On a broader scale, it's the latest standoff between a U.S. body and its worldwide brethren. "We're leaving, moving on with our business of proclaiming the Gospels and caring for the community," said the Rev. Robert Giffin, the Anglican priest who served the group as a satellite of the Episcopal Diocese of Springfield (Ill.). "There was a sincere desire to remain in community with the Anglican Communion, but not (the Episcopal Church (USA))."

The Episcopal Church (USA) is one of 38 regional provinces of Anglicanism, which traces its roots to the Church of England. U.S. bishops in 2003 consecrated the Rev. V. Gene Robinson as bishop of New Hampshire, roiling their global peers and some stateside Episcopalians. For them, the act represented the final deviation from Anglican tradition.

"This isn't a bunch of pissed-off old people," said John Lippert, president of the nonprofit corporation he founded to begin the ministry as Faithful Anglicans in the Heartland.

"The Episcopal church is going to do what it's going to do, but that's not us." Lippert led an exodus of about 50 from area parishes, including his own St. Paul's Episcopal Church in Downtown Evansville.

The group initially met at the Fairfield Inn on the West Side, then relocated to the former St. Andrews Presbyterian Church, 1820 Stringtown Road. Robinson's consecration spawned a global rift on the subject of homosexuality and pushed the worldwide Anglican Communion to consider splitting its denomination along that fault line.

Of the 77 million Anglicans worldwide, 2.4 million live in the United States as Episcopalians.

The Anglican Communion, the umbrella organization for all the world's Anglicans, next meets in 2008. An interim gathering earlier this year asked the Episcopalians not to send official delegations because, they said, the North Americans had strayed from the tenets of Anglicanism, the world's second-largest Christian blanket.

As a stopgap measure, Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams commissioned a Panel of Reference to ease the strain on the Communion.

A process for appeals, it lacked authority and some, such as Giffin, said it was too late. "It'd be like having a jury trial and you don't like the verdict, so you have another one," he said. "It just doesn't work. There's nothing that says the bishop has to follow the panel."

So these local self-described orthodox Anglicans petitioned the Bishop of Bolivia, who also has welcomed parishes in the Atlanta area to his diocese. The formal folding came July 20, but All Saints' leaders delayed the announcement until they told their current bishop, the Rev. Peter Beckwith of Springfield.

Geographically, All Saints Anglican Church falls under the Episcopal Diocese of Indianapolis, but the members operated as a satellite under Beckwith, who is a vocal critic of the tilting within the Episcopal Church (USA).

Even so, the Anglicans said they needed oversight from a bishop aligned more closely with orthodox Anglicanism. "Until the Communion worldwide learns how to deal with these issues, the best place for us is there (Bolivia)," Lippert said.

By becoming a full parish as All Saints Anglican Church and not simply a ministry of the Springfield diocese, it can have the same standing as St. Paul's Episcopal Church, from which many of All Saints' members left.

"We just have a different mission, different theology," Giffin said. As a Bolivian Anglican church, the two churches are on the same plane in Anglicanism.

"They can't say we're not legitimate," Lippert said. "In order for the parish to experience the growth it should, we need to have oversight from outside (the Episcopal Church (USA))."

END