Gay Protestant
coalition merges with Task Force

A coalition of Protestant gay advocacy groups is being merged with the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force. The Institute for Welcoming Resources announced Monday that it is becoming a project of the Task Force, which in practice means that institute director the Reverend Rebecca Voelkel and a part-time support person will become Task Force staffers, enabling them to take advantage of the organization's resources. The institute has been a joint project of Welcoming Congregations in seven mainline Protestant denominations for the past 15 years. Welcoming Congregations includes those that have formally adopted statements welcoming lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people to full inclusion in the life and ministry of the church. The seven denominations that support the institute include the Presbyterians, the United Methodist Church, the Evangelical Lutheran Church, and others, with 10 million to 20 million adherents in the United States. But only some 1,400 congregations with perhaps a million members are Welcoming. Voelkel said Monday that the members have set the ambitious goal of increasing the number of Welcoming congregations to perhaps 11,000 by 2011. Task Force director Matt Foreman emphasized the importance of what he called an unprecedented joining of LGBT secular and faith-based organizing. He said that the "awful results" of a divide between secular and religious progressives has been that "people on the right have been able to, by default, portray themselves as speaking for all people of faith." (Sirius OutQ News)