and uncoils into the choir seats and around the altar.

Regas faces the congregation, raises his hands in blessing and calls out “Sing to the Lord a New Song,” and the 11:15 Sunday service is under way.

Regas will preside today. Regas will preach. After 28 years as rector, this blue-eyed man of medium height and extra-large energy has made this 112-year-old church his own.

It’s an extraordinary story: A church of a traditional Christian denomination in a middle-sized American city has over the last quarter century become a dynamic center of religious expression and social reform. It is famous across the nation, within its own denomination and beyond, for continually pushing beyond the limits of convention.

It welcomes the unbaptized--anyone--to communion. It was an early advocate of ordaining women. It blesses same-sex covenants. Assertively Christian, it has a treasured rabbi-in-residence, Leonard Beerman, founding rabbi of Leo Baeck Temple.

Nearly every Sunday, speakers address its Rector’s Forum on public issues. It opposed the Vietnam War, famously, and the Gulf War. It founded Pasadena’s homeless center, its AIDS services center, its medical program for uninsured children. In a time when the membership of traditionally middle- and upper-class churches--Presbyterian, Methodist, Episcopalian and the like--has been dropping, All Saints, the largest Episcopal congregation west of the Rocky Mountains, with 3,500 members, grows year by year.

Beginning with his opposition to the Vietnam War, Regas led the church into its controversies, infuriating some members and driving some away. His strong will in matters ranging from aggressive fund-raising to theology alienated some parishioners. But the combination of dramatic liturgy, excellent music, passionate preaching and liberal social activism brought in new ones.

“This is the task of the church,” Regas cries out in a sermon, “to be a place for the words of the Lord spoken through the Prophet Ezekiel: ‘I will give you a new heart, I will remove the heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.’ This is a community that shelters your heart from apathy! The tragedy of America is not in our minds but in our hearts! . . .

“The fundamental disease of the heart is that we do not like the Other. . . . The Other is despised. . . . This is the source of every pogrom, every genocide, every Holocaust. . . . I’m glad I’m in a place that helps me to heal this disease. . . . By the grace of God this place has set its face against this disease!”

Two years ago, Regas, now 64, presented All Saints with a new challenge: his retirement at the end of April this year. It would have to find a new rector. Could All Saints continue to push with the same energy at the outer edges of social and church policy? Did the congregation want to? The congregation does want to and, after nearly two years of searching, announced in early January the appointment of a new rector.

He is the Very Rev. James Edwin (Ed) Bacon, dean of the Cathedral Parish of St. Andrew in Jackson, Miss. (When he comes to All Saints, Bacon will drop the “Very,” which applies to deans of cathedrals.) A conscientious objector in the Vietnam War, Bacon says he will continue what Regas set in place. Nonetheless, the question is to what extent the parish’s commitment to social action will--can--persist beyond the highly personal tenure of the charismatic figure who established it.

“The leadership George Regas has given will be very, very difficult to duplicate,” says Pasadena Mayor Kathryn Nack. “Other churches have their programs, but only All Saints has such a strong involvement in civic matters, has been so innovative. Its dedication has really made a difference in our city.”

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All Saints parishioners include businessmen and businesswomen, lawyers, doctors, teachers, mechanics, some very rich people, some very poor people, newspaper people (some current and former Times editors and reporters belong to the church, and others, including this writer, attend fairly regularly).

The church estimates that its membership is about one-quarter former Roman Catholics, one-quarter former Christian evangelicals, one-quarter Episcopalians and the rest a mix, including some New Agers. In the last few years, it has seen a marked increase in families with young children and in gays; the latter group makes up perhaps 15% or more of the congregation. Judging by appearances, the members are mostly, but by no means entirely, white and largely, but by no means exclusively, pretty well-off.

