Shipmates

The fact that her husband grew up on Deer Isle and her son settled there as an adult wasn’t enough to convince Fran Greenlaw that it was the place to retire.

What tipped the scale 15 years ago was St. Brendan the Navigator Episcopal Church, a small, active parish in Stonington that holds services at St. Mary Star of the Sea Roman Catholic Church.

“It’s wonderful because having gone to the Episcopal church all my life, it’s exactly what I have had,” said Greenlaw. “It’s a tremendous congregation. They’re just as active and they sing just as loud as my much larger old congregation in Bridgeport, Connecticut.”

Officially, St. Brendan’s has 33 year-round members, but attendance at Sunday services often swells to 80 worshippers during the summer months, according to the Rev. Lawrence Estey, who has served as part-time vicar of the church for the past two years.

As a child, he spent summers at Les Chalets Francais, a summer French camp on Deer Isle, where his parents taught drama and ballet. Estey, 61, and his wife bought a summer home in Stonington five years ago.

Estey said that about the time St. Brendan’s was looking for a new minister, he was at a turning point in his own career. He took early retirement from his full-time job as rector of a church in Troy, N.Y., to live and work in Stonington.

“I had been in a medium-sized congregation in a beautiful old Victorian Gothic church building that had to be constantly maintained, which was a major operation,” he said. “I was looking for less administrative work and more person-to-person ministry. The fact that St. Brendan’s didn’t have a lot of overhead and is committed to outreach really intrigued me.”

Over the years, the small congregation has had a big impact on the Deer Isle Peninsula, according to Siri Beckman, one of its founders. Members of St. Brendan’s helped start the island food panty about 10 years ago. It serves 120 local families each year. Parishioners also visit shut-ins and conduct Bible studies in the local nursing home.

Beckman, 60, helped found the Episcopal congregation 18 years ago because there was no Episcopal presence in the community. The original group, which included people from Blue Hill, Deer Isle, Bucksport and Castine, met in private homes at first. Within a short time, Blue Hill residents formed their own church, St. Francis by the Sea, which now has more than 80 year-round members.

An artist, Beckman designed the church’s logo, a woodcut of St. Brendan in the bow of his legendary leather ship.

The Irish saint seemed a perfect fit with St. Mary Star of the Sea when the Episcopalians began renting space from the Catholics about 16 years ago. While two other congregations in Bridgton and Peaks Island in the Episcopal Diocese of Maine share space with Protestant churches, St. Brendan’s is the only Episcopal congregation to worship in a Catholic church.

St. Mary’s, founded in 1931, also is a small congregation where attendance swells in the summer months. The priest who serves as pastor at St. Vincent de Paul Catholic Church in Bucksport celebrates Mass at the Stonington church and at Our Lady of Holy Hope Catholic Church in Castine.

Harry Vickerson, former pastor and now a congregant at St. Mary’s, said that while there had been a few minor disagreements between the two congregations over the years, the arrangement has served both churches well.

“I think it’s a wonderful thing,” he said of the arrangement. “Our traditions have so much in common. To be able to use the same building I think it’s great. I think it would be difficult for them to use another building in town, and ours is empty much of the time. The rent also contributes to the upkeep of the building.”

Lawrence “Skip” Greenlaw Jr., 56, said St. Brendan’s has had “a wonderful relationship” with St. Mary’s and its parish council over the years. He said that the Episcopalians are in no hurry to move.

“Having our own church would increase our visibility, but we’ve not outgrown St. Mary’s,” he said. “No sense going into debt until we’ve grown bigger on our own.”

Estey said that over the winter the congregation would be trying to discern what form their community outreach would take in the near future. He added that while St. Brendan’s has experienced slow but steady growth over the years, there is a need to solidify the year-round population of the congregation and its activities on Deer Isle.

That future most likely will include more people like Anne Burton, formerly of Westfield, N.J. Unlike most year-round members of the church who are “cradle” Episcopalians, Burton is a Lutheran. She moved to Stonington a year ago, 38 miles from St. Andrew Lutheran Church in Ellsworth.

“I wanted to be in this community,” said Burton after a recent Sunday service. “I’ve never been so welcomed and enfolded into a congregation in my life. I’ve even joined the choir.”

Services at St. Brendan the Navigator are at 11 a.m. Sundays at St. Mary Star of the Sea Catholic Church in Stonington. For information, call 348-8884. Mass at St. Mary’s is at 4 p.m. Sundays. For information, call 367-2343.

St. Brendan the Navigator was born in Ireland in A.D. 484. He established monastic cells in Ireland, Wales and Britain. Brendan might have been forgotten were it not for the legend that grew around his seven-year voyage in search of a fabled paradise.

Described as a beautiful land with luxuriant vegetation, St. Brendan?s paradise has been cited as the Canary Islands or an area in North America south of Chesapeake Bay. There?s no proof of St. Brendan?s voyage, but the accounts began appearing in the 12th century in Latin.