Homosexuals’ Church Alters Mainline Religions’ Views : Religion: A Newport Beach Presbyterian minister asserts that the Bible speaks clearly against ‘homosexual intercourse’ and that efforts to redefine church teachings smack of ‘political correctness.’

When Joshua Waters’ 10-year relationship with a male lover “was falling apart,” he did what a lot of Americans do in distress: He sought solace in a church.

But Waters, raised as a Baptist, wanted a church where “my sexuality wasn’t an issue”--not one which preaches that God condemns unrepentant homosexuals. “I knew from a young age that God would not put me here to hate me,” he said.

The church he chose six years ago in Kansas City, Mo., had gays and lesbians in the pulpit and the pews. Moving west, he joined congregations of the same Metropolitan Community Church, first in Phoenix, then in North Hollywood.

Started by excommunicated Pentecostal preacher Troy Perry in his Huntington Park duplex in 1968, a separate denomination for Christian gays seemed an improbable venture.

Yet from his Hollywood office Perry oversees a worldwide denomination of 27,000 members and 240 congregations.

Although its membership is small when compared to other church bodies, religious leaders and scholars believe that its success was a major reason that some mainline denominations are grappling with how to deal with homosexuality.

“MCC has put the issue of religious rights for homosexuals on the agenda of the National Council of Churches and many other American religious organizations,” said sociologist R. Stephen Warner of the University of Illinois at Chicago.

The church “had a very powerful founding vision that ‘God made me gay’--that it’s fixed and innate--and out of that came the argument that it’s good and not contagious. That idea has had a tremendous effect,” Warner said.

Although MCC “is here to stay,” Warner said, its membership gains are being slowed by conflicting trends. The deadly AIDS crisis brings people to MCC, and simultaneously devastates its ranks. And MCC will become less distinctive if mainline churches openly accept gays and lesbians as members and clergy.

MCC has also been a motivating influence in other ways.

Inspired by news accounts after Perry founded the church, a heterosexual priest in San Diego started what became a nationwide Catholic gay caucus.

MCC started the first gay synagogue in the country in 1972. That Los Angeles temple is one of several affiliated with Reform Judaism, which has taken a relatively tolerant view of gay and lesbian rabbis and congregations.

“Troy Perry, in my opinion, is a prophet of God who led the way,” said the Rev. Steven Preston, a fundamentalist seminary graduate who chairs a Los Angeles gay coalition composed of 16 organizations ranging from evangelical Christian and United Methodist to Quaker and Buddhist.

Perry started the church because homosexuals wanted a place to worship in which they could be open about their sexual orientation and feel accepted. “It was crazy; the church was the one institution a lot of gays and lesbians spurned because it had hurt them so much,” Perry said.

Marsha Stevens, a singer and composer who belonged to Calvary Chapel of Costa Mesa, said church leaders were disturbed when she divorced her husband in 1979 and later began a relationship with a woman.

“They talked to me lovingly, but they were horrified,” Stevens said. She and her partner tried other conservative Protestant churches before visiting the Ocean of Life MCC in Costa Mesa. “It was astounding,” said Stevens, who joined MCC in 1984. “We could sit and hold hands, and take Communion as a family--with my companion and our children from our marriages.”

But MCC has not been widely accepted within the Christian community on religious and moral grounds.

“They are espousing something that is very clearly condemned in the New Testament,” said Bishop Isaiah of New York, chancellor of the Greek Orthodox Archdiocese for the Americas. “Any logical-minded person would (question) their claim to be a Christian church when they are promulgating something that St. Paul says is un-Christian,” he said.

The National Council of Churches rebuffed MCC efforts to seek membership in 1983, but agreed last fall to resume dialogue on various issues, preparatory to any new application.

Early this year, the denomination scored a minor success by being accredited as an official observer at the World Council of Churches meeting in Australia. However, Eastern Orthodox and several Protestant churches are certain to block any serious move toward membership in either council, observers say.

Perry originally had no lofty aspirations. He merely wanted to keep preaching.

Born in Tallahassee, Fla., Perry was 12 when his father, suspected of being a moonshiner, died during a police chase. He ran away from a harsh stepfather to live with religious relatives. Although Perry did not join them when they handled snakes as a test of faith, he was convinced as a teen-ager that he was called to the ministry.

When he was 13, he started preaching in Georgia, Florida, Alabama and Illinois at congregations of the Tennessee-based Church of God. When he pastored a Church of God in Prophecy in Santa Ana at the age of 23, he told a superior that he was homosexual and was excommunicated. Perry’s wife left him and took their two children to Alabama.

Five years later, he attempted suicide when a lover left him. As he recovered, Perry said he felt that God still wanted him to preach. Suggestions by his mother and a neighborhood psychic to start a church finally led him to announce in a gay newspaper that he was holding services. Twelve people came to the first service on Oct. 6, 1968, in his Huntington Park living room.

One year later, Perry was filling Sunday services at the 385-seat Encore Theater in Los Angeles.

