The Homosexual Church

Never before has homosexuality been so visible in this country, especially in entertainment and news reporting, and never before have homosexual groups been so militant. Because of increasing religious study of homosexuality and involvement of churches with homosexual causes, the news department ofCHRISTIANITY TODAYasked correspondent Robert Cleath to investigate. Here is his report:

People call the Metropolitan Community Church of Los Angeles the “gay” church. This doesn’t particularly please the 440-member congregation drawn overwhelmingly from the homosexual community. “We are a Christian church first, and homosexual second,” said its 56-year-old assistant minister, who prefers not to be identified lest his regular job in the “straight” world be jeopardized.

The congregation that packs Hollywood’s Encore Theater each Sunday was founded nearly two years ago by the Reverend Troy Perry, 29, former Baptist and Church of God of Prophecy pastor. It now has branches in San Francisco, San Diego, and Chicago, with others pending in Miami and Minneapolis-St. Paul. The congregations are ready to ratify a constitution for a new denomination, “The Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches.” And Metropolitan leaders plan to establish a two-year seminary for homosexual ministers.

Howard Wells, 25, pastor to a hundred homophilesHomophile literally means anyone sympathetic to homosexuals though the term is often used as a synonym for homosexual. who meet over a gay bar in San Francisco, said in an interview: “If regular churches would welcome homosexuals and their lovers to worship God with them, there would be no need for the Metropolitan Community Church. As long as a homosexual has no lover and pretends he’s straight, he can attend a liberal church but in a fundamentalist church they’ll kick him out.” In his ministry Wells emphasizes that “homosexuals have the same potential to develop a meaningful relationship with God as any others.”

Perry is also president of the Western Homophile Conference and a board member of the Council on Religion and the Homophile. The council, formed in 1964 after a police raid on a dance, includes many heterosexual clergy from mainline denominations.

The founding of the Metropolitan Community Church reflects both the growing willingness of homosexuals to assert themselves as a movement and a more relaxed attitude toward homosexuals by religious groups. Regional and national church bodies, especially the United Church of Christ, the Lutheran Church in America, and the Episcopal Church, have advocated more dialogue between homosexual and heterosexual groups.

The New York Times reported that there are perhaps as many as 200 churches across the country that are known to be congenial to homosexuals. A Roman Catholic parish in Minneapolis opened its facilities last January to FREE (Fight Repression of Erotic Expression), a homosexual group composed largely of students from the University of Minnesota.

Homosexual delegates to the fifth annual North American Conference of Homophile Organizations met in Kansas City last year. As might be expected, all the religious participants at the convention advocated the new morality: there was no mention that homosexuality might be sinful or wrong, although some questioned whether it was the best way of life.

The Metropolitan Community Church has a twofold concern: to provide a church for unchurched homosexuals, most of whom have fled the “authoritarianism” of Roman Catholic and fundamentalist churches and to reform laws and customs that discriminate against homosexuals. Perry frequently presents the gay viewpoint on television talk shows and recently led a march for homosexual rights down Hollywood Boulevard. The church provides counseling and a “hot line” for the disturbed, seeks to get male hustlers off the streets, and looks with disdain on those who violate homosexual laws in public.

The church views homosexuality as a legitimate part of God’s creation—not as sin or sickness—and believes that the homosexual life style should be respected by society. Its homosexual ministers are far from homogeneous in theology or even in their views of the basic cause of homosexuality. Perry, whose sermons are fundamentalistic in tone, considers homosexuality essentially genetic. His assistant minister, a former United Church of Christ and Evangelical Reformed minister liberal in theology, believes homosexuality comes from psychological conditioning. Both men were married and fathered two children before turning to the gay life.

Metropolitan Community Church leaders are little concerned with the Bible’s condemnation of homosexuality. “We have learned not to get hung up on the Bible,” said San Francisco’s Wells. He claimed that the Old Testament’s admonitions against homosexuality were due to Israel’s need to increase its population and homosexuality was detrimental to this objective. The Apostle Paul, writing about homosex-sexual practices in Romans, “was a man of his times reflecting the general attitude of the Jewish nation,” according to Wells. Said the assistant minister at the Los Angeles church: “Paul does not speak for Jesus Christ. There is nothing in the Gospels about homosexuality. We believe God is a loving Father who will not eliminate from the kingdom of God any practicing homosexual for departing from what is only an established social norm.”

