Small but resilient church struggles quietly in Village
By Oakley Brooks
George Deshon now marks time by significant events, not specific dates, and there's a moment in particular that he recalls clearly.
Around 1979, St. Andrew's Episcopal Church in Saratoga, along with most Episcopal parishes across the nation, gave up a worship guide written in 1928 that Deshon knew backward and forward. He left St. Andrew's and helped found a new church that continued to follow the traditional worship guide.
"When they threw out the old prayer book, I wasn't comfortable with that," says Deshon, 86.
Two decades later, Deshon's grassroots effort still survives, although he and his wife, Viva, are the only remaining members of the original splinter group.
And amidst a very public debate this year between liberal-minded Episcopalians and conservatives who broke away recently and consider themselves outside the umbrella of the U.S. Episcopal Church, St. Elizabeth's, as Deshon's group is now called, quietly worships in a tucked-away corner of Saratoga.
Their solemn Lenten march to Easter later this month is more a demonstration of survival than an act of defiance against the modernizing Episcopal mainstream.
"We're as small a parish as you can gather," says Deshon, who lives in Los Gatos.
On a given Sunday morning, 10 to 12 parishioners fill out the ranks of St. Elizabeth's, gathering around a movable alter on the second floor of the Odd Fellows Hall on Oak Street.
The church is in such an obscure location that current leader Peter Vogel, a software engineer by day, drove around Saratoga for an hour trying to find it when he first came to a service in 1997.
They have been renting from the Odd Fellows for at least five years, Deshon says. The parish survived some hardship this fall when their ordained pastor, Gerad Flynn, quit because of health concerns; Vogel, 34, who was licensed to assist with worship last year, has stepped in.
There are Sundays when Vogel says he wonders, "Why am I here?" On the first Sunday in March, he set up for a 10 a.m. service only to discover that his wife, Kimberly, and young daughter, Heidi, would comprise the entire congregation.
But a "pretty faithful" core of parishioners from Santa Clara, Palo Alto and San Jose keep the parish alive. Vogel says they pay the bills with a weekly pass of the collection plate. Parishioners also support a food pantry.
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Los Gatos, California Since 1881
