Battle for Gay Clergy Started at West Park

By Megan Finnegan

West Park Presbyterian Church is celebrating a victory 33 years in the making.

Last week, the Presbyterian Church (U.S.A.) passed a measure to officially accept gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender clergy members. It was the culmination of a fight that began decades ago on the Upper West Side, when a minister and group of congregants sought to make their church more inclusive—and ended up spurring a national movement.

In 1978, the Presbyterian Church adopted an ordinance denouncing homosexuality. West Park protested this immediately. The pastor at the time began welcoming gay people into the church, and it soon gained a reputation.

“People would drive from 40 miles away because they knew they would be welcome,” said Reverend Bob Brashear, who’s been the pastor at West Park for the past 16 years. The old rule “really kept a generation of people from the ministry God had given them,” he said, citing a gay friend and classmate from Yale Divinity School who was to be ordained in 1977, but had to wait for the church’s decision in 1978 and was then prohibited from entering the ministry.

In order for a measure to pass the Presbyterian Church, it has to first be passed by the General Assembly, a national body, and then be ratified by a majority of the 173 U.S. presbyteries (geographically arranged councils). In 2010, the General Assembly passed the measure to approve LBGT clergy, and the tipping point came from the Twin Cities Presbytery in Minneapolis, which voted yes on May 10, making the rule official.

“The West Park church was the first Presbyterian church to declare a different message, one of openness and acceptance,” said Michael Adee, executive director of More Light Presbyterians, a group that began at West Park and now works nationally to promote moral, spiritual, ordination and marriage equality.

“When West Park Presbyterian Church was looking to describe their church in a way that would be open and affirming, they found a 1620 blessing from Pastor John Robinson,” said Adee. “He was a minister in the Church of England, blessing pilgrims who were leaving the old world coming to the new, and it contained this phrase: ‘God hath yet more light and truth to break forth from His word.’ That’s perfectly in alignment with Presbyterian theology. We’re part of the reform tradition. Our minds and hearts are not to be closed.”

Hope DeRogatis, a retired nurse, has been a member of West Park for over 30 years, and she credits the church’s atmosphere of openness with helping her realize her own identity as a lesbian.

“By the time I got there in ’81, the AIDS epidemic had already gotten there,” said DeRogatis. “I worked as a nurse at St. Luke’s Hospital, and I became very conscious, working with families of whom people were afraid.” She said that doctors and nurses would sometimes refuse to enter the hospital rooms of AIDS patients. “I was very glad to have a church where everyone was present, where gay people were present, where everyone felt welcome to come and teach us their love. It helped me to be a better nurse.”

Reverend Brashear points to the rainbow flag that has been draped over the balcony at West Park for 33 years, and shows off the stained glass Tiffany window that serves as the centerpiece of the 221-year-old sanctuary. In the 1980s, a man paid to have the window fully restored in honor of his partner, who had died of AIDS.

“That beautiful restored Tiffany window is a symbol of the AIDS era,” Brashear said. Still, he’s happy to see now that gay church members aren’t forced out of necessity to spend their whole lives advocating for equal rights.

“None of us anymore are ‘the gay church.’ We’re integrated, we celebrate people for being who they are,” he said. “They don’t have to be advocates anymore.”