Its pastors claim that the Metropolitan Church serves as a dating center for homosexuals in no greater way than a straight church does for heterosexuals. The denomination’s mother church in Los Angeles has a United Presbyterian-ordained youth director, and holds monthly dances for 13 to 20-year-old homosexuals. This year’s social high jinx for the whole church was a May Festival that crowned a king and queen. A lesbian in formal male attire was chosen king; the queen was a boy in drag who resembled comedienne Carol Burnett.

The church encourages homosexual “marriages” to deepen personal relationships and cut down on sexual promiscuity with its attendant psychological and venereal disease problems. Perry has performed approximately forty such “marriages”; only two have not survived so far (one joined homosexuals of different sexes for convenience). Prior to the wedding, the “couples” must give evidence of having known each other for six months and attend two counseling sessions. In the legally unrecognized ceremonies, the words “friend and spouse” are substituted for “husband and wife.”

A Sunday service at Metropolitan Community Church is similar to most Protestant services except that the sermon frequently focuses on the topics especially relevant to homosexuals. Although the congregation includes a sprinkling of limp-wrist stereotypes, leather-clad boys, colorfully frilled men, and Mack-trucklike women, the great majority are indistinguishable in appearance from a typical WASP congregation. Like those in straight churches, most who attend Metropolitan come with problems of all kinds in the hope that God, with a little help from his friends, will make his love known to them.

Christian Teachers: Making Crucial Contributions

Alumni of Christian colleges are superior in their achievements to graduates of secular institutions of comparable size because of the quality of their Christian commitment. So said the president of a leading evangelical college who previously was chancellor of one of the nation’s largest secular universities.

Dr. John W. Snyder, 45, head of Westmont College and formerly chancellor of the main Bloomington campus of Indiana University, said that Christian education must not be secular education with a Christian veneer, but rather must stress a Christian approach to problem solving marked by drive, determination, consistency, stability, and creativity.

Snyder made his remarks on his home campus in Santa Barbara, California, at the first national convention of the National Educators Fellowship. The meeting last month drew 200 evangelical teachers and administrators from public and private schools. Speakers, including scholar-evangelist J. Edwin Orr, Los Angeles City Attorney Roger Arneberg, and James Panoch of the Religious Instruction Association, discussed the crucial contribution that the Christian teacher can make in the current ferment of American education.

The fellowship, founded by retired Los Angeles high school principal Benjamin Weiss and psychologist Clyde Narramore, has 2,000 members and distributes materials on legal ways of including the biblical viewpoint in school curricula to 17,000 teachers annually. It will soon move to new headquarters in Pasadena, California.

Dr. Orr, an authority on the history of spiritual awakenings, asserted that school development has frequently been the fruit of evangelical awakenings. If a new spiritual awakening comes to America, it will probably emerge on the college campus, Orr said.

Panoch told the fellowship not to concentrate on prayer, petitions, and parties to change governmental policies based on Supreme Court findings on religion in the schools. Instead, he said, Christian educators should work on teaching units about the Bible that are clearly within the law. The courts, he stressed, have held that public schools may not sponsor the practice of religion but may sponsor the study of it.

Arneberg warned against “the great danger of our age … an easy tolerance.” He said Christian educators could be tolerant of many things, but not of falsehood or evil. “They will be tolerant even toward other moral standards but not toward those whose scandalous behavior is a disgrace to Christian morality.”

ROBERT L. CLEATH

Missionaries March On

The day of foreign missions is over—or so some spokesmen have been saying for several decades. Actually, the number of missionaries is up 15 per cent from a decade ago. Figures just released by the Missions Advanced Research and Communication Center show that more than 33,000 Protestant missionaries from North America are serving overseas (adding Catholics, Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and other non-Protestants would greatly increase the total). This figure is down from two years ago, but whether the decrease indicates a new trend will not be known for a while.

