Evangelical Church Welcomes Gays

The congregation at Christ Chapel had just finished singing the last stanza of a rousing evangelical hymn when Pastor Jerrell Walls planted himself to the side of the lectern and called for prayer.

Walls stood in silence -- head bowed, jaw set, hands clasped against his chest. In the next instant his arms swooped upward in praise, as if snagging a blessing from heaven.

“Your salvation is secure if you say yes to Jesus Christ,” he declared, winding into his sermon. “It’s not about what you are doing or who you are,” Walls said. “It’s about what Jesus is doing for us.”

Christ Chapel is a Bible-believing, Jesus-praising, hymn-singing evangelical church. When the pastor quotes Scripture, members open their Bibles and follow word for word. Many take the Bible literally. One middle-aged man, for example, told a recent visitor that God can’t be anything other than male because the Bible uses only the pronoun “he” in referring to the Almighty.

Christ Chapel is also a gay and lesbian church, one of a small but growing number of gay evangelical or Pentecostal churches that are filling a spiritual niche.

Liberal mainline Protestant churches have been reaching out to gays and lesbians for years. So, too, have the Metropolitan Community Churches, a predominately gay and lesbian denomination.

But the believers at Christ Chapel want to come “home” to a church like the one that many of them grew up in -- evangelical, theologically conservative -- but one that is also friendly to gays.

“MCC began in a day when there were no other choices,” said the Rev. Tom Hirsch of Dallas, founder of the Alliance of Christian Churches, a loose association of 42 evangelical and Pentecostal churches run by and ministering to gays and lesbians. “We don’t want to be ghettoized. That’s the biggest thing happening. People in the gay community don’t want to be ghettoized.”

The growth of small, independent lesbian and gay churches not only offers more religious choices, according to those who have followed developments, but a coming of age of gay spirituality.

Many gays and lesbians say they are grateful for the welcome that liberal mainline Protestant churches have extended to gays, and the pioneering work of the Metropolitan Community Churches, founded more than 34 years ago in Los Angeles by the Rev. Elder Troy D. Perry. The MCC, organized in 1968, remains the dominant player among gay churches. It claims 300 member congregations with 40,000 members in 18 countries.

But some gays find the MCC uncomfortable as a spiritual home. They object to the liberal theological takes on the Bible, the lack of emphasis on the lordship of Jesus, and, at times, what they see as a failure to forthrightly advocate monogamous sexual relationships.

Those attending evangelical and Pentecostal gay churches say they have hungered for the kind of clarity about Jesus that Walls preaches every Sunday.

“That’s one thing that drew me here,” said Andre Jacinto, 53, who has attended Walls’ church for three years. “It was preached. It was said and it wasn’t apologized for. It wasn’t tiptoed around. Jesus is Lord, simple as that. Get over it.”

Walls says his congregation is “pretty fundamental” in its beliefs and teachings. “We do stick to the Scripture as God’s word,” he said.

There is, of course, one area of scriptural decree that congregants at Christ Chapel challenge. In most conservative evangelical and Pentecostal churches, homosexuality is a sign of man’s fallen state. Members of those churches take literally the biblical declaration that homosexual relations are an “abomination.”

Like liberal clergy, Walls said those Scriptural passages must be read against the historical and cultural backdrop in which they were written.

“As you interpret those passages with those things in mind you realize it was not talking about homosexuality in general, but specific acts -- promiscuity, temple prostitution and abuse,” he said. “Those are the only areas we see it talking against, and that would be true, gay or straight.”

Walls, a Nebraska native, grew up in the Pentecostal tradition, where speaking in tongues and spiritual healing was as much a part of faith as an unbending view that homosexuality is sinful.

Today, he urges monogamous, committed same-sex relationships, but for pastoral reasons doesn’t press the point, he says. “We’re not going out and taking notes of who’s at the park, who’s at the bath houses. But when they start presenting they want help, we’re more than willing to help,” he said.

What he tells members of the congregation, he says, is that once they realize God loves them as they are, the door opens to the Holy Spirit.

“Then they start coming to me and saying, ‘You know what, I go to circuit parties. I’ve done all these things. I still do some of this stuff. I still go to the parks,’ ” he said.

He tells them change sometimes takes time. But, as another clergyman observed, change in a positive direction -- even if barely perceptible -- is in itself holy.

“If you end up at the park, don’t beat yourself up and run from God. Run to God. You’ve got brothers and sisters in here that will support you. You can talk to us,” Walls tells his members.

“We’re not going to throw you out. We’re not going to put you up front and condemn you. We’re going to lovingly help you know that maybe next time, instead of going to the park, you may call a friend and say, ‘Let’s go for coffee.’ ”

For many of those who are showing up at places like Christ Chapel, it’s been a long road. Many felt forced out of their home churches because of their sexual orientation. Some have still not come back, even to a gay-run church. The memories remain too painful.

“Probably the majority have prayed for this to go away. They tried various avenues to not be gay,” Walls said. “I’ve run into people who can’t attend here because it brings back so many bad memories, even though they know they’re safe here.”

For those who do attend, gay churches are filling a spiritual need and simultaneously bending some old ways of looking at sex.

“It’s an unfolding tradition, which in many ways is what the apostles did. They had an unfolding revelation of who Jesus was and is,” said the Rev. Neil G. Thomas, pastor of the Metropolitan Community Church in West Hollywood. “So each one of us is very much writing our own book of revelation or our book of the apostles because of our own experience of the divine today.”

In creating their own churches, gays and lesbians are taking a page from African American history and from the feminist movement that produced feminist theology, said the Rev. Malcolm Boyd, a Los Angeles Episcopal priest and author. In 1977, he became one of the first gay priests in his church to declare his sexual orientation.

Black slaves saw themselves in the Biblical stories of the Israelites being held in bondage in ancient Egypt and in Moses leading them to a promised land. Feminists looked to goddess myths in their search for an authentic identity, which they felt had been denied them.

Life experience and spirituality, Boyd said, are inextricably linked in the existential questions of life. “Why do gay people exist? Well, God created gay people. And why does anybody exist? Because God created us all with a purpose,” Boyd said.

Or, as Christ Chapel member Sheri Armstrong wryly observed after church one recent Sunday morning, “If God knew me before I was even conceived, I’m sure he wasn’t walking around going, ‘Ah! She’s gay! Who saw that coming?’ ”