A Long And Winding Spiritual Path Leads

To A Little Church On Dodgingtown Road

By Kaaren Valenta

On Sunday, members of the congregation of St Peter and Paul Orthodox Church will welcome Bishop Nikon of Boston and the Albanian Archdiocese and administrator of the New England diocese on a pastoral visit in preparation for the celebration of Easter.

“This is always a big celebration for us. It is a happy day. When the bishop is present you feel the fullness of the church,” said David Unschuld, a reader and subdeacon.

Located in a small white church on Dodgingtown Road (Route 302) just over the Newtown border in Bethel, St Peter and Paul Orthodox Church is a mission church of the Orthodox Church of America. A Newtown resident, the Rev John Eissman, has been the church’s pastor since 1980.

But the local congregation and its pastor were not always part of the Orthodox Church. They began as a part of Christ the Savior Brotherhood, a Protestant brotherhood that was not affiliated with any other group.

John Eissman joined the brotherhood in 1972 in San Francisco, where its members helped homeless men and women.

“I never went to church in my life until I was 19,” Father Eissman said. “I felt sorry for my friends because they had to go. When I was 20, I had a conversion experience. I joined the brotherhood to be with other people of like mind. I took vows of poverty when I joined and gave them my car. We prayed and fasted and took vows. Men and women were housed separately.”

The brotherhood bought the former San Francisco General Hospital building to house homeless families. They rented a former brothel where they served meals to 300 to 400 people a day.

“I worked in the kitchen,” Father Eissman said. “Eventually I took my vows, just like other religious orders.”

The brotherhood also had an evangelical program, sending its members out two at a time as missionaries, setting up congregations around the country. “We had a couple hundred members in California, about 3,000 around the country,” he said.

From San Francisco, John Eissman was sent to Portland, Ore., then to Burlington, Vt., then to New Haven, where he helped to start the church, the Christian Community of Southern Connecticut, that would eventually move to Fairfield County.

“Then I went to the seminary in San Francisco, where I was ordained in 1976,” he said. “I was sent to Syracuse, N.Y., to start a church near the university.”

After helping to get the church started, he was sent to Boston for four years. He also married his wife, Clara, another member of the order, whom he met while at the seminary where both of them were teachers.

“In 1980 we were given the option of going to three or four different places, and we chose Connecticut,” he said. “We came here as co-ministers.”

They lived in Wilton, then rented a cottage at New Pond Farm in Redding. Sixteen years ago they moved to Newtown with their two children, Christopher, now 22, and Gwendolynn, 20, who are both students at Fairfield University.

“In 1987 we saw an ad in the Newtown Bee for a 12-acre farm on Schoolhouse Hill Road that we could rent for $1,000 a month,” Father Eissman said. “We lived there until we could afford to buy a house in southern Newtown about eight years ago.”

Clara Eissman worked as a teacher at Hawley School, while her husband, a carpenter, started his own remodeling business, Renaissance Construction of Bridgeport, with a partner.

During those years there were changes in the order. The founder died, and another monk eventually took his place. He had a conversion experience, which would result in the entire order joining the Orthodox Church, one of three divisions of Christians in the world today that includes Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Orthodoxy. Among the largest Orthodox churches are the American, Russian, Greek, and Syrian.

In the mid-1970s a group of Protestant evangelical leaders from varied backgrounds made a commitment that they would try to discover the historic church and seek God’s will for themselves and their communities. Each of these leaders was the pastor of a church or a Christian fellowship group, like the Christ the Savior Brotherhood, that was independent of any existing denomination.

As these Christian leaders studied church history and gradually discovered historic, Orthodox Christianity, they embarked on a path that would turn upside down many of the doctrinal preconceptions they had held all their lives.

“We began a quest to find our Christian roots,” Father Eissman said. “The key was in the writings of the Orthodox Church. We began devouring the theological classics of the orthodox fathers, and started to follow the liturgical calendar. We substituted readings from orthodox lexicon for our readings.”

In 1988 the entire Christ the Savior Brotherhood and all its local congregations joined the Orthodox Church.

“As a pastor, I felt I like I had to walk a middle road,” Father Eissman said. “There were some members of the congregation who felt the church was moving too fast, others who felt it was not fast enough. I was struggling myself. I wasn’t going to become a priest. When our entire church got baptized together on the feast day of St Peter and Paul in a full immersion baptism, I was unordained. For about a year we had no sacraments although I still functioned as pastor. We used a lay service called Typica.”

Clara Eissman also was unordained because in the Orthodox Church there are no women priests. After teaching at Hawley, she went on to start a Waldorf-style school in Georgetown, the Linden Hill School.

Eventually John Eissman decided to be ordained as a priest. But he refused to take any credit for the changes in his church. “We wouldn’t have done any of it without David and other members of our church,” Father Eissman said. “Our church doesn’t revolve around the priest. Everyone is a priest unto themselves. The priest is a facilitator.”

David Unschuld, who was raised as a Jew, said that every member of the congregation had to make a personal commitment.

“I went to every Orthodox Church,” he said. “I asked myself, if I become orthodox, why come to this parish? I had to undergo a recommitment. ”

In 1996 the church joined the Orthodox Church of America and Father Eissman was ordained for a third time. “We are all a church of converts,” he said. “That is really unusual for the Orthodox Church in this country.”

The Little Church

Finding a place to worship was always a challenge for the congregation, which now numbers about 25 families. For years they rented a church in Redding, then beginning in 1990, rented the church on Dodgingtown Road owned by the Seventh Day Adventists, who held their services on Saturdays.

“We would come in for Saturday night vespers and our Sunday service,” David Unschuld said. “Then we would pack up all our icons and leave on Sunday afternoon.”

This went on for three years until the Adventists ended the arrangement. So the Orthodox Church moved to the basement classrooms of the central Christian Church in Danbury then, in the summer of 1994, met in a lower level room of Edmond Town Hall.

“Then the Adventists called us to offer to sell us their church because they had built a new, larger church,” Mr Unschuld said. “They said we only want to sell it to you.”

Many members of the congregation believed their good fortune came about because David Unschuld had buried an icon, with the bishop’s blessing, in the driveway of the little church, when they left.

Built sometime around the turn of the century, the church had been known at one point as the Codfish Hill Chapel. A hall was added in the 1950s.

“We put in a kitchen downstairs and a bookstore,” Mr Unschuld said. “It is still a very small church but the fullness of the Byzantine service happens in this plain structure every week.”

 Sunday’s visit by the bishop, the second time he has visited the congregation, reinforces the priest’s efforts to capture the spirit of the Bible.

“When the bishop comes, the fullness of the Orthodox Church can be realized. It is a very heightened moment,” Mr Unschuld said. “All other Sundays, the priest serves in his place. But the priest never stands in the high place behind the altar. That is the bishop’s place because the bishop represents Christ.”

Divine Liturgy at 10 am on Sunday with Sunday school and a fellowship hour. Vespers are held at 6 pm on Saturday; Rev Jordan Vargas is the church deacon. Services are in English and everyone is welcome.

For more information, call the church at 791-9994 and the bookstore, Wisdom Books, at 790-7074. Or check the website www.peterandpaulbethel.com, which is under construction.