Hewett shepherds a small-town parish, the independent Anglican Church of the Transfiguration, but he has a fresh rank and uniform to help him as he pursues his bold national plan. Earlier this month, he was consecrated a suffragan bishop in the Diocese of the Holy Cross, one of the very breakaway groups he hopes will be absorbed into a single, as-yet-uncreated American church jurisdiction, known as a province.

"If we can't do this, then I think Anglicanism in this country is lost," Hewett said in an interview. "Everyone who has left [the Episcopal Church] will either become Roman Catholic or Eastern Orthodox or go nowhere. We have one more five-year window if we're going to put the thing together right."

Hewett, 56, is a veteran of ecclesiastical struggles. He is a longtime activist in the wing of church absolutists who not only spurn the liberal theology and gay-affirming stances in the Episcopal Church, but reject women clergy as well. While Episcopal fights over same-sex clergy have grabbed headlines and caused much current dissent, Hewett was in an earlier wave that left the U.S. church in the 1970s to protest the ordination of women.

The absolutist group is smaller - perhaps 75,000, versus about 250,000 Episcopalians who dissent on gay clergy but accept female clergy - but it regards itself as the true keeper of Anglicanism "in its fullness." The larger group has many members who have not formally split with the Episcopal Church. Said Hewett, "They're so infected by radiation poisoning they're almost paralyzed. We've been quarantined and away from the vile system, so we've kept ourselves fresh."

Hewett sees himself as uniquely positioned to broker unity among the absolutists and to lure in more-moderate dissidents as well. He has spent years setting up parishes and even dioceses to serve Episcopal "refugees," and has watched as breakaway groups have formed and feuded and splintered.

"There is an awareness among a lot of the leaders of these jurisdictions that we've got to find some new paradigm," he said. The Holy Unity plan, he said, has the blessing of Bishop John Broadhurst, head of Forward in Faith Great Britain and a godfather to many U.S. traditionalists, and Bishop Robert Waggener, Hewett's overseer in the 23-parish Diocese of the Holy Cross.

Waggener, in an interview from his Alabama office, said Hewett had "a real vision for the unity of the church and a zeal in pursuing that. I believe in it, too, because we present such a fractured face to people that they are reluctant to affiliate."

Philadelphia is key, Hewett said, "because the complete crackup of the Episcopal Church occurred here." He was referring to the historic ordination of 11 women as Episcopal deacons here in 1974, a defiant act that won sanction from church leaders two years later. Hewett, then a young priest at Church of the Good Shepherd in Rosemont, left the denomination in protest along with tens of thousands of others, and saw an early plan for a single, Philadelphia-based province of traditionalists fall apart.

The church "was all smashed to pieces in Philadelphia, and I think it would be just like God to show healing and renewal in the very place where it broke down," Hewett said. "If we can get our act together here and give leadership to the rest of the United States, we can pull the whole thing together."

Hewett said he returned to this area to found the Transfiguration parish in 1997 and organize a coalition of 12 parishes and mission churches called the Anglican Fellowship of the Delaware Valley. That loose coalition, now linked to five traditionalist jurisdictions, is to be the seedbed for the Holy Unity strategy.

Here, he said, is how it will work:

First, the coalition will declare itself an official deanery, or grouping of parishes. Then, the deanery will declare itself a diocese - the first in the seminal national province. The bishops of the five current jurisdictions will release the local parishes to join the new diocese. A legislative synod will be held and a bishop elected for the new diocese.

In Hewett's ultimate vision, each of the 50 states will have a traditionalist diocese, all linked to the national province and its archbishop. "We would just empty out the existing jurisdictions" and replace them with the single province and its dioceses, he said.

The goal is to have this happen in the next three years or so, in tandem with a move by Broadhurst's British group to set up a third, traditionalist province in the Church of England. The new American province, Hewett said, "can be an official province of the Anglican Communion by being linked with Forward in Faith Great Britain." It would be based in Washington, so its leaders could network with the powerful "to prevent us from becoming marginalized."

Hewett spelled this out as he sat in the basement quarters of his little Phoenixville church, beneath a display of the shields of the apostles. He is a spry man with a self-assured air. He also is a student of military history who draws freely from battlefield concepts: "We need a clearly defined objective, logistics and support, a unified chain of command, and must keep everything simple."

Are the parishes in the local fellowship ready to proceed? Hewett said he realized the several that remain connected to the Episcopal Diocese of Pennsylvania may face property fights and "are going to have to find their own timetable to get out."

The rectors of two of the parishes, the Rev. David Moyer of Church of the Good Shepherd and the Rev. David Ousley of St. James the Less, both lauded Hewett but said they had only a rough idea of the Holy Unity plan.

"It's not clear to me how it would work," said Ousley, "but it's certainly something we would look at."

Episcopalian historian R. William Franklin, dean emeritus of Yale's Berkeley Divinity School, said the blue-ribbon Anglican inquiry into the gay-clergy crisis, in its recently released Windsor Report, approved of dissident groups' unifying but opposed their seeking recognition from overseas provinces that are in the Anglican Communion, as Hewett seeks to do.

"What they are doing is out of line," Franklin said.

Hewett is driven by a cold disdain for the liberal leadership of the Episcopal Church, particularly Bishop Charles Bennison of Pennsylvania, whose gay-rights stance and modernist theology are loathed by traditionalists.

"Bennison and his group are the emerging church of the Antichrist," Hewett said. "John, in his first epistle, said that anyone who denies that Jesus is God in the flesh is the spirit of the Antichrist."

Bennison, in an interview, said Hewett's condemnation reflected "the pain of schism that we all live with." But the gospels, he said, "remind us that one of the most unhelpful ways to live together is to do what sociologists call deviant labeling, especially with people you are not in conversation with."

Bennison issued a warning to parishes still in his fold. They can join the new province, "but if they try to take their buildings, it is incumbent on the diocese to retain the properties because they were given to the diocese for the episcopal work of the church." He also said the diocese's membership numbers had begun edging upward, "and I feel sad these folks can't come with us into a bright future."

Hewett said he was taking his cues not from Bennison but from a higher authority.

"I believe I was given this task directly by God," he said. "God called me back to this area to set this up. I'm going to state my goals clearly, and if I fail, I fail. But my goal is to see that this region becomes a new diocese that will be the pivot around which we build up one province. And I'm going to spend the rest of my life doing it."

Jim Remsen is Faith Life editor of the Philadelphia INQUIRER