The ninth edition of North American Protestant Ministries Overseas lists over 600 organizations. Of the missionaries, about 5,000 are serving under National Council of Churches member communions (down from 5,850 in 1962), and 11,800 are serving under member societies of the closely related Interdenominational and Evangelical Foreign Mission Associations (up from 8,000 in 1962). Another 3,000 missionaries, chiefly Adventists and Lutherans, are affiliated with the NCC though their denominations are not.

The largest agencies are the Southern Baptists, 2,564; Wycliffe Bible Translators, 1,762; Seventh-day Adventists, 1,426; United Methodists, 1,397; Sudan Interior Mission, 993; and The Evangelical Alliance Mission (TEAM), 962.

Revival At The Racetrack

If the jockeys and bettors had put odds on the chances of Maryland’s Rosecroft Raceway being invaded by a couple thousand Bible-packing Christians, they might have set them at one in a thousand—with a confident chuckle.

But for fifteen consecutive nights last month the unthinkable happened. Crowds of Christians and curious seekers streamed past the cashiers’ and sellers’ booths to hear the Gospel preached by evangelist Paul Rader. It was the first time anything but horse races had ever been held there—a precedent upsetting some Christians as well as some racing enthusiasts.

The assault was the beginning of a long campaign directed at the 3.5 million people living in the Washington, D.C., metropolitan area. Within the next two or more years, as many as fifteen such efforts are expected, forming the “Circle Cities Crusades.” Each is to be held on neutral ground—such as the raceway—to attract those who avoid churches.

The Rosecroft outreach drew one to two thousand a night (including blacks, a majority of young people, and 30 to 40 per cent non-Christians) and recorded about 200 new commitments to Christ.

Rader emphasizes the complete mobilization of local churches for evangelism, with over forty from twelve denominations in southern Prince Georges County working together on the Rosecroft crusade. It was the first time ministers of that area had met together.

Rader moved to Washington in 1968 to begin involving local churches in aggressive, united outreach to the capital. In contrast to two years ago, he now sees definite signs of spiritual awakening in the area.

The husky, broad-shouldered evangelist is not new to the business. From his days as a University of Minnesota football player until he came to Washington, Rader tackled the unsaved of the Minneapolis area. He took over his father’s Gospel Tabernacle there and ran it for about thirty years, traveling widely to preach. In a family of fiery preachers—such as his grandfather Daniel, the “fighting parson of the West”—Rader marks the eighth straight generation of ministers.

ANNE EGGEBROTEN

Lutheran Youth: Caring In The Wilderness

Naïvely they ventured into the wilderness, taking “Bread for the day” with them.

The wilderness was New York, where 15,000 mid-western high school students of the American Lutheran Church (ALC) gathered and dispersed daily in one of the most unconventional conventions ever held. The official business was “caring”—and most of the time was spent getting to understand people in the city through “walk/talk/listen tours” and visits to social agencies, child care centers, and drug rehabilitation homes. “We just go out and love people,” said Gerry Glaser, one of the young planners of the event.

The tangle of traffic, subways, skyscrapers, and slums was new and overwhelming to many, causing some culture shock. But the youths weren’t sent into the streets alone: after sharing Communion in large services in ten hotels, each group of ten was given a “Bread packet” with a Scripture for the day and modern parallels to it from literature and newspapers. These were used en route during appropriate moments, helping them to listen to God’s Word in each wilderness encounter.

This experiment in confronting the modern world with a Christian lifestyle was “like a decentralized Bible camp,” explained Jerry Pyle, chairman of the happening. “Being a servant of Jesus in this context gave us a whole different perspective on life.” Each person’s experiences were unique. Said Pyle: “This isn’t one convention, but 15,000 conventions.”

The “backstage” program in Madison Square Garden continued the theme “And We Say We Care” with attention to world problems of hunger, development, and ecology, and a focus on the cultures of Latin America, Asia, and Africa. The emphasis was on the problems and lives of the native people as expressed in their own words, dance, and music. The theme frequently became a question, demanding self-analysis that cut deeply into the lives of the young people gathered to listen.

Multi-media reigned. Slides flashed on two large screens while actors and dancers cavorted about the stage, narrators spoke, and background music fought for the foreground. At one point a Yoga expert had six members of the board of the Luther League doing headstands and breathing exercises on stage.

