DALLAS -- On a sweltering midsummer's Sunday in Dallas, the cavernous Cathedral of Hope is packed with hundreds of congregants. Lively choral music sets toes tapping, and the sermon, about observing the Sabbath, is delivered with warmth and humor.
"Six days shall you shop, but on the seventh day you shall cease from all shopping," Mona West, the pastor, says from the pulpit, her eyes twinkling. "And that includes Home Depot. Or at least two out of four Sundays."
It's a scene straight from Middle America: There is laughter all around and hugs and kisses, too, and after the offertory and communion and much greeting and good cheer, the faithful file happily out of church -- men holding hands with men and women holding hands with women.
"Dallas is changing," said Tim Hurst, a gay 47-year-old real estate agent who attends the Cathedral of Hope with his partner, Jay, 44, a hotel owner. "We've been together four years last month, and this church has been very important to our relationship."
As the largest predominantly gay church in the United States, and possibly the world, the Cathedral of Hope in Dallas is thriving. In doing so, it is challenging old stereotypes about conservatism and intolerance in the nation's ninth-largest city.
Despite a congregation drastically reduced by AIDS, the hostility of some mainstream churches and the aggressive animus of several anti-gay groups, the church's growth has been staggering. In the last 15 years, membership has swollen from a few hundred to more than 3,500, about half of whom attend services on a typical Sunday morning. It's now among the biggest churches in one of the most churchgoing cities in the nation, Dallas.
The Sunday mornings are not always peaceful: The Christian right and anti-gay groups have trained their ire on the church, picketing outside and occasionally infiltrating the sanctuary to shout slogans. "I'd call it a synagogue of Satan," said John Reyes, head of the Dallas office of Operation Rescue/Operation Save America. "It's a monstrosity."
But as the church has tripled and quadrupled in size, the critics have been able to muster only a dozen or 20 protesters sporadically. The Cathedral of Hope, its services protected by a pair of uniformed police and a sprinkling of officers in plain clothes, has shrugged and moved on.
For many congregants, the church provided a soothing backdrop against which to tell friends or relatives they were gay. Barb Nunn, 47, a medical school clerk, came out to her mother in 1996. A trombonist in the church orchestra, she had been rehearsing, and her mother insisted that she be invited to the performance. That left Nunn little choice.
"The day of the concert, I said, 'Mom, I need to tell you about this church,' " she said. "When you tell your parents -- your mom -- that you're gay, you tend to be a little bit ashamed. But when you have this church as your backup -- my God! My mother said she'd never heard a group of Christians so glad to be Christians."
For most of the congregants and pastors, the church filled a gaping spiritual need. They are former Catholics and Baptists and Methodists who quit their old churches or were kicked out when they publicly acknowledged their homosexuality. Michael Piazza, the church's dean and driving force, came out to his former Methodist congregation in Georgia in 1979, fully realizing before he read his sermon that it would be the last he ever delivered there.
The Cathedral of Hope's membership has grown so fast that the church now offers three full services on Sunday mornings, plus Sunday school and an ambitious array of programs assisting the poor and sick around Dallas.
The church also has embarked on a $40 million expansion whose planned centerpiece will be a $28 million cathedral designed by the renowned nonagenarian architect Philip Johnson, who is gay. Planned to begin construction within the next four years, it will rival the size of St. Patrick's Cathedral in New York. The massive modern structure will have no windows and seating for 2,500 people.
"It will be the first cathedral of the new millennium," Piazza said.
The boom at the Cathedral of Hope, which is attracting 350 new members a year and giving $1.3 million annually to local schools, health clinics and charities, suggests that the church -- and gay men and lesbians generally -- has become something that Dallas respects: Big. Rich. And involved.
"It is ironic that it's a queer church in the middle of the Bible belt," said West, the pastor. "But I don't think it's benign neglect. We've taken a chance by showing people that we're a church that cares about our community and about justice."
To grasp the dizzying ascent of the Cathedral of Hope, it helps to take a snapshot of the church and the city's gay community just a few years ago.
Dallas has long had an established gay scene, much of it centered in Oak Lawn, a once seedy and now gentrified shopping and clubbing district just north of downtown. At Oak Lawn's main crossroads, gay men do the Texas two-step at the Round-Up; nearby, a pair of bars for gay men and lesbians, J.R.'s and Sue Ellen's, attract clients into the wee hours.
Beyond Oak Lawn, however, Dallas was not a hospitable place for gays. In the early 1990s, the city was thrown into turmoil when the police department refused to hire a lesbian because of her sexual orientation. There was no city ordinance barring discrimination against gays in jobs or housing, and no openly gay members of the city council.
Piazza, 47, now the dean of the Cathedral of Hope, arrived as chief pastor in 1987. At the time, the church had about 280 members.
It had been founded in 1968 as part of the fledgling Metropolitan Community Churches, a gay denomination that originated in California and now has 40,000 members in 300 churches in 22 countries. Shortly after the birth of the Dallas church, it moved into the chapel of a Unitarian church, the only one in town that would share space with a gay congregation. In 1972, it relocated in an abandoned abortion clinic.
Piazza's arrival was a turning point. A solid, sharp-featured man whose expressive face is topped by neatly combed orange hair, he brought charisma, energy and a flair for organization to the Cathedral of Hope.
At the outset, though, he faced a flock traumatized by AIDS. Just after he arrived, Piazza conducted 18 funerals and memorial services for members who had died of AIDS in January 1988 alone. By the mid-1990s, he said, more than a quarter of the congregation had AIDS. An HIV-positive men's choir sang regularly at Sunday services.
"There have been 1,400 deaths [from AIDS] since I've been here," he said the other day while showing a visitor around the church's Memorial Garden, in the shadow of an eight-story belfry built in front of the church.
Even as AIDS wasted the congregation, new members flocked to the church, many seeking solace. Turning them away was not an option. Gays in Dallas, as most others in the city, had grown up in church, and they were determined to stay in a congregation. In a city of sizable churches, there was a burgeoning demand for one where gays would feel welcome.
So Piazza set out to find a plot of land for a new sanctuary.
Architects and contractors refused to bid for the work, fearing the wrath of their Baptist and Methodist clients. Banks refused to make loans. Finally Piazza found a small plot in the flight path of Dallas's Love Field airport, so close that the new church's windows had to be two inches thick to block out the jet engines' roar.
The sanctuary completed here a decade ago was stamped with the church's themes of inclusiveness and openness.
There is no altar and no rear wall separating the pews from an outer corridor. Sermons deal with gay issues but more often focus on mainstream Christian themes. The idea is to offer a traditional liturgy in a traditional setting, but one adapted to a church in which 90 percent of the congregants are gay.
"We are . . . trying to remove barriers for people, and not putting things between people and God," Piazza said.
As the church grew, Dallas also became more diverse and somewhat more progressive. Fewer than half the city's residents now are white Anglos. A hugely popular black mayor, Ron Kirk, presided over the city for more than six years, resigning this year to run for the Senate.
The Dallas city council, which now has two openly gay councilmen, this spring adopted an ordinance barring discrimination against gays in housing and jobs. And in the annual Gay Pride parade, scheduled for next month, half the city council members as well as the mayor are expected to march.
"Things have changed in the last 10 years," said Ed Oakley, one of the council's gay members. "Dallas has become a less intolerant place."
