BREMERTON, Wash. — In 2005, John and Linda Parsons decided to downsize. They were each about 50 years old, with two sons nearing college age. The time seemed right to leave their house on Bainbridge Island, near Seattle. They would sacrifice square footage for a lower mortgage.

Browsing the Web, they read about Bartimaeus, a development nearby across Port Orchard Bay. Its literature promised the living style known as “cohousing”: private residences, but with common green areas and a common house, with space for group cooking and dinners, and with decisions made by consensus. Initially, the development was planned for Christians, who would live together and support one another in faith.

So he and his wife met several times with Bartimaeus’ founding visionaries, about five couples who had conceived the community in 2002. In December 2006, the Parsonses moved into their town house, one of the community’s 25 homes, hoping to find people who identified as Christians but tolerated many versions of Christianity.

But their optimism soon faded. In 2009, they moved back to Bainbridge Island, and now their experience offers a testament to the double difficulties of Christian cohousing: how hard it is for Christians to live together, how hard it is for cohousing to succeed. With the arguable exception of Bartimaeus, out of 110 cohousing communities in the country, according to the Joani Blank of the Cohousing Association of the United States, “none of them is religious.”

Interviews with the Parsonses and eight current and former residents, as well as a review of a fair-housing complaint filed by the Parsonses and recently dismissed, clarify but also complicate the community’s history. On 7 acres, bounded by a salmon-spawning creek, it has proved to be the place where some people will happily live out their years. A much smaller group abandoned the community in despair.

Adjusting the vision

Bartimaeus — named for a blind man cured by Jesus in the New Testament — was formed in 2002 as a limited liability corporation. An early flier described a community whose members would be “biblically orthodox” and would live in a permanent setting where “the Holy Spirit can bring people.”

But when almost nobody responded to the vision, “I said, ‘Look, we have a choice: keep the standard as it is, and not build our community, or drop our standard and build our community,’” said Nancy Conrad, an early member. “I was surprised they all said, ‘Let’s drop our standard.’”

Not everyone had to be an Orthodox Christian, but everyone had to respect Christianity. There would be no religious discrimination in housing sales to meet fair housing law. The condominium association was formally constituted under the name Meadow Wood, and Bartimaeus, as developer of the housing site, would become the name of a voluntary community that happened to reside and meet there. Meadow Wood home-owners could choose whether to participate in Bartimaeus activities.

But John and Linda Parsons came to believe that this new, less religious vision was a pretext to get people to buy condominiums.

“Things changed as soon as we moved in,” according to their fair-housing complaint. “Founding members established a religious structure for community life, including daily prayer hours, a spiritual discussion group, Greek classes, nightly prayer group, and monthly Taize services.” (Taize is a style of musical worship.)

While attendance was never required, the Parsonses allege that residents were pressured to attend Bartimaeus events and scorned if they refused and that the community “imposed their religious beliefs and practices.”

Ideological incompatibility

Throughout 2007, the Parsonses allege, there were other instances of a religiously hostile environment. There was a public denunciation, they say, of a member believed to be sinful.

Some residents protested that, regardless of the legal questions, they were uncomfortable with conservative Christian language on the website, for instance the assertion that “the family, celibate singleness, and faithful heterosexual marriage are God’s ideal.” Some members complained, too, that such language depressed their property values by driving away potential buyers.

According to minutes of a Meadow Wood homeowners’ meeting from 2009, Guy Coe, among the founding members, defended that language, which has since disappeared. “Actually, it is my theological conviction that heterosexual marriage is God’s ideal,” Coe said, according to a transcript of the meeting. “If that scares someone off, I can’t do anything about that.”

Giving a tour of Meadow Wood in mid-August, Coe and another founder, Joel Adamson, were gracious hosts, proud to show off the fire pit where residents gather for frequent singalongs, and the small treehouse that can be reached only by a rope bridge. A teenager lazed on a porch, listening to Whitney Houston’s music. It seemed like an edenic place to grow up.

And they made only the scantiest mention of any history of disputation. “There’s no mention of Bartimaeus on the Meadow Wood website,” Coe said. “The people worried about the fair-housing issue, they want it that way. For those of us who don’t think it’s an issue, we think it’s a disclosure issue — people should know.”

A conciliatory note

Although Conrad and her husband were among the community’s founders, they no longer consider themselves Bartimaeus members. Since 2002, they have moved from evangelical Christianity to the Russian Orthodox Church. But she still prays with other women from the condominiums weekly, she said.

“Now we are unified,” Conrad exclaimed on the telephone. “It’s a happy neighborhood. Our house, in particular, is like living on a ‘Seinfeld’ set — people coming and entering.”

On Aug. 28, John and Linda Parsons received a letter from the Department of Housing and Urban Development stating that, as Christians, they have no standing to file a discrimination claim against the Bartimaeus Christians.

It is a striking oversimplification, of course: Whatever the merits of their complaint, it surely is logically possible for one group of Christians to oppress a very different group of Christians.

In 2011, Adamson sent a conciliatory email to John Parsons. He hinted that perhaps Bartimaeus would have functioned better as an explicitly religious organization, like a church, which would have granted members more leeway in whom they chose to live with, than as a condo model.

“I apologize for my part in not looking deeper into this issue six years ago,” Adamson wrote.