Photograph by Paul Myers
Peter Vogel (left), who leads the tiny St. Elizabeth's Anglican Church in Saratoga, prepares for a recent Sunday service with his daughter, Heidi.
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.
And the Odd Fellows Hall is just the group's latest home.
For many years, they met as St. Michael's Anglican Church in a doomed chapel along the Highway 85 corridor. When the bulldozers arrived, the group moved to a space in the Sisters of Notre Dame De Namur convent in Saratoga, then to a private home in town.
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 that morning.
But a "pretty faithful" core of parishioners from Santa Clara, Palo Alto and San Jose keep the parish alive. Vogel is a volunteer, which holds the overhead to the $320 per month that the church pays the Odd Fellows in rent. He says they pay the bills with a weekly pass of the collection plate.
In between his engineering job in Belmont, his weekend gig in Saratoga and his family in Santa Clara, Vogel is working toward a master's degree in divinity through an online course with a seminary in Florida.
Vogel says he hasn't been particularly absorbed by the recent conservative breakaway movement of the Anglican Mission in America, led in part by Campbell priest Doug Weiss. Vogel acknowledges that he does share some beliefs with the Anglican Mission about the Episcopal Church's efforts to modernize--namely that they were "done to satisfy man and not God."
Right now, however, Vogel's main concern lies in moving St. Elizabeth's from its current spot to a more visible, downstairs locale somewhere in the West Valley. He says the move would not only allow easier access for elderly parishioners, but also attract new members.
For now, he's looking forward to the swelled ranks of between 15 and 20 people that St. Elizabeth's expects for its Easter celebration.
Saratoga, California Since 1955
