Accent on Acceptance

For 30 years the Rev. Elder Nancy Wilson has been telling her gay and lesbian congregations that Jesus loves homosexuals.

Many other churches would argue that they preach the same thing. But most fundamentalist churches--and even those in many more liberal denominations--approach homosexuality with the message that “God loves a sinner.”

For 30 years, the Metropolitan Community Church, where Wilson preaches, has been offering a far different message that avoids any firm definition of sexual sin. It is a message that at times has sparked angry confrontations.

In 1973, an irate man rushed the altar as she was celebrating Communion in Boston, kicked over the sacred symbols and punched her in the face.

Another incident occurred one night in West Hollywood Park, where a group of fundamentalist Christians was taunting lesbian and gay Christians. Wilson said she was urgently summoned to the scene and managed to defuse the confrontation.

“Jesus never preached in ways that make people who are poor and outcast feel worse,” she recalls telling the crowd. “What would Jesus be doing here in West Hollywood Park tonight?”

Since its founding in Huntington Park in 1968 by the Rev. Elder Troy Perry, the MCC has grown from a small house church with 12 members to a worldwide denomination reporting 42,000 members and more than 300 churches in 15 countries, mostly in North America.

MCC churches baptize in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit. They affirm the Old and New Testaments as the word of God. They celebrate Communion using traditional Christian formulas. Their liturgy and prayers reflect Roman Catholic and Anglican influences, and their preaching borrows from the style--but not always the content--of evangelical Protestant churches.

Musically, the churches blend traditional hymns familiar to worshipers elsewhere with the kind of contemporary music found in growing Pentecostal and evangelical churches, complete with drums and electric instruments.

“We identify ourselves as a Christian church,” said Wilson, who is senior pastor of the MCC’s mother church in West Hollywood. She is also one of seven elders, a bishop-like position, who oversee the denomination.

But clearly, what makes the MCC stand out is that it is a church run by and for lesbians and gay men, many of whom Wilson calls the “religiously wounded.”

“We’re on the front lines,” she said. While mainline Protestant denominations, including the United Church of Christ, the United Methodist Church, the Episcopal Church and others, have made great strides from the point of view of gays in welcoming them into their congregations, Wilson said she is as convinced as ever that the MCC fills a critical gap.

Human sexuality--the hot-button issue around which the MCC grew--and how sexuality is ideally expressed remain sensitive issues. There is a wide range of views within MCC congregations on sexual freedom and casual sex.

Virtually all mainline churches, even the most liberal, frown on promiscuous sex and infidelity in marriage, but the MCC in the beginning was far more tolerant, Wilson said.

While it was the first church to encourage and bless same-gender unions, she said, it hesitated in its early development to speak out against blatant sexual promiscuity such as that found in gay bath houses and sex clubs.

“We don’t have a new rule book that applies to gay and lesbian people, but we ask people to try to work out their own . . . ethical stands,” Wilson said. “I would not want people to say that in the MCC [there is] . . . only one way you can be sexual.”

In the 1960s, when the church was getting established, and into the 1970s, she said, the emphasis had to be on reaching out.

“We simply had to help people who felt totally rejected and judged by the world to feel loved and accepted just as they are,” she said. The church was reluctant to apply to gays and lesbians sexual conduct rules--such as abstinence for singles--that weren’t working for heterosexuals, said Wilson, who has been in a committed, monogamous relationship with another woman for 21 years.

At the height of the AIDS crisis in the 1980s, she said, safe sex, particularly among gay men, became imperative, as a matter of survival. Now, however, with the number of AIDS deaths declining among gay white men amid the use of condoms and new pharmaceutical therapies, she detects a resurgence in promiscuous sex and drug abuse, particularly in what she called the “hypersexual” environment that can be found in parts of West Hollywood.

“I think there is sexual addiction in our community, just like there is drug and alcohol addiction, and sometimes they’re all connected,” she said.

How does the church respond? Even today, it isn’t easy, she said.

“It’s a very tough role for us, because we really are a church identified in the community not to be another finger-wagging place, but to be a place that says, ‘How can you live a life of health and love and respect for yourself and others?’ How can we teach that, preach that, live that, model it and encourage people to live that way?”

Her personal bias, she said, is to accept that people are sexual beings and rate sexual activity on a scale of good, better and best, based on the works of the late Anglican theologian Norman Pettenger, who died last year.

“Sexuality that is consensual, mutual and considerate is good. Sexuality expressed in a context of a loving relationship is better. Sexuality expressed in a long-term, committed relationship is the best,” she said.

But Pettenger’s work came before the AIDS crisis, she noted. It also does not address the fact that sexuality can be distorted, she said.

“I think where you have [sexual] repression you have [sexual] obsession oftentimes. I think that happened in the gay and lesbian community. There’s so much repression that sometimes you get obsession,” she said.

“We’re not saying there is no such thing as sexual sin,” Wilson said. “We believe that sexuality ought to be exercised in the context of love and responsibility.”

As the church marks its 30th anniversary, Wilson sees demographic shifts ahead. For example, she said that within 10 years Latinos may be the largest single ethnic group in the church in the Los Angeles area.

She also said the average churchgoer will be younger. Already, she said, a generational shift is underway. She has observed that those coming out of the closet are increasingly young.

And she worries about the influence of the Christian right and leaders such as conservative Christian psychologist James Dobson, best known for his national radio show, “Focus on the Family.” She expects serious challenges to efforts to win civil and human rights for lesbians and gay men.

“We’ve weathered all kinds of political climates, but I think the pendulum may swing more wildly as we go through the millennium,” Wilson said.

But she sees no likelihood that the need for the MCC will disappear. Other churches have taken steps to make themselves “reconciling” denominations--churches that welcome gays as members.

But “if MCC had not gotten off the ground,” she asked, “would these reconciling churches have existed?” Many of the gay advocates in mainline churches, she said, got their start in the MCC. She noted that Dignity, an organization of gay and lesbian Roman Catholics, met in MCC facilities, as did the first gay synagogue in the country.

“How does the mainstream church change? It changes because there are people who persevere, who are out of the closet, who continue to encourage others to come out of the closet,” Wilson said. “But you have to have the front-line movement out there.”