Immigrants' Church Clashes With State On Land-Use Rules

GERVAIS, Ore. - In 1965, Yavorhi Cam brought two dozen Russian Old Believers families to Oregon to avoid religious persecution in the former Soviet Union.

He carved out a small subdivision amid northern Marion County's fertile farmland and built a modest church. He named it Pokrov and the road to the church he named Bethlehem. He then moved to a new church.

Today, the 72-year-old priest finds his new church embroiled in a bitter land-use battle that has frayed the peace along Bethlehem Road.

State land-use regulators and former church members say Cam's new church violates state rules preserving high-value farmland. Cam can't comprehend the fuss.

"It's a little Communist, he thinks," said Eric Cam, the priest's son. "They're trying to tear the church down. It's worse than Russia."

On Aug. 7, the Oregon Supreme Court backed state regulations that bar urbanlike uses of Oregon's best soils. The ruling affects roughly 4 million of Oregon's 16 million acres of farmland.

"To us, it's a huge deal," said Larry George, director of Oregonians In Action, a property-rights advocacy group. "There's kind of no way to get to them as far as citizens having impact on the process."

The decision shifts authority over Oregon's farmlands to the Land Conservation and Development Commission.

In 1973, the Legislature directed the new commission to set growth goals and rules for counties and cities.

Since then, some say, the agency has gone beyond that directive.

They point to the rules affecting Cam's new church. The commission adopted the rules in 1994 after determining that nearly 12,000 acres of farmland had been converted to golf courses, churches, schools and parks over five years.

The recent ruling rebuffed a challenge of those rules by Lane County.

Bethlehem Road is an unlined street west of Gervais, where gold-and-blue church cupolas jut above fields of corn, wheat, onions and flowers.

Cam, a bearded, deep-voiced man with sun-parched skin, moved his followers here after fellow Russian Old Believers abandoned his Turkish village for the Soviet Union and its rising economy.

Cam, unwilling to return to a place that had persecuted his family centuries earlier, turned to Oregon.

As more Old Believers families settled nearby, the Pokrov Church he had started grew.

Cam left and formed a new church because, he said, fire inspectors found Pokrov's congregation too large.

Cam and 100 of his followers moved to his seven-acre berry farm. He turned a metal barn into a carpeted sanctuary filled with centuries-old icons, a wood ceiling and an altar draped with purple-sequined curtains.

Marion County officials decided a year later that Cam had built without proper permits.

State officials say they don't want to close Cam's church. They merely think it belongs farther west, inside Gervais's urban-growth boundary.

Cam says moving the church would ruin his community. Life on Bethlehem Road revolves around its churches. Members attend services four times every weekend.

The churches also observe 28 holidays. Odd hours, along with chanting and singing, might not find acceptance on other city streets, says Cam's attorney, Richard Stein of Salem.

Cam's opponents, including members of the Pokrov Church, say Cam left after losing an election as church priest. They say Bethlehem Road, with two Old Believers churches and another church not far away, has no room for Cam's church without posing hazards to small children and drivers.

Peter Basargin, a spokesman for the United Congregations of Old Believers, USA-Canada, wrote Marion County commissioners in 1995 that closing the church would require that it be dismantled or burned. Using it for secular purposes would violate church doctrine, Basargin said.

Opponents countered that Cam already violated church doctrine by moving without first blessing the land.

Pirfil Cam, another of the priest's sons, says said the church has spent $30,000 on attorneys' fees and can't afford to move. They refuse to believe that God or Oregon will bar them from worshiping where they please.