ROCHESTER, N.H. (AP) – Less than a year ago, Episcopal Bishop V. Gene Robinson was the wedge that split the Church of the Redeemer. Last Saturday he presided over its final service, accepting gifts and praising parishioners for their faith and service to the church.

Though it had been open for 100 years, the church had been hampered for years by financial difficulties. The difficulties worsened when the majority of parishioners decided to leave the church rather than accept the leadership of Robinson, who is openly gay.

The handful of parishioners who voted to stay tried to rebuild the congregation, and in the last 10 months had attracted some new members, but financial pressures continued to mount. The church had accepted about $200,000 in support from the diocese in the last decade, officials said. In January, after failing to raise the $40,000 minimum budget needed to stay open, parishioners asked Robinson to close the church.

About 100 people gathered for a final chance to pray and take communion together. Many began weeping as the service ended, although Robinson told them not to interpret the closure as a failure.

“What looks like weakness is really strength,” said Robinson, who delivered his sermon standing in the aisle. “These folks stayed put when it would have been much easier to leave,” he said. “They have been remarkable stewards of this treasure they have been given.”

Three-dozen parishioners walked out last June after Robinson denied their request to operate outside the authority of the New Hampshire Diocese. Helen Gray, 60, was one of three who voted to stay at the church she had attended for 40 years.

“I felt uncomfortable at times,” Gray said of Robinson’s openness about being gay. “But I didn’t know where to go, so I stayed put here.”

The church’s demise was painful.

“I cry at the drop of a hat,” she said of. “I really haven’t had a chance to take it all in.”

Another parishioner who voted to stay also was unsure what she would do. “I guess I’m just numb at this point,” said Ann Elkins of Farmington. “I don’t think it will sink in until tomorrow when I wake up and there will be no church to go to.”

Over the next few months, a transition team will decide what to do with the church and its property. In the meantime, it will continue to be used by a social services group and a Presbyterian congregation that holds services there.

Robinson called the final service a “bittersweet moment” that healed the fissures of the past. Parishioners made a donation to the bishop’s discretionary fund, and church administrators presented Robinson with a baptismal pitcher dating from Rochester’s first Episcopal congregation in the 1830s.

Robinson’s election in 2003 as the first openly gay leader of a Christian diocese outraged conservative Anglican bishops around the world, particularly in Africa. The 2.3 million-member Episcopal Church is the U.S. branch of Anglicanism.

Divisions from Robinson’s consecration led the Anglican church to call last year for both sides to apologize to each other, and ask the U.S. Episcopal Church not to elect any more gay bishops.

The appointment of an openly gay bishop was the latest in a series of changes in the Episcopal Church that cost the Church of the Redeemer its congregation. In 1988 more than 100 parishioners left the church after female clergy were approved and the church modernized its Book of Common Prayer.

“When I first came here 18 years ago, it was a viable parish, lots of people, but then one major change after another came,” said Kevin Gorham, a member of the church’s administrative team. “With each one of these we lost some people and never regained them.”