Folk singer Pete Seeger unleashed the full energy of the 15,000 teenagers when he sang, “If you want to get clear water, jump and shout,” to the tune, “She’ll Be Coming Round the Mountain.” Later, the Voices of Harlem set the audience wild with their hard-rock sound, completing the circle of communication for more than 4,000 teens who had been “caring” in Harlem.

The week was bracketed between worship services. Also, in daily Communion, in small groups, and in some speeches and songs, the “faith” side of the Gospel was heard. The emphasis, however, was on faith in action.

“Kids are questioning the insistence that the only way to witness is in words … with the idea that maybe it’s better to do a little listening before you start talking,” said the Reverend Wilfred Bockelman, an ALC information coordinator. “We are here to be exposed to the suffering world.”

ANNE EGGEBROTEN

Ark Search Strikes Snag

Scientists and equipment sent from America to Turkey in hopes of scaling Mount Ararat this summer and finding the remains of Noah’s Ark have been quietly returned to the United States. An official of the Arctic Institute of North America, which with the SEARCH Foundation of Washington, d. c., had applied to the Turkish government for permission to excavate, said efforts will be made to continue the archaeological effort next summer.

SEARCH spokesmen cautiously refused to comment until the team’s head, Ralph B. Lenton of the Arctic Institute, returned home early this month with “all the facts.” Several news accounts last month stated that Turkish authorities “categorically rejected” all requests by foreign groups to search for the biblical ship.

“The expeditions have become a political issue in Turkey,” reported newsman Sam Cohen from Istanbul. “In view of the critical public opinion at home and Russian sensitivity abroad, the Turkish government has preferred to put an end (at least for the time being) to them all. The government does not wish to attract criticism from the many who now claim that the purpose of the expeditions is something other than the discovery of Noah’s Ark and that Turkey is being ‘fooled’ by the CIA.”

Religion In Transit

Conclusions of an opinion poll by the Presbyterian (U.S.) Board of Education of the denomination’s laity, clergy, and professional staff: reunion with northern Presbyterians could succeed, PCUS merger with COCU will fail, pronouncements on social issues are favored, women are more liberal than men on these issues, few want a new confession, and hard-core opposition in the church is smaller than the board expected.

Lutheran church bodies in North America slipped to 9,233,216 members by the close of 1969, a loss of 16,058 for the year, the Lutheran Council in the USA reported.

The American Association of Theological Schools (AATS) favors making the Doctorate of Ministry (D. Min.) the basic professional degree for the ministry.… A new degree—the Master of Arts in Religion (M.A.R.)—will be offered at Asbury Seminary beginning this fall.

A more militant Southern Christian Leadership Conference will return to the nation’s capital next spring to continue the Poor People’s Campaign, vowed a fiery Ralph David Abernathy at the SCLC’s convention last month.

More than 1,700 students and staff members of Campus Crusade for Christ completed a five-week Bible course last month to equip them for work on the nation’s campuses. Included were 540 new staffers.

The Roman Catholic equivalent of the New English Bible will be published by twelve firms across the country beginning this month. The new translation—in modern English—is called the New American Bible. The project took twenty-five years.

U. S. postal inspectors more than doubled arrests of pornography dealers during the last fiscal year.… The Federal Communications Commission said public complaints against obscenity, profanity, and indecency on radio and TV programs during the last fiscal year were up more than 60 per cent from the previous year.

Gospel Light Publications has established a new division, International Center of Learning, to train people for Christian service.

Personalia

St. Herman of Alaska was officially elevated by nine bishops in Kodiak last month. The first American saint in Eastern Orthodox Christianity was canonized in four days of ceremonies around the coffin containing the remains of the missionary priest at a small wooden church overlooking the Gulf of Alaska.

Father Daniel J. Berrigan, the fugitive pacifist priest, began a three-year prison sentence four months late last month after the 49-year-old Jesuit—convicted last April of destroying draft records—was captured by FBI agents posing as bird watchers outside the Block Island, Rhode Island, home of attorney William Stringfellow and poet Anthony Towne.

New York attorney Charles C. Parlin, 72, was named president of the World Methodist Council, succeeding the late Bishop Odd Hagen of Sweden. Parlin is the first layman to head the federation of thirty-three Methodist groups in ninety countries.