Regas and his successor fall within the main tradition of modern Anglican theology. This kind of theology is often called incarnational: Because God became man in Jesus, Jesus is present in the world today. Therefore the command to seek the Kingdom of God is the command to work for justice in the world. In the Incarnation and the Crucifixion, God also learned to suffer as men and women suffer. Of a young man killed in Pasadena, Regas once said, as he has of other tragedies, “It is my deepest conviction that in that death God’s heart was the first to break.”

The church introduces new members into what it proudly calls “The Gospel According to All Saints,” a mix of religion and social engagement.

“Spirituality can be such a dangerous diversion from the living God,” Regas said one Sunday. “Some people . . . want a spirituality divorced from economics and politics. But we are trying to preach a spirituality that is authentic because it is inseparably connected with the real world. I like All Saints because it is not a hothouse of piety.”

The rector is fond of quoting theologian Karl Barth: “An effective preacher should always have the Bible in one hand and the latest edition of the newspaper in the other.” His preaching career has focused on justice and injustice in American society and the world, but Regas is not merely a social reformer in the guise of a clergyman. His concern springs from deep religious convictions. Those beliefs are strikingly intense for a denomination--Church of England, or Anglican--that, since splitting with Rome in the 16th Century, has prided itself on its benign tolerance of a wide range of theological beliefs and liturgical practices.

In America in particular, the Episcopalians, as they are called here, have been seen as the theologically unstrenuous church of the upper crust. There is an old joke about a drunken man who falls into the gutter. The Baptists clothe him, the Methodists feed him, the Presbyterians educate him and the Episcopalians introduce him into Society. There are plenty of Society people at All Saints, and Regas offers them not just the formalistic comfort of old, familiar words, but also the comfort--or the challenge--of belief in the divinity of Jesus at work in the world.

Sitting in his wood-paneled office in the All Saints complex of neo-Gothic church and parish hall, Regas mulls over his understanding of the role of Jesus and Christianity in a pluralistic world.

“There are these three strands of Christology: the exclusive, which is only through Christ do we have salvation; the inclusive, which says that . . . Christ is unknown but at work in Buddhism and Hinduism and Islam, and the pluralistic, which says that Christ is one of the many messiahs, and you do not have to come into the Christ tent in order to be saved.”

Of the pluralistic, he says, “I’m not there yet.” Earlier, wondering aloud to the parish, he suggested that perhaps there is even a fourth school: “There is a special dimension in Jesus, without which Christianity ceases to be Christianity. Father and son are one, not metaphysically, but Jesus is the human face of God.”

Regas’ devotion to Jesus and to God, which has been with him since his childhood as the son of a Greek Orthodox immigrant in Knoxville, Tenn., is the hallmark of the splendid, musical liturgy the rector and his staff have devised for Sunday services and other celebrations. Their foundation is, as for all Anglican churches, the Book of Common Prayer, but the prayer book offers churches considerable flexibility, and All Saints makes the most of that freedom.

The music, from traditional hymns to Bach and Mozart and Durufle and Britten to African American, Latin American and Native American, is performed on the German-Baroque-style organ and by two choirs. For such special occasions as Christmas and Easter and All Saints Day, outside orchestras and instrumentalists perform. On some feast days, swinging censers dispense the sweetish smell of incense. The liturgy reflects its origins in the Roman Catholic Church of medieval England, the worldwide Anglican Communion and the diverse peoples of modern Pasadena.

The centerpiece of the service is the eating and drinking by the congregation of the consecrated bread and wine in memory of Jesus’ last supper. The celebration of the Eucharist can be routine. All Saints stresses its inherent drama.

“This table is the center of our lives,” Regas says of the altar where the bread and wine are offered. “Whoever you are, wherever you are on the journey of faith,” he says with conviction, “you are welcome at the Lord’s table.”

Welcome is the operative word that brings many people in and keeps them here. “A primary task of the church is (to provide) a place where people can find companions for the immense journey of life and faith,” Regas says.

