"There was a group of people who have felt abandoned by the Episcopal Church, as I do," said Wilson, who had been filling in for parish priests. "I am part time, but we needed to start something permanent to get people an alternative.

"I don't care what the package looks like. I'm much more concerned with the present inside. The Episcopal Church seems to have kept the trappings, the package, but they've thrown out Jesus and the Bible, as far as what I can see."

Milwaukee Bishop Steven A. Miller called the splinter congregation "a very small group of people who have chosen to worship together."

The new congregation is symbolic of larger, continuing challenges for the Episcopal Church, which represents the worldwide Anglican Communion in the United States.

There are questions about whether the 2.3-million-member Episcopal Church might face schism here and/or be ejected from the 77-million-member communion. At least nine of the nation's 107 Episcopal dioceses and dozens of individual congregations have joined the Network of Anglican Communion Dioceses and Parishes, a conservative group that was formed at a January meeting in Texas to oppose the national church's decisions on homosexuality.

The network has made it clear that it intends to operate within the Episcopal Church, and the archbishop of Canterbury's interpretation is that the network is not a rival denomination to the Episcopal Church in the United States, Robert Williams, a spokesperson for the denomination in New York, said Friday. Eighteen Anglican archbishops, most from Africa and Asia, released a letter in May calling for the Episcopal Church to be expelled from the Anglican Communion if it does not "repent" and revoke the consecration of gay Bishop V. Gene Robinson of New Hampshire.

Last month, orthodox Episcopalians formed what is believed to be the first breakaway congregation in Illinois in a rented church in Evanston.

In the Episcopal Diocese of Milwaukee, which covers about the southern third of Wisconsin, a task force on human sexuality appointed by Miller has been meeting to find common ground.

A 17-member Lambeth Commission appointed by the archbishop of Canterbury and led by Ireland's Archbishop Robin Eames is seeking a solution. It is expected to complete its report in October.

Both sides of the issue

Robinson, who is divorced and living with a male partner, made international news last year when his diocese elected him a bishop. The controversy intensified last August when the Episcopal Church's national governing body, its General Convention, at its meeting in Minneapolis, approved of both his election and of the blessing of same-sex unions.

Miller said his job as bishop "is to foster dialogue and to be a pastor to people on both sides of the issue so that, together, we can discern and learn what the Spirit is saying to the church.

"I would say that we have people on both sides of this issue who are seeking to be faithful to God as God reveals himself to them in Christ Jesus, and that we have a majority of people who want to get on with the business of the church, which is to reconcile and restore to unity all people to God in Christ."

Wilson has about 30 people in his congregation; average Sunday attendance is about 18 adults and children.

Most came from Trinity Episcopal Church in Wauwatosa, where heated disputes last year over the national church's actions resulted in the departure of about 30 parishioners from what continues to be one of the largest Episcopal congregations in Wisconsin, according to Wilson and Bill Robison, Trinity's current senior warden. Some are known to have gone to other Episcopal churches, to Wilson's church, or to other denominations.

Although Miller had called for a year of study and prayer, dissidents at Trinity pushed for and nearly succeeded in getting a vote on the national church's decisions.

Participants described an intense and angry meeting of the vestry, or parish governing body, immediately before a heated meeting of about 200 congregation members on Dec. 7, 2003.

Miller, whom Robison described as angry, attended at the request of a majority of the vestry. After Miller strongly opposed a vote as divisive, a motion to table it for a year passed by a large majority.

Robison thought those who supported or were willing to live with the national church's action would have won a vote by a wide margin. Gregg Bridge, a member of the vestry who later left and now attends a Catholic church, thought the opponents would have won a vote.

"Many of us were looking to know where we stood with this church," said Bridge, who remains highly critical of the bishop's interventions. "If I feel I'm in a minority in a group that really wants to go in a different direction, I want to know so I can choose where to worship."

At the time, Trinity was searching for a permanent priest. More controversy arose when most of the vestry, concerned that the internal division would carry over into that effort, asked the bishop to intervene. The search was suspended, diocesan staff recommended candidates to serve the church as a vicar, or bishop's representative, and the vestry selected the Rev. Gary Manning of Norfolk, Va., who presided at his first service Sunday.

A growing division

The Episcopal Church's General Convention last year highlighted a growing ideological division within the church on a variety of questions, from human sexuality to the relationship between the authority of scripture and what people understand about God from modern culture, said Robert Bruce Mullin, professor of history at General Theological Seminary in New York.

"The interesting thing is, going on 30 years ago, in the last big fight in the Episcopal Church - the question of the ordination of women - the church in Wisconsin was really one of the leaders (against it)," Mullin said.

How divided is the church?

Mullin says the votes at the convention indicated that about two-thirds of the dioceses were at least able to live with New Hampshire's right to choose Robinson, even if they weren't comfortable with it. And he thinks that a significant number of dissidents who are pushing to break up the church are newcomers who are not comfortable with a long-standing Anglican tradition of living with ambiguity.

"My sense is that there's still a lot of anger, frustration and ill will, but the thing you have to understand about the Episcopal Church is that it has been remarkably resilient and has suffered very few divisions in its long history," Mullin said.

"They all sort of know where the line is, and can get very close to it and yell and wave hands and all that. . . . As angry as they get at each other, when the question comes to either live together or leave, they tend to side toward living together. My sense is that's probably going to triumph in the United States. Whether it triumphs in the larger Anglican Communion, I'm not so sure of."

END