Valley Congregation to Celebrate 25 Years With Worldwide Gay Church

The San Fernando Valley’s only congregation in the homosexual-oriented worldwide Metropolitan Community Churches celebrates its 25th anniversary Sunday, after surviving threats that had a former pastor wearing a bulletproof vest and the deaths of 80 members from the AIDS epidemic.

The 115-member North Hollywood church will be congratulated by the San Fernando Valley Interfaith Council and the denomination’s founder, the Rev. Troy Perry.

The Metropolitan Community Church in the Valley prides itself on having pushed the once male-dominated denomination--itself only 30 years old--into more concern with women’s issues.

“This was one of the first congregations in the MCC to strongly advocate an equal role for women in church life . . . as well as place just as much emphasis on women’s health issues as we do on AIDS/HIV,” said the Rev. Jeffrey Pulling, the pastor.

Pulling, 48, is one of many MCC ministers who were educated at a mainstream Christian seminary but eventually joined the clergy ranks of Metropolitan Community Churches, a West Hollywood-based denomination that now has 314 congregations in 16 countries.

“I was the first openly gay seminarian at Andover Newton Theological School near Boston in the early 1970s,” Pulling said. When it came to the requirement that he serve a part-time internship at a local church, he said, “they didn’t quite know what to do with me.

“I found an MCC congregation by that point and was able to do my field education there.”

As a refuge for openly gay and lesbian Christians who are uncomfortable with or rebuffed by mainstream churches, the MCC has had mixed results.

In the first 15 years of its existence, for instance, MCC clergy performed many “holy union ceremonies,” similar to wedding rites, Pulling said. But there are fewer requests for same-sex rites today, partly because some mainline clergy will now perform such ceremonies unofficially and mainly because there are more options for secular ceremonies in the gay community, Pulling said.

“The MCC is not the only game in town now,” said Pulling, who performed only two rites last year.

Even openly gay or lesbian Protestant clergy whose sexual life forces them out of their denominations often take a look at the MCC, he said, but do not always stay.

The closest MCC church to the North Hollywood congregation is one in Glendale, which merged recently with a Silver Lake congregation. There is another small MCC church in Lancaster. In the Hollywood area, most MCC members attend the Los Angeles “mother church” next to the denomination’s headquarters .

Pulling, who stutters, held mostly administrative posts in the MCC until becoming pastor of the North Hollywood church at the beginning of last year--not an easy task for a stutterer because he has to give at least one sermon a week.

“It does take some people by surprise, but once they get to know me and realize I have something to say, they listen,” he said. “I do have more difficulty in one-to-one conversations.”

Pulling attends twice-yearly meetings of the National Council of Churches’ faith and order commission as the representative of the MCC, one of several nonmember denominations that send participants to commission meetings.

Only last year was the MCC admitted to membership in the Southern California Ecumenical Council.

But the North Hollywood church has long been active in the San Fernando Valley Interfaith Council, participating in the council’s annual wintertime homeless project, clergy council and Martin Luther King birthday observances as well as the North Hollywood Food Pantry.

The council includes active Protestant, Jewish and Mormon involvement as well as Catholic, Unitarian, evangelical Protestant and Hindu participants in some programs.

This Good Friday--April 10--MCC in the Valley will hold a joint service with East Valley Congregational Church and Little White Chapel Christian Church in Burbank.

The MCC makes an effort to join ecumenical and interfaith alliances whenever possible, Pulling said, on the theory that religious opposition to gay and lesbian churchgoers cannot be combated simply by arguing with those who oppose homosexuality as immoral. Exposure to religiously committed homosexuals is more effective, he said. “What works is personal contact and building relationships.”

Which is not to say that all barriers have disappeared.

“Some congregations are a little uneasy with MCC involvement,” said Barry Smedberg, executive director of the Valley Interfaith Council, “but I think they don’t say much about it because the interfaith community has appreciated what MCC has done.”

The North Hollywood church was among the first congregations to host homeless people in that council project in the late 1980s and “is one of the few that have done it every year since,” said Smedberg.

Despite the hard-won acceptance in the religious community, the North Hollywood congregation has had to contend with outside dangers.

The Rev. Sherre Boothman, who pastored the church from 1989 to 1993, “used to wear a bulletproof vest because her life was threatened several times,” Pulling said.

Pulling said that the church building on Cahuenga Boulevard, once an American Legion hall, has occasionally been vandalized.

The congregation, which had 300 members at its height in the early 1980s, later saw its male ranks decimated by the AIDS virus. “Funerals were being held here every week during the height of the AIDS crisis,” Pulling said.

“We’re still dealing with accumulated grief.”