Darien, USA - At a morning service on Tuesday in St. Paul's Church here, a worshiper read a poem urging his pastor to stand firm against the moral decay embodied by the local bishop and the church's national leadership. Fifty miles away in Watertown, a pastor drew chuckles when he asked his flock to pray for the bishop, who has threatened to silence him for his defiance.
All told, six Episcopal churches have rejected the authority of the bishop of the Connecticut Diocese and stopped paying their diocesan dues because of the bishop's liberal views on homosexuality and his support for a gay bishop in New Hampshire.
The bishop, Andrew D. Smith, has responded by threatening to remove the pastors of those congregations from their pulpits if they do not rejoin the fold by Friday. The Rev. Christopher Leighton, the rector of St. Paul's, says a reconciliation will not happen without supernatural intervention. "It would be a miracle," he said. "There's no doubt about it."
The ideological rift in Connecticut is only the latest convulsion in a wave of rebellion shaking the Episcopal church all across the country, fallout from the consecration of a gay Episcopal bishop in New Hampshire in 2003 and the church's softening stance on gay marriage.
In the last year, about a dozen churches have broken with the Episcopal Church USA, the American arm of Anglicanism, and joined Anglican dioceses in Africa and South America whose leaders still view homosexuality as an abomination. Many other churches have split in two, or have joined networks of dissenting churches within the national church.
At the same time, the Episcopal Church USA faces growing opposition in the international Anglican Communion for its position on sexuality. On Wednesday, the American church's executive council decided not to send voting delegates to the annual world meeting of Anglicans in June, obeying a request that the global council of the church had made to pacify angry Anglican leaders in many countries.
The global leadership had asked the American church to send nonvoting delegates instead to explain the church's position on homosexuality, and the American church said on Wednesday that it would do that.
"Voluntarily withdrawing an Episcopal representative at this meeting, while it's a difficult thing to do, should be very warmly received," said the Rev. William L. Sachs, director of the Episcopal Church Foundation, an independent group that follows trends in the church.
To address the American church's internal ferment, the global leaders, or primates, also called for the archbishop of Canterbury, the church's worldwide head, to create a panel to hear disputes between American churches and their bishops. But that panel has not been created yet. This has left the six churches in Connecticut with what they say is an unpalatable option: reporting to an alternative bishop chosen by Bishop Smith.
No organization, including the Episcopal Church USA, keeps track of the number of parishes that split or leave because of theological differences with the mother church. But in the last few weeks, members of an Episcopal church in Tempe, Ariz., left to form their own church, the third-largest church in Alabama split, and on Sunday members of the biggest parish in the Diocese of Eastern Kansas are expected to vote to quit the Episcopal Church USA.
Ronald McCrary, the rector of the Kansas church, Christ Episcopal in Overland Park, said, "From my vantage point it seems like the pressure is building for congregations to act, and therefore the pace and frequency of parishes coming to a conclusion to separate from the Episcopal Church is picking up."
In Connecticut, as elsewhere, discontent among conservative congregations over what they perceive to be the church's liberal drift - both on matters of scripture and on social policy - has been building for years. Father Leighton said it crested in 2003, with Bishop Smith's ordination of a gay priest, followed by his vote for the consecration of the gay bishop, V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.
Last year, the six churches sought to be supervised by another bishop. But they did not want Bishop Smith to choose that bishop. In addition to Father Leighton of St. Paul's, the other priests and churches are Allyn Benedict of Christ Church Watertown; Mark Hansen of St. John's Church and Donald Helmandollar of Trinity Church in Bristol; Ronald Gauss of Bishop Seabury Church in Groton; and Gilbert Wilkes of Christ and the Epiphany Church in East Haven.
The two sides spent months trading accusations of bad faith. On March 29, Bishop Smith notified the six rectors that they had "abandoned the communion of this Church," a canon offense punishable by removal and possible defrocking. He told the priests that if they wanted to reconcile, they needed to do it by April 15.
None of the rectors has responded, said Leslie Jones Tollefson, a diocese spokeswoman.
St. Paul's is an airy place where prayer is led with acoustic guitars, the worshipers are all born-again Christians and a pamphlet subtitled "Exposing the 'Gay' Theology" is stacked by the entrance. Last week, the church's lay leaders wrote Bishop Smith that they would not let Father Leighton meet with the bishop until the bishop had spelled out what the rector had done wrong.
The diocese's director for communication, Karin Hamilton, said that the dispute "is clearly a matter of authority rather than a theological difference."
"The priests," she said, "take vows of obedience to their bishop in their ordination, and these priests are essentially not accepting the authority of the bishop."
Father Leighton would agree, at least, that the sticking point is an issue of obedience. On Tuesday, he preached on the apostles Peter and John, who are forbidden by the religious rulers of Israel to spread Jesus's gospel and reply that they answer to God, not to the theocracy. Eventually, the Bible says, many priests of Israel "became obedient" to the faith of Peter and John.
"Let's pray for that," Father Leighton told his flock. "Let's pray that large numbers of priests become obedient to their faith."