LJ-SEC: (ORIGINALLY POSTED BY sunfell)

From the New York Times:

Serving Gays Who Serve God
By ANDY NEWMAN

This spring, Brenda Oliver, depressed and desperate for spiritual sustenance, visited the church near her home in Bushwick, Brooklyn. She lasted until the minister started talking about the men of Sodom who demanded that Lot let them have sex with his houseguests.

He looked straight at Ms. Oliver, a sturdy, dreadlocked woman dressed in her customary long pants and black work boots.

"The preacher said that if a bunch of gays went to his house, he'd start shooting and killing them," recalled Ms. Oliver, who is a lesbian. She walked outside, leaned on the church gate and cried.

Months later, on a humid Sunday morning, as an organ's sweet gospel music drifted out onto a grim stretch of Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn from a different kind of church, called Unity Fellowship, Ms. Oliver sat in her van, nervously eating a breakfast of bacon and grits. In a few minutes, she would go inside to be baptized.

The senior pastor at Unity, the Rev. Jeffery A. Haskins, is different, too. He channels the rolling, ever-cresting flow of an archetypal black Baptist preacher. But when he thunders about the AIDS sores on the back of his head, or how at another church, "I had to call on the name of Jesus when they talked about me, saying the little fairy faggot can't preach up in here," his congregation can relate in ways that most might not.

Unity Fellowship Church, housed in a gray former warehouse in East New York, is the New York outpost of the Unity Fellowship Church Movement, the only Christian denomination explicitly set up to serve gay, bisexual and transgender members of minority groups. Unity, founded in Los Angeles in 1982, has 12 churches nationwide, including two in New Jersey - one in Newark and another in New Brunswick.

On a typical Sunday at the East New York location, more than 100 worshipers pack the plain room, with its white curtains covering bricked-over windows. Most of the worshipers are from Brooklyn, but many are from elsewhere - Jersey City, the Bronx, Long Island. There are 2,000 members on the rolls.

A gay church in a battered neighborhood led by a black minister with AIDS may sound like something dreamed up by a politically correct screenwriter. But Unity is the very real, raucous spiritual home for hundreds who feel cast out by traditional churches, which for many people serve as the heart of the community and an extension of the family.

"There are churches here and there" that welcome gay worshipers, said Gerard Williams, an assistant minister who teaches the Sunday school course on homosexuality and the Bible at Unity, "but ain't nobody going to love you like we do."

Unity also finds itself on the front lines of an emerging cultural battle. Across the country, black clergy members are joining forces with conservatives and white evangelicals over their common opposition to gay marriage. Kenyon Farrow, public education coordinator for the New York State Black Gay Network, said that many black ministers were condemning homosexuality with increasing force, and that unspoken "don't-ask-don't-tell" pacts in churches were dissolving.

In July, one of Unity's ministers, the Rev. Valerie H. Holly, spoke at a rally organized in part by the network against the denunciation of gays by black clergy members. "It's not a question of you having to like me," she said in an interview. "It's a question of you having to accept that I am God's child, too."

That message, often repeated from the pulpit at Unity, resonates for members like Ms. Oliver, 40, a caseworker for the city's Human Resources Administration. "How could God feel that us spreading the word is an abomination?" she asked. "He's perfect. It just can't be. We're spreading his word."

New York's Unity church feels itself to be a bit of an outcast. From 1992 to 2003, it rented space in St. Mary's Episcopal Church in Clinton Hill, Brooklyn, a middle-class neighborhood with a history of tolerance. But after St. Mary's changed leadership, Unity felt less welcome, said the local congregation's founder, Bishop Zachary G. Jones. "They didn't come and say 'All gay people get out,' but it was increasingly uncomfortable to negotiate the use of the space," he said. The rector of St. Mary's, the Rev. Reginald Nuamah, declined to discuss Unity's departure.

Unity's leaders decided to buy a building, but the only one they could afford was the warehouse on Atlantic Avenue, near an overpass, flanked by a shuttered bank and a vacant lot. Bishop Jones said that he "felt challenged" by the neighborhood. But Unity was quick to establish ties, opening a food pantry, offering H.I.V. testing, giving an annual block party and attracting some new members. Relations with the locals seem good.

"How they pray to God is not how I pray to God," said Paulette Williams, 39, who stopped in one night to pick up groceries from Unity's food bank. "But I'm not going to judge somebody's lifestyle. They came out into the neighborhood, and they showed love."

On new membership Sunday last month, everyone at the front of the church was dressed in white. Pastor Haskins, 50, a lean, balding man with a trimmed beard, danced and bounced and summoned Tina Marshall, 56, a cook at a methadone treatment center.

"Did you know God made you the woman, the lesbian that you are?" he asked. Yes, came the answer. "If you see a young lesbian, lost, she don't know the way, will you show her to this place where you found refuge?" Yes, Ms. Marshall said. In the name of the Mother-Father-Everything-God, Pastor Haskins declared her a member of the church.

Then Pastor Haskins called Ms. Oliver. He praised her tireless work for the church. Tears ran down his face as he shook his hand over the water bowl. He asked her, "Are you willing to do the work of the Lord?" She replied, "As long as I live on this earth."

Pastor Haskins let a few drops of water fall on Ms. Oliver's head, and her face was seized with shudders and sobs. Someone came forward with a white towel. She was still crying at her seat 10 minutes later.

After the baptisms came the homily. Deborah Rice, an assistant minister, preached in a quiet but even voice that Sodom and Gomorrah were destroyed not because of homosexuality, but because of inhospitality.

"God don't care who you sleep with," she said. "God judges you for the merits of your heart."