NYTimes: Serving Gays Who Serve God

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September 16, 2005
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.

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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.

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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.

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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."

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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.

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