Where we came from and where we are going

Churches hand on tradition not by imitating or conserving what they have done before, but by sharing their experience with those who do not know it, and accepting the same gift from other Christians in return.

Donald Schell

Rick Fabian

In 1978 the Bishop and Convention of the Episcopal Diocese of California organized the Church of St Gregory Nyssen at San Francisco, honoring a fourth-century Greek theologian whose teaching has enriched eastern and western churches alike.   Our charter charged us to continue liturgical development in the direction the new Book of Common Prayer had set out.  We were to draw directly on the classical resources that inspired this Prayer Book —including Jewish and eastern Christian resources, newly emphasized in this version— for practices which would enhance congregational participation.   And we were to build congregational music, dance, and other expressions beyond what settled parishes might readily attempt.  Our goal was not a unique "experimental" or "eastern" liturgy,  but a liturgy embodying an authentic Anglican approach, gaining from modern scholarship, open to new material, and yielding experience to serve the whole Church.

- Richard Fabian, Worship at St. Gregory's, 1988.

Our Founders

Rick Fabian and Donald Schell founded St. Gregory of Nyssa Episcopal Church in 1978. Their hope was to create an intentionally experimental congregation that would press the liturgical limits of the Episcopal Church’s new Book of Common Prayer. The founders began to imagine St. Gregory’s as a place where the liturgy would form the community. They described a congregation that was primarily a place uninhibited by received ideas about how a congregation of the Episcopal Church should operate. Instead, they wanted to start a community of Christ’s Church firmly rooted in the gift of God’s grace to people of all faiths – or no faith at all. They wanted to start a community where this extravagant gift of love was experienced week by week in the

Sacrament of Christ’s Body and Blood. So it is from the altar that the community discovers its identity. Each one is none other than God’s friend, as are all human beings. People are made friends of God by the loving service of Christ. Friendship with God comes freely; it comes as an expression of the eternal love that is God the Holy Trinity, and it comes with an expectation that human lives will be transformed in God’s love. Many changes took place between the founding of the parish. However, the initial hope of creating an intentional community that was formed and transformed by the liturgy of the church was undiminished.

- Paul Fromberg, The Art of Transformation, 2017