The Rev. Brad Jones, rector of Christ Church Episcopal, on State Street in Schenectady, also is a lifelong Episcopalian. Now 46, he has seven children and will celebrate his 20th wedding anniversary this year.

Jones once was gay but said he believes he was "healed" through prayer. He said he believes homosexuality is a sin and that he suffered from a form of spiritual illness akin to alcoholism, gambling or sex addiction.

"I was prayed back into the kingdom," he said. "God did not create me to be a homosexual. Our culture and society have grabbed onto this wishful thinking that people are born that way."

The two men stand on opposite sides of a fault line in the Episcopal Church that split wide open after a majority of U.S. bishops voted in August to ordain V. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire. Robinson is openly gay.

Conservatives, like Jones, see homosexuality as biblically unacceptable. But St. John and others consider that an outdated and prejudiced view of human sexuality that the church must move beyond.

That's a profound question being debated by the 2.3 million members of the Episcopal Church USA.

While the debate over the acceptance of gay clergy has raged nationwide, it has been particularly divisive in the 12,000-member Albany Episcopal Diocese, which has in the past been more conservative than the church at large. In 1989, Albany Bishop David Ball opposed a city gay rights bill -- 13 years after his church's General Convention voted to support civil rights for homosexuals.

Today, Albany Bishop Daniel Herzog is working with a movement that would join conservative dioceses in a network that would refuse to recognize Robinson or any openly gay clergy. Several churches in New Hampshire, opposed to the gay bishop, have asked Herzog to provide oversight.

Conversely, if conservatives consummate their network, liberal churches in conservative dioceses may seek oversight from other liberal dioceses, said the Rev. Keith Owen of St. Paul's Church in Albany, whose church welcomes gay members.

Some Albany clergy have formed their own group to oppose Herzog. They say the network would create a schism that might never heal, possibly throwing ownership of church property and other assets into a legal fight.

Opposition mounts

Herzog, who has been bishop since 1998, is a leader in the American Anglican Council, which contends that the church is straying from a strict interpretation of the Bible. The council receives funding from Pittsburgh billionaire Richard Mellon Scaife, who also is a major supporter of the Heritage Foundation and other conservative causes. Jones' church in Schenectady is affiliated with the council, as is the Church of the Messiah in Glens Falls.

Later this month, Herzog and Bishop Suffragan David Bena, his assistant, will go to Plano, Texas, where Episcopal bishops will discuss the proposed diocesan network.

Herzog's office declined interview requests, but the bishop has posted several items about the matter on the diocesan Web site.

After Pittsburgh Bishop Robert Duncan announced last month that Albany and 12 other dioceses already had agreed to join the network, three dioceses in Florida backed away. Herzog, meanwhile, wrote that media reports that Albany had already joined the network were "somewhat inaccurate," although he said he and Bena "support the network proposal ... we are watching to see how this takes shape."

On Dec. 18, he reported to diocese priests and deacons that he and Bena would go to the Plano meeting, though he closed his message by asking: "How does anyone get the nutty idea that we can take a diocese anywhere?"

The Plano meeting "isn't going to be a declaration of independence," said Cynthia Brust, a spokeswoman for the council. "We are looking at how to form the network, and see who's in and who might want to wait."

Yet many Episcopalians have already made up their minds.

Calls for unity

Some churches in the Albany diocese are defying Herzog and have formed a group to prevent the bishop from taking the diocese into any separate network. St. John is a founding member of that group, called Albany Via Media, based on a Latin phrase meaning "middle way."

Rector James Brooks-McDonald, co-president of Albany Via Media and rector of St. Stephen's Church in Schenectady, said the group's purpose is to "shed light on what is going on and to keep the diocese within the Episcopal Church USA."

He notes that Herzog is trying to use money to pressure the national church. After the controversy over Robinson's ordination erupted, Herzog allowed local churches to withhold all their contributions from the national church. Before that, a church had to forward at least 10 percent of their donations.

Yet this is not an abstract dispute among church leaders. Even within his own church, Brooks-McDonald said, the issue has divided people.

"We've had two or three families leave, although I'm not sure why they did," he said. "But we've had four or five new families come in. This issue has hit some families very personally."

Nor is it seen as a simple question of acceptable sexual orientation.

"The issue now isn't ultimately about homosexuality," Jones said. "It's about the word of God. Is it authoritative or can we pick and choose?"

St. John counters that such "narrow interpretations" of the Bible reflect the prejudices of an earlier age. He notes that Scripture has been used to justify such practices as slavery and the stoning of adulterers.

"The Old Testament was written in a very different time," St. John said. "Would our diocese have us believe that we should treat women the way they were treated back then?"

There's no dispute that the situation could land in the civil courts if the network forms and starts taking action.

"The moment they do anything that looks like a schism, the lawsuits will begin to fly," said Owen, who helped circulate a letter signed by about 350 clergy and lay people opposing the Herzog's support for the network.

"You'd have a fight over real estate, endowments, other assets. It could take a decade to settle," Owen said. "It would be so ugly and so messy."

On that point, he and Jones, the more conservative pastor from Schenectady, sadly agree.

"This is the kind of things that makes lawyers giggle with delight, but it just makes my head hurt," Jones said, adding that the church is in a "dangerous situation."

"If the church exists in a generation from now," he said, "it will be very, very different than what anyone knows now."

All Times Union materials copyright 1996-2004, Capital Newspapers Division of The Hearst Corporation, Albany, N.Y.