But an unwelcoming impression is one of this large church’s biggest problems, partly accounting for its fairly high turnover. Even with six priests and a senior support staff of more than a dozen, members can get lost. It helps to be assertive, to join one of the 40 or so social justice programs and other activities.

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The creation of the Coalition for a Nonviolent City is the most recent example of Regas and the church members throwing themselves into social action.

On Halloween, 1993, three boys in their early teens were shot to death in Pasadena as they walked home from a party. They were apparently mistaken for gang members. The following Sunday was All Saints Sunday, the day for remembering those who have died, especially in the past year.

The choir and an orchestra handsomely performed Faure’s Requiem. Regas preached a sermon based on his belief in eternal life: “The God we know and love and in whose power we now live will be with us in death, and raise us up into the light forever. That is central to our faith.” And he called upon the congregation to undertake the overwhelming task of making Pasadena a nonviolent city:

“The time has come to say ‘no’ to guns and to begin the torturously difficult task of neutralizing the power of the National Rifle Assn. But saying ‘no’ to guns means saying ‘yes’ to life in all its fullness. That is an overwhelming task--healing the root causes of violence: racism, poverty, homelessness, unemployment, ignorance, gangs, drugs, no alternative recreational activities for youth in the afternoon or at night, violence in the media. . . . But God will guide us and give us the power to persevere. . . . Together God will use us to create a city of life. . . . Oh, how that would bring gladness to the heart of God!”

Regas immediately put his staff to work, organizing and reaching out to other churches as well as to the city of Pasadena, foundations and social service organizations, to assemble the Coalition for a Nonviolent City. Less than a year later, he presided over a daylong conference attended by nearly 800 Pasadenans on how to move toward nonviolence.

On Monday, the Pasadena City Council is scheduled to vote on a substantive result of the coalition’s efforts, an ordinance requiring anyone who buys ammunition in the city to furnish thorough identification, including a photograph and thumbprint. The information would go to the police, who support the ordinance. Last Sunday, Regas urged his congregation to also voice its support.

“That is George at his best,” says former associate rector Rick Thyne, now a psychotherapist, “providing true leadership with that incredible energy of his to get things done.”

Regas works 70, 80 hours a week.

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How people become leaders is mysterious, but certainly success is what Frank Regas demanded of his son. George’s mother died when he was 5.

“Every morning my father woke me up and said, ‘George, make something of yourself!’ He expected me to be a leader. It was not subtle. So in college and in high school, I was the leader. I was the president of the student body and president of the fraternity at the University of Tennessee.” At UT, he earned the outstanding student award in his sophomore, junior and senior years.

He was in premed--”I thought the only way to get out of going into my father’s restaurant business was to be a doctor”--until his junior year, when a fraternity brother died of injuries from an automobile accident. “So at that funeral I sat there looking at this casket in this Baptist church and thought, well, which would I rather have been able to do, save his life, or help him in his soul to be ready to be with God? And that’s a 20-year-old mind thinking, but it was deep in me,” Regas recalls.

He married shortly after graduating from college, then went to the Episcopal Divinity School in Cambridge, Mass. (He and his first wife, Jane, had four children before what he describes as an anguishing divorce in the 1970s.) As a young priest he encountered and was deeply impressed by the civil rights movement in the South and by some pacifists in the North, and in 1967 was chosen as rector of All Saints.

Under its previous rector, John Burt, All Saints had already been involved in social justice issues. Kenneth O. Rhodes, then chairman of the search committee, found Regas in Nyack, N.Y. “I realized he was a marvelous preacher, and he had an active forum going. We were a wealthy and somewhat conservative congregation and we wanted to be challenged. Burt had told us we should find someone who would make us uncomfortable. George certainly did that,” Rhodes says.

“The wonderful thing about this church,” Regas says, “is that they want someone who will be a fighter for peace and justice. You can count on this place to help you grow. It not only supports my ministry but calls it forth.”

