"I know it sounds cliché but this whole current flap is really the straw that broke the camel's back, though it is not the real base issue," Dorman said.

That issue is the understanding and interpretation of Scripture. "And there's no doubt in my mind that most of Christianity ... support the authority of Scripture - certainly more strictly than does the Diocese of Massachusetts," he said.

Dorman said as far as he knows the worship communities meeting in his and Brooks' home are the only two groups in the state to have broken ranks with the Episcopal Church.

According to diocesan figures there are 2.3 million baptized members in America, 7,347 parishes and 100 domestic dioceses, including Navajoland Area Mission, and eight overseas dioceses for a total of 108.

The Massachusetts Diocese is among the largest in the Episcopal Church, with 79,000 baptized members in 194 congregations across the commonwealth, according to the diocese's Web site.

Dorman and Brooks no longer want to be counted among those numbers, both having established independent Anglican congregations, holding worship and prayer services in their homes.

"The issue of same-sex marriage and the fact that church doesn't talk about sin or being born again anymore made a number of us feel it was time to separate," Brooks said, adding that the liberal drift of the Episcopal Church in the United States has developed a church body who, "if they don't like it (certain scriptural teachings), they don't believe it."

Breaking ranks

Brooks, whose parents founded Camp Good News in Sandwich in 1935, is a "senior warden" of the recently established Anglican Church of the Good Shepherd, having broken ranks with St. John's Episcopal Church in Sandwich, where she had been a member.

Every Sunday morning beginning at 9:30, anywhere from 15 to 20 similarly minded Anglicans gather in Brooks' Forestdale home for an hour-long worship service, recently presided over by a former Catholic priest, the Rev. Joseph Higgins.

At Dorman's Orleans home, about 15 or so Anglicans, most of whom are former congregants of the Church of the Holy Spirit in Orleans, gather for worship, relying on guest preachers to conduct the service, along with Dorman or visiting seminarians.

The name of their new congregation is the Anglican Church of the Resurrection.

"Why Anglican and not Episcopalian? Both are perfectly good words," Dorman said. "But the problem for many people is that 'Episcopal' represents everything that is bad about the church. So we are indicating, in a positive sense, an association with the worldwide Anglican community and a disassociation with ECUSA," the Episcopal Church of the United States of America, Dorman explained.

"I think the use of the word 'Anglican' also indicates our belief that it's ECUSA that has caused the split."

Dorman said though he and members of his congregation have left the Episcopal Church they still maintain an informal relationship with conservative Episcopal parishes that have not disassociated from the hierarchy of the Episcopal Church.

Report criticized

Maria Plati, diocesan spokeswoman in Boston, said last week that Bishop Thomas Shaw was not available for comment but that the diocese was aware of the two disaffected groups of Anglicans on the Cape.

"In accordance with the Windsor Report, Bishop M. Thomas Shaw has indicated his desire to invite and work with those groups so that they can find Episcopal pastoral oversight," Plati said in a prepared statement.

The Windsor Report 2004, which was released on Oct. 18 after a yearlong study on homosexuality and the unity of the Anglican Communion, triggered what is expected to become the most controversial debate in the history of the Anglican Church.

The report has been criticized by conservative Episcopalians, including bishops in Africa, as being, in the words of Peter Akinola, the head of the largest Anglican Archdiocese in the world, a report that "fails to confront the reality that a small, economically privileged group of people has sought to subvert the Christian faith and impose their new and false doctrine on the wider community of faithful believers."

Historically, Episcopalians are the closest cousins of Roman Catholicism this side of Protestant Christiandom.

The Anglican Church was officially established in 1562. That year marked the official split with the Roman Catholic Church that is popularly considered to have been triggered by the pope's refusal to grant King Henry VIII a divorce, though many Anglicans consider that explanation to be an oversimplification of a deeper theological disagreement with the Catholic Church over biblical interpretation.

In addition to the Bible, central to Episcopal liturgy is the Book of Common Prayer, first published in 1549. According to official church history, "In the United States, the Episcopal Church is the local branch of the Anglican Communion. The first Anglican service of worship in the new world was conducted by Francis Drake in 1597 following his landing in San Francisco Bay. Anglican liturgy was introduced to Old South Church in Boston on Good Friday in 1687."

The first American bishop, Samuel Seabury, was consecrated in 1784 by Scottish bishops. But it was two months before Seabury was consecrated that "seven representatives (from) Massachusetts and Rhode Island parishes gathered in Boston to declare the independence of the Episcopal Church.

By 1850, there were 54 parishes with 80 clergy members. By 1900, it had grown to 139 self-supporting parishes. Today, there are 2.3 million Episcopalians in America.

The Massachusetts Diocese, which was first established in September of 1784, lays claim to several "firsts" in the Episcopal faith, including the installation of Rev. John Burgess as the 12th bishop of the diocese and the first African-American diocesan bishop in the Episcopal Church.
In 1989, the Massachusetts Diocese installed the first woman to be consecrated a bishop in the church.

But it was in 1912 that the Cathedral Church of St. Paul in Boston was commissioned to be the "People's Church."

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