The Rev. Canon Granville V. Henthorne today will celebrate the 50th anniversary of his ordination in Ellsworth’s St. Thomas Anglican Church. Had the rector of the Hancock County parish been ordained two years earlier, he would have had to mark the anniversary in borrowed space.

Instead, Henthorne and his 55-member congregation will celebrate at their new building on Route 1A in Ellsworth.

Other than the Cathedral of St. Paul in Portland, St. Thomas is the only Anglican congregation to own its own building in Maine and the first to be built in the state since the denomination formed in the late 1970s.

The building sits on a 3.1-acre triangle-shaped lot on Route 1A about four miles north of Ellsworth. What the congregation hopes eventually will be the parish hall is now being used for worship services. The land is large enough for a church, rectory and school, according to Henthorne.

“This is a milestone,” David Simmons, 60, of Sargentville said recently of the congregation. “It’s not the end; it’s the beginning. For years, we’ve been in makeshift spaces, including a restaurant and a church that didn’t want us. We’ve worked hard at this.”

Simmons, his wife, Ellen, along with Frank and Nelik Doble of Brooklin, are the four surviving members who helped organize St. Thomas in 1992. Simmons placed the newspaper ad that 14 years ago gathered the small group of Anglican traditionalists for the first time.

Since then, St. Thomas has attracted new members seeking to experience God through a traditional worship service.

The first time lobsterman Leroy Weed went to church was in 1963 – the day he got married to an Episcopalian. Today the 63-year-old regularly travels from his home in Deer Isle to Ellsworth to attend services at St. Thomas.

“It enlightens us for a better walk in life,” he said of attending the church and studying the Bible. “Everything you need to get you through life is in that book.”

The issues that have garnered media attention, such as the ordination of women and a homosexual bishop in the Episcopal Church, are not as important to Weed and his fellow parishioners as the traditional liturgy.

“A woman priest on the pulpit – I don’t have a problem with that kind of thing,” he said. “But I don’t believe you should change Scripture with society’s whims and needs. You either believe it or you don’t.”

Over the past decade, the pendulum of worship styles has swung back toward the traditional, Robert E Webber, president of the Institute for Worship Studies, told the Baltimore Sun earlier this year. The author of the eight-volume Complete Library of Christian Worship, he said after conducting a survey in the late 1990s that even evangelical Christians, known for their contemporary worship styles in buildings that had never been used for worship, were hungry for tradition.

“They didn’t like contemporary worship anymore,” said Webber, a professor of ministry at Northern Seminary in Lombard, Ill. “They were looking for an encounter with God; they were looking for mystery; they were looking for more Eucharist.”

Services at St. Thomas and other Anglican churches are almost identical to the pre-Vatican II Roman Catholic Mass, except they are conducted in English instead of Latin. Although the language used often is closer to that spoken by Queen Elizabeth I than President Bush, it is easily understood.

The prayers include the words “thy,” “thee,” “dost” and “vouchsafe.” The order of service would be familiar to most Christians who have attended services in Catholic or mainline Protestant churches. Some Evangelicals might find the focus on evil and wickedness in the penitential portion of the service familiar.

How the traditions evolved, however, would require some research.

The term “Anglican” means English, but it is also used to indicate any national church derived from the Church of England. The Anglican Church in America was established in 1977 by Episcopal bishops, clergy and faithful laity.

The Anglican Church was formed when King Henry VIII broke with the Roman Catholic church becaise Pope Clement VII refused to grant him an annulment so he could marry Anne Boleyn, mother of Queen Elizabeth I. He hoped a new wife would bear sons.

The Anglican Church in America was created when members left the Episcopal Church – the Church of England’s affiliate in America – over the denomination’s ordination of women and the rewriting of the Book of Common Prayer. Anglicans use the 1928 version of the prayer book for worship and have not “modernized” their liturgy the way Episcopalians have.

They sought to preserve traditional doctrine and forms of worship in the face of what they saw as drastic changes in liturgy, morality and order by liberals in the church. The small Anglican denomination has less than 10,000 members in the U.S. and about 500,000 worldwide in the Traditional Anglican Communion.

It has experienced slow, but steady, growth over the past five years due to what it sees as more liberal changes in the U.S. Episcopal Church, including an open and affirming position regarding the ordination of homosexuals and the blessing of same-sex unions.

The denomination is small in the Northeast, with about 25 parishes and missions in a diocese that includes New England and eastern New York. Maine has five Anglican churches in Portland, Raymond, Fairfield, Chesterville and Ellsworth with a total membership of about 150.

Groups in Millinocket and Rockland are considered to be missions because the congregations are small and have not organized formally.

Fairfield’s Holy Trinity Anglican Church, however, has doubled in size over the past 18 months, the Rev. Mark FitzGerald said earlier this week. Between 25 and 30 people gather to worship each Sunday at the Asa Bates Chapel on Ten Lots Road.

People come from as far away as Winthrop, Hartland and Pittsfield to worship at the community church that had not been used regularly for services for decades before FitzGerald and his congregation began meeting there.

“Our growth is due largely to the number of people who want to worship in a traditional manner,” he said. “We have Episcopalians and Roman Catholics who are coming for the liturgy. We have several people under the age of 45 who want the grounding in the tradition that their parents and grandparents had.”

If the trend toward traditional worship styles continues and the rift between the U.S. Episcopal Church and the Anglican Communion turns into a schism, other Anglican parishes in Maine, including St. Thomas, could experience similar growth.

“I get a lot of peace out of this service, especially the quiet times,” Simmons said of his worship experience at St. Thomas. “That is the time for moments of great introspection when I ask myself the question, ‘Have I done right with my life today or this past week?’ I can go from here to a service in another state and it will essentially be the same. There’s a nice conformity in that that’s very comforting. It doesn’t change.”