Good Shepherd Mission, Fort Defiance, Ariz, is much more than a simple parish church, although it is that. In its 103-year history, it has been a hospital, school, orphanage and training centre. Currently, mental health, AODA and traditional healing, Americorp and a community college rent space inexpensively. There is housing for teachers in the local school system.

Just this year, the mission has converted one of the 15 or so buildings on its compound into a guest house. It has outstations in Sawmill and Coal Mine, house churches "way out" across the reservation, and devoted friends in places like Darien, Conn., Cincinnati, Ohio and Sewanee, Tenn. Its gentle influence is far reaching.

The vicar of the Good Shepherd is the Rev. David Sutcliffe, who moved to the mission from Menomonee Falls, Wis., a year ago, with his wife and three of their five children. They are learning to "walk in harmony" with Navajo ways, where four of them are often the only Anglos. One son is a Nicaraguan Indian, and he is enjoying the fact that "he looks just like them."

"On a typical Sunday," Fr. Sutcliffe said, "attendance may be 100 people. The next Sunday, it may be a hundred different people. When people are invited for healing, the laying on of hands, there may be two, there may be 30. We've had 60 baptisms this year, kids and teens. The mission has lots of burials too, but not many weddings," he said. His sermons are in English, translated into Navajo. Half the hymns are from a Navajo ecumenical hymnal -- "old gospel things."

Services, he said, are "very formal Anglo-Catholic, but in some ways very loose." Ceremonial practices are strong in Navajo spirituality. The two traditions are unique and separate. "they don't want us coming in and expropriating their traditions." Yet they're connected by, among other things, a "sensual approach to worship," with a fondness for "Anglo-Catholic processional movement, visual things like candles, cedar for incense."

"It's a little like working in a foreign country," Fr. Sutcliffe said, "with different values, a different language. We have to figure out the essence of the faith. Not just Western European, but what is the Navajo expression of faith?"

Needs are great in the community, the Navajo reservation. "There are 250,000 people on the reservation, and only 500 businesses, including McDonald's." Good Shepherd runs "the only viable food bank in the area." At Window Rock jail last holiday season, the staff was off and prisoners were slated to dine on peanut butter sandwiches. The local Roman Catholic church provided a Thanksgiving feast; Good Shepherd served a Christmas turkey dinner.

The opportunity for young people from far away to learn Navajo culture and teach their own is a primary ministry of Good Shepherd. Jim Anderson, youth director of St. Luke's Church in Dairen, Conn., has for four years taken 25-35 of his senior high students to Fort Defiance for 10 summer days of "servant partnership".

First the students must earn the right to go by performing at least 35 hours of service -- acolyting, singing in the choir, working at the soup kitchen or with Habitat for Humanity. They must help raise money for the trip in contributions and grants.

At Good Shepherd, they run Vacation Bible School for Navajo children, work on renovation and maintenance, and last year helped to turn the "fancy old rectory" into Givens Guest House.

Mr Anderson said "Darien is a commuting town for New York. There's money here, the kids are well provided for and well adjusted. This project has a marked impact -- it is their first knowledge of poverty."

In June and July, the area can be hot and dry, the relatively high altitude affecting. "The physical presence of the country, the canyons and mesas, the presence of Spirit," are felt. And there is history, "a deeply entrenched culture of thousands of years, compared to Anglos' few hundred years. It gives them a sense of perspective."

Some of St Luke's young people have gone all four years. "The Navajo people are gentle, warm and loving. We develop relationships with the kids," Mr. Anderson said.

Fr. Sutcliffe's newsletter said, "We aided in the ongoing student exchange program between Choate/Rosemary Hall and the Ft. Defiance/Window Rock School District. We had 10-12 students and advisors from Choate/Rosemary Hall stay with us for seven weeks while a similar number of Navajo students experience life on the Choate/Rosemary Hall campus." The exchange helps to "bridge the culture shock."

Thirteen undergraduate students from the University of the South, Sewanee, Tenn., recently returned from their chapel outreach stay at Good Shepherd. According to staff chaperone Tom Lewallen, it was no picnic. "They worked 10 hours a day. Then they studied," he said. "They did painting, cleaning, light carpentry. Last year we worked at Givens House. It's lovely!" The students also tutored elementary children at the local school. "It was an opportunity for [Sewanee students] to see in-house a third world society. It was an eye-opener, and a very positive experience." The college students worked with the children in reading, writing and after-school care. "The little kids loved the attention. Lots of tears were shed when [the Sewanee students] had to leave their kids.

"They took us to Coal Mine for a Navajo service in a little church. We lit the wood stove. We sang old Southern hymns in Navajo, and a 96-year-old man read the gospel in Navajo. The kids there take a Navajo class daily." The Indian people don't want traditions to be lost, he said.

"Our students were sort of put on a pedestal. We had talked about reverse racism but it didn't happen."

One of the mission's two lay ministers in Margaret Hardy. Fr. Sutcliffe said, "She's seen the church through thick and thin, for 40 years!" She says she is "a pastor to the people." She counsels, trains, acolytes, manages youth ministries, oversees buildings and grounds, conducts Morning and Evening Prayer.

"I was raised at Good Shepherd," she said. "My mother died at my birth. Good Shepherd was an orphanage, a hospital, a boarding school. Now it's a church and a parish hall."

Ms. Hardy can take time to talk to people. "I encourage parents to teach the Navajo language, to respect both traditions," she said. "I tell them they need to listen to the stories. Old Testament stories are similar to Navajo stories -- listen to the chanters! You need to know where you come from, who you are, in order to figure out where you're going."

She is pleased that the young people who were part of Good Shepherd as children and left for education elsewhere have returned, often with families. "It makes you feel real good."

One who returned is Steven Tsosie Plummer. He is Margaret Hardy's nephew, in the Anglo sense, or grandson in the Navajo. "I was raised there," he recalled. "We lived at Coal Mine in New Mexico, but we came in to Good Shepherd for feasts. I was baptised there in April, 1949." He attended boarding school in Albuquerque but returned summers to Good Shepherd. "My ministry began there".

In 1968 he became a lay minister, doing missionary work, teaching, leading the Daily Offices. "In 1970, I was told to go on for more theological training." He completed his GED, and eventually attended Church Divinity School of the Pacific.

A 1969 history of the mission details the development of Navajo leadership: "Probably the single most important step in the program has been the advancement of Steven Plummer. This one time ninth grade dropout has been accepted by the Diocese of Arizona as a postulant, and is embarked upon a difficult course of study and tutoring that will eventually lead him to become the first Navajo priest in the Episcopal Church."

The writers probably did not foresee the establishment of the Navajoland Diocese, or the consecration of Steven Tsosie Plummer as the first Navajo bishop of the Episcopal Church.

"I was ordained deacon in 1976 at Good Shepherd and priest in 1976 at Canyon de Chelley, site of a convocation of reconciliation between Anglos and Navajos," Bishop Plummer said. He was a curate at Good Shepherd until he married Catherine Black and moved to Utah. "In our tradition, men leave home to go with the wife." But, he said, "Good Shepherd is still my home church. It is very close to me."