Chaplain Roy M. Terry, a Methodist and a major general, became chief of Air Force chaplains August 1.

The Reverend Donald K. Drake has become president of Piedmont Bible College in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.… Dr. Merlyn W. Northfelt was elected president of Garrett Theological Seminary in Evanston, Illinois.

Martin H. Work, for twenty years a leading spokesman for conservative Roman Catholicism in his post as executive director of the National Council of Catholic Men, resigned to join the staff of conservative Archbishop James V. Casey of Denver.

Dr. Elmer Kraemer, managing editor of the Lutheran Witness Reporter, publication of the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, resigned to head public relations for a St. Louis Lutheran Hospital.

The Carl McIntire Collection of biographical materials on the Michigan-born fundamentalist radio preacher and president of Shelton College in Cape May, New Jersey, is being established by the Historical Collections of the University of Michigan.

Dr. Joseph D. Duffey, a United Church of Christ clergyman and president of Americans for Democratic Action, won the Connecticut Democratic nomination for the U. S. Senate by a comfortable margin to face incumbent Senator Thomas Dodd and a Republican nominee this fall.

The Southern Christian Leadership Conference reelected Dr. Ralph David Abernathy as its president at the thirteenth annual convention in Atlanta last month. The SCLC also attacked the FBI and lashed out at a Time article implying that SCLC founder Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., had a “vigorous” extramarital sex life.

Cadet Cary Donham, 20, a West Point senior, has asked to be discharged as a conscientious objector—the first such request in the academy’s history.

Deaths

FREDERICK BROWN HARRIS, 87, former chaplain of the Senate for a record twenty-four years and retired pastor of historic Foundry United Methodist Church; in Washington, D.C., of a heart attack.

FRANK HIGGINBOTHAM,65, pioneer of International Christian Leadership in Maryland and founder of the Governor’s Prayer Breakfast there; in Washington, D. C., of a heart attack.

World Scene

Bishop Abel T. Muzorewa, the first African to head the United Methodist Church in Rhodesia, was banned August 18 from black tribal areas by the Ian Smith regime. The bishop was thus barred from about three-quarters of his church’s 35,000 members. Christian churches in Rhodesia are risking their existence to defy the new apartheid law enacted by Smith.

The Vatican and Yugoslavia announced last month that after an eighteen-year interruption, full diplomatic relations between the two had been resumed at the ambassadorial level. Cuba is the only other Communist country exchanging ambassadors with the Vatican.

Century Baptist Church in downtown Toronto, Canada, was sold for $90,000 and is now the meeting place for the Theosophical Society. The movement blends pantheism, Hindu mysticism, magic, and transmigration. Salvation is attaining release from the tiresome burden of reincarnations in this miserable world.

The Southern Asia (India) Central Conference of the United Methodist Church, formally known as the Methodist Church in Southern Asia, apparently will not go into the proposed Church of North India as had been expected. A special session of the Central Conference reportedly voted 106 to 48 against the plan of union. Six other denominations are involved in the merger plan, but the MCSA was to have provided almost half of the CNI’s anticipated 1.3 million members.

Members of the Amateur Radio Missionary Service, which has about 450 members handling communication needs for missionaries from a dozen fields, held its annual meeting in St. Paul, Minnesota. The majority of league members are evangelicals.

International Bible College in Moose Jaw is feeling the financial bite. The Church of God (Cleveland) school, operating in Saskatchewan for thirty years, will not open this fall unless needed money is forthcoming.

Up From Suffer-Age

Liberated women gathered all over the nation on August 26 to commemorate the winning of suffrage fifty years ago and to clamor for Senate passage of the equal rights amendment to the Constitution. In Lafayette Park in front of the White House, mini-skirted young girls heard gray-haired grandes dames of the movement describe being “dragged away in paddy wagons right in front of that house” while demonstrating for the right to vote.

Dr. Cynthia Wedel, president of the National Council of Churches, was among speakers who urged freedom and equality without false protectionism. Red, white, and blue balloons bobbed with the message “Women are on the way up!” as the rally ended with the singing of “This light that’s given me, I’m gonna let it shine.…”

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