“People would hear of this new church and would immediately ask themselves whether they could have one in their cities,” said the Rev. Donald Eastman, a former Assemblies of God pastor who started an MCC congregation in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1975. MCC missionaries began churches in Canada and Australia, but churches in 12 other nations started on their own.

At least 5% of U.S. members are heterosexuals--usually relatives or friends of homosexuals who joined.

A typical congregation incorporates the formal liturgy of the Catholic church and the lively preaching and singing of a Baptist church.

Perry’s denomination has never lacked for an educated clergy as secretly gay Protestant pastors discovered a denomination to their liking. Today, 38% of MCC clergy hold masters of divinity degrees and a growing number of mainline Protestant seminaries are accepting MCC ministerial candidates as students.

The AIDS epidemic has been a double-edged sword--causing many to seek the comfort of the church while also taking a striking toll on MCC members and clergy.

Since 1982, an estimated 4,500 members or regular churchgoers have died of AIDS and related diseases. Six MCC pastors have succumbed to AIDS in the last two years, and bad news comes in almost monthly.

“All this could overwhelm us but we won’t let it,” Perry said.

MCC has drawn praise and sympathy for its role in responding to the crisis.

A Catholic health administrator told a conference last year that she found MCC “a place where I could bring persons with HIV disease or AIDS to worship services and trust that they would be treated with love and with respect and with dignity--that no one would be afraid to touch them or hold them.

“This fact alone endeared the church immediately to my nurse’s heart,” said Mary Elizabeth O’Brien, research director for the School of Nursing at Catholic University of America in Washington. “I didn’t need to examine the church’s organization, the credentials of the pastors or their theology.”

Perry said the church often performs “funerals for people who won’t take their kids back to First Baptist Church somewhere because they are so ashamed about their children dying of this disease.”

From its earliest days, the church has spoken against sex with minors and prostitutes, and has conducted “holy union” ceremonies to encourage monogamous partnerships. MCC pastors emphasize that they are not marriages, despite some resemblances.

For example, North Hollywood’s Metropolitan Community Church of the Valley requires that the couple demonstrate that faith is important to them, attend counseling sessions and be at least 21 years old and single. In a twist on conventional morality, the church also stipulates that the two people have lived together for at least a year.

MCC professes that the Bible was inspired by God and provides a key source of authority for Christian faith. But MCC leaders also cite half a dozen contemporary scholars who give new interpretations to verses usually seen as biblical admonitions against homosexual behavior.

The sin of Sodom and Gomorrah, for instance, was the sin of inhospitality and idolatry, not of homosexuality, they say. And they cite scholars who have suggested that Paul was condemning only certain kinds of same-sex love in his letters to the Romans and the Corinthians.

“My own personal feeling is that those scholars are dead wrong,” said the Rev. John Huffman, senior minister at the 4,500-member St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Newport Beach. “It seems they are coming with preset understandings of what they want the Bible to say on those particular passages.”

Huffman recently withdrew as a leading candidate for “moderator,” a prestigious post within the Presbyterian Church of the United States, which is holding its General Assembly in Baltimore and considering issues such as ordaining gay clergy. He is staunchly opposed to reinterpreting the Bible on the subject of homosexuality.

“The Bible speaks very clearly that the wise, the intelligent, the healthful way to live is to not be involved in premarital intercourse as a heterosexual, to not be involved in extramarital intercourse as a heterosexual and to not be involved in homosexual intercourse,” he said. “And to disregard the teachings of God’s word is to jeopardize one’s own holistic health and . . . the health of the society.”

That does not mean that homosexuals should be ostracized, said Huffman, who withdrew his candidacy two weeks ago because of a serious family illness. Nevertheless, he suggested that the movement to redefine Church teachings on such controversial issues smacks of “political correctness.”

“There are many things which the Church of Jesus Christ and the politically correct movement would agree on. This is not one of them,” he said.

MCC has internal critics who complain that it is unfair to minorities and women.

Eastman said the denomination may unintentionally reflect sexist attitudes in U.S. society. “But we are light-years ahead of virtually every Christian denomination on eliminating discrimination toward women,” he said. “Racism does exist,” he acknowledged, adding that the church body hopes “to confront the issue” at its convention, to be held July 14-21 in Phoenix.

The denomination does not suit the spiritual tastes of all gays and lesbians.

The “closeted” religious homosexual will stay in conventional churches, said Episcopal priest and author Malcolm Boyd of Santa Monica, who “came out” years ago. “To walk into an MCC church is in effect to come out of the closet,” Boyd said.

“It is also increasingly possible today to find a (mainline) church where you can be open about your sexual orientation,” Boyd said. “A lot of people want to be in a mixed church.”

With attitudes softening on homosexuality in liberal-to-moderate religious circles, the Rev. Sandra L. Robinson, dean of MCC’s fledgling Samaritan College, said some critics feel MCC is becoming obsolete.

But Robinson, sounding no less evangelistic than a Southern revivalist, exhorted colleagues in a report to the church to remember millions of gays and lesbians “who have not yet heard the simple but life-changing message that they will not burn in hell because of their sexual orientation.”

Staff writer Kristina Lindgren in Orange County contributed to this article.