Metropolitan Community Churches

Heritage

Founded in Los Angeles in October 1968, when Troy Perry — a Pentecostal preacher who had lost his credentials and nearly his life after coming out — advertised a worship service and twelve people came to his living room in Huntington Park. The Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches grew from that room into a worldwide fellowship, born a year before Stonewall. Its history is carried with open grief and pride: congregations burned by arson in the 1970s, including the New Orleans Upstairs Lounge fire that killed a third of a congregation in 1973; decades of AIDS ministry when many churches would not bury the dead; and same-sex weddings blessed from its first years, decades before any legal recognition.

Theological family

Ecumenical Protestant: MCC draws its members and clergy from every Christian background, holds the historic creeds lightly but genuinely, and centers its theology on the conviction that the gospel includes those the church has excluded.

Who decides what

Congregational with connectional structures: local churches govern themselves within a general conference and a moderator; clergy are ordained by the fellowship.

What a first-time visitor would find

Liturgically eclectic on purpose — a single service may carry Pentecostal fire, Catholic-shaped communion and mainline hymnody, because the congregation came from all three. Communion is open to everyone, every week in most churches, often received with an embrace.

What it has always cared about

A gospel for the exiled; open communion as the family table; marrying and burying its people when no one else would; and insisting, from 1968 on, that LGBTQ Christians are not a cause but a congregation.

Its gift to the wider church

MCC bore witness — earlier, longer and at higher cost than any other body — that LGBTQ people could be Christians in community and not merely in question, and its decades of pastoral practice shaped how many traditions later welcomed them.

Commonly confused with

With "Metropolitan" churches of other kinds — the name marks no connection; and with LGBTQ-affirming congregations of mainline denominations, which came to similar practice later by their own roads.

Range of views inside it

Congregations vary in liturgy from high-sacramental to charismatic, and in theology from evangelical-shaped to progressive; the affirmation at the center does not vary.

Where Metropolitan Community Churches churches are on the map

2 Metropolitan Community Churches congregations appear on The Church Map, across 2 states.

• Arizona — 1
• Oregon — 1