That plea, however, did not come from supporters of New Hampshire Bishop V. Gene Robinson, who is divorced and has lived openly with a male partner for 14 years. It came from bishops, priests and lay leaders who have denounced Robinson's election as heretical and have heaped opprobrium on the recent course of the Episcopal Church.

The meeting Friday and Saturday at Hylton Memorial Chapel -- a cavernous auditorium next to the Potomac Mills shopping mall in Woodbridge -- was a prelude to an even bigger gathering slated for Jan. 19-20 in Plano, Tex., that will formally establish a network of traditionalist Episcopal congregations across the United States.

The network's rise has often been described as a schism. But its founders repeatedly stressed at the Virginia meeting that they are not breaking away from the 2.3 million-member Episcopal Church USA.

Rather, they intend to stay inside the legal structure of the church while fighting for its direction and for international recognition as the legitimate North American branch of the 75 million-member Anglican Communion.

"We're not going anywhere," said the network's convener, Bishop Robert W. Duncan Jr. of Pittsburgh.

To make this crystal clear, the association's proposed name is the "Network of Anglican Communion Dioceses and Parishes of the Episcopal Church," Duncan said.

Behind this position is a stark legal reality: Courts across the country have ruled that a congregation that secedes from a hierarchical church loses all right to its former property. In the Episcopal Church, this general principle is bolstered by the Dennis Canon, a church law that places ultimate ownership of every parish's land, buildings and real property -- from the steeple to the hymnals -- in the hands of its diocese and the national church.

A congregation that walks away, in other words, leaves with nothing.

"There is no such thing as a parish leaving the Episcopal Church," said James Solheim, spokesman for the national church. "People can leave. Clergy can leave. But even if every single person left, the diocese would come in and appoint a vicar and reorganize the parish."

What might happen if an entire diocese seceded from the church is unclear, because none has tried. But Solheim said the church's attorneys would argue that all of the diocese's property should remain with the national church.

Having seen how fiercely the church has fought for property in the past, the fledgling network's organizers clearly believe they have a better chance of wresting control from inside than of waging a legal battle from outside.

"It's going to be interesting, since we're claiming to be -- we're acting as -- the Episcopal Church, and the other side is claiming it's the Episcopal Church," Duncan said in an interview. "Obviously, the way the laws are written here, none of us who is a bishop of a diocese is going to claim to cease being a bishop of the diocese, or going to claim that our diocese ceases to be part of the Episcopal Church. That would be foolish."

Judging by the vigorous applause at the Virginia meeting and interviews with participants, the idea of an upstart church within a church appeals to many -- but by no means all -- disenchanted Episcopalians.

"If they're going to try to stay within ECUSA, I'm not comfortable," said Jean Gruhn, 44, of Springfield, Va., using an acronym for Episcopal Church USA.

To Gruhn and her husband, Daniel, she said, Robinson's election as a bishop in June, followed by his confirmation at the church's General Convention in August and his installation in November, was the last straw after years of liberal drift in the church.

"We're still vacillating, and hopefully this meeting will help us decide," she said. "But we know we won't be staying in the Episcopal Church."

Since the 1970s, a few congregations have attempted to leave the church while holding onto their properties. Conservative bishops -- those who opposed prayer book revisions and the ordination of women in the past, or who oppose the ordination of gay clergy now -- have been just as adamant as their liberal counterparts in crushing such efforts to take church properties.

Just last week, members of All Saints Waccamaw Neck Church on Pawleys Island, S.C., a wealthy parish with 50 acres of prime real estate sandwiched between country clubs, voted 468 to 38 to break away and join a splinter group, the Anglican Mission in America.

In anticipation of that vote, South Carolina's Bishop Edward L. Salmon Jr. had already moved in December to fire the governing vestry council of All Saints, replace its pastor and reduce its status to a mission church, placing it under his direct control.

Yet Salmon is one of the founders of the network and calls himself an orthodox Episcopalian, meaning that he hews to traditional, biblical teachings, including the position that homosexual activity is a sin. He said he fully shares the opposition of the Pawleys Island congregation to recent actions by the national church, including Robinson's consecration and steps toward allowing ceremonies blessing same-sex couples.

"If Pawleys is an orthodox parish in an orthodox diocese, what's going on? It's certainly not that we have a theological difference," the bishop said in a telephone interview. "It's an authority issue. It's a lawlessness issue."

Salmon added that "division and schism doesn't solve problems, it just spreads them around. The strong way to deal with that is within the system."

The Rev. Chuck Murphy, former pastor of the Pawleys Island congregation, left the Episcopal Church nearly four years ago and was consecrated as a bishop by an Anglican prelate in Rwanda. He now serves as chairman of the Anglican Mission in America, which has about 60 congregations and claims to be part of the Anglican Communion but not the Episcopal Church USA.

Murphy said he is a proponent of an "outside strategy" for change, in contrast to what he called the "inside strategy" adopted by the network.

"I believe the inside strategy is an attempt to find a way so that people can keep the four P's -- position, power, property and pensions -- within ECUSA, without having to embrace the latest theology of ECUSA," he said.

Last month, 13 bishops signed a memorandum of agreement to form the network. But several subsequently said they were acting only as individuals, not on behalf of their dioceses.

The Rev. Martyn Minns, rector of Truro Church in Fairfax, told yesterday's gathering that 12 dioceses are expected to send representatives to the network's organizing conference in Texas.

While that represents only about a tenth of all the U.S. dioceses, Minns described the network as "a new structure within the Episcopal Church" that is "rapidly becoming a force to be reckoned with." Its first goal, he said, is to obtain "alternative episcopal oversight" -- church jargon for calling in conservative bishops to minister to conservative congregations that feel out-of-sync in such liberal dioceses as Washington, D.C.

Ultimately, organizers said, they hope the network will win recognition from the archbishop of Canterbury and the heads of Anglican churches around the world as the true Anglican body in America.

"Could it become a replacement for ECUSA? Only God knows," Minns told the assembly. "But we'll be ready."

© 2004 The Washington Post Company