Well, not always. Regas mightily angered some parishioners when in 1971 he preached a sermon against the Vietnam War, later published in The Times. Some members demanded that he be fired. Some left for less rambunctious Episcopal churches. Annandale Golf Club in Pasadena withdrew his honorary membership, saying it was “no longer convenient.” But the church also attracted new members precisely because of its anti-war stance. “The opposition to the war was the defining moment in the history of this church,” Regas says.

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The rector in an Episcopal Church is chosen by the lay vestry, the governing board, but thereafter has great power. He chooses his associate priests, the staff and the senior warden, who is the top vestry person. Regas has used his authority without stint. He has pushed and pushed the congregation to expand the budget. In 1994, the church’s operating budget was $2.7 million, all of it generated by the congregation. Unlike some churches, All Saints has no income-producing endowment; rich parishioners have not bequeathed money. But no Episcopal church in the country raises as much as All Saints does. (By contrast, St. James Episcopal Church on the Upper East Side of New York, a richly endowed parish whose investment income has declined in recent years, raised only $945,000 of its $2-million 1994 budget.)

Regas says of his fervent requests for funds: “I have never felt anything is gained from timidity.”

All Saints has some rich and generous parishioners; 3% of them contribute 30% of the budget. Regas and his second wife, Mary, an artist, give $20,000 on a cash income from the church of $70,000 a year. Regas does not hesitate to ask parishioners to tithe--to give 10% of their income--and some do. The average yearly gift is about $2,000; the median, about $1,200.

The peace and justice ministries Regas wants to funnel more money into number 19, most of them started by All Saints. Among the programs are the new anti-violence coalition; the All Saints Children’s Center, which provides child care at the church; Union Station, which offers food and shelter to the poor, homeless, addicted and mentally ill; the AIDS Service Center; the Food Pantry in South-Central Los Angeles, which operates jointly with Praises of Zion Baptist Church, and Young and Healthy, which gives medical care to uninsured children in Pasadena.

As a self-declared “peace church,” All Saints advocates peaceful resolution of disputes. It opposes the death penalty and Proposition 187, which seeks to curb public services for illegal immigrants. For many years, All Saints led the American Episcopal Church in its opposition to apartheid in South Africa. Anglican Archbishop Desmond Tutu has been a frequent and enthusiastic visitor and preacher to the church, as has Jesse Jackson.

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With all these flourishing programs, with all this growth, with all this enthusiasm, why is Regas, healthy and vigorous, leaving at the end of April?

“Well for several reasons. I will have been here 28 years and I think I’ve had a good go of it. I think we’ve done good work . . . it’s good to leave when you’re ahead. I ought to leave when things are going well and my successor can come to a vigorous place. . . . I’m not tired, but it seems smart to allow a more youthful leadership to come and take it into the next chapter. The third reason is that I would like to try something different.”

What that is, he doesn’t know. Maybe something connected with tackling the hard problems of urban America, maybe joining Rabbi Beerman in opposition to what Regas calls the Christian right.

And so, the parishioners of All Saints will no longer hear the familiar and highly personal prayer Regas offers each Sunday morning before his sermon:

Lord, make us masters of ourselves that we may be the servants of others. Take our lips and speak through them; take our minds and think through them, and take our hearts and set them on fire!

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

George F. Regas

Age: 64.

Native?: No; raised in Knoxville, Tenn., lives in Pasadena.

Family: Married to his second wife, Mary; four grown children from his first marriage.

On the turning point in his life plan: “I sat there looking at this casket in this Baptist church and thought, well, which would I rather have been able to do, save (my friend’s) life, or help him in his soul to be ready to be with God? And that’s a 20-year-old mind thinking, but it was deep in me.”

On the church as a social center: “A primary task of the church is (to provide) a place where people can find companions for the immense journey of life and faith.”

On his impending retirement: “It’s good to leave when you’re ahead. I ought to leave when things are going well and my successor can come to a vigorous place.”