Lehigh Valley church practices “radical inclusivity”

Fourteen gloved hands pass dozens of styrofoam containers down an assembly line to be filled with fresh cheeseburgers, hotdogs, mustard, ketchup and napkins.  

There are five tables, each representing a step in the line that spans the length of the Bethlehem Emergency Shelter’s chapel.

Other volunteers carry the containers outside to the tables, adding to the spread of homemade pasta salad, fruit cups, chips, Tastykakes and two coolers filled with iced tea. 

Over the course of two hours, 130 financially struggling and unhoused individuals and families visit the shelter. Each is greeted with a smile and a hot meal, courtesy of the Metropolitan Community Church of the Lehigh Valley. 

Bob Kasinecz had been awake since 7 a.m. that sunny Saturday morning, transporting pounds of food to the shelter and coordinating with volunteers who wouldn’t arrive for another three hours. 

He said he always imagined spending his retirement cooking and helping those who need it most.

Now, not a month goes by without Kasinecz and the church’s volunteers preparing and serving hot meals at the shelter. 

Kasinecz, like many others, came to the church with a traumatic and complicated relationship with God, but he’s since found refuge in the love and compassion of the church’s  community. 

The Metropolitan Community Church of the Lehigh Valley is a self-described “radically inclusive” Christian church that fosters a safe and healing environment for the LGBT community to worship God and serve local minority groups. 

In the 40 years since its inaugural meeting at the Lambda Center in Allentown, the church has supported the LGBT and other minority communities through unorthodox religious classes, interpersonal care, addiction services and community service. 

Most of the congregation identifies as LGBT, but the church is committed to extending its inclusion to all who feel unwelcome in traditional Christian spaces or have faced religious trauma or violence.  

Kasinecz said he has always considered himself a religious person, just not the kind to attend service every Sunday.  

But in 2004, Kasinecz’s daughter, Katie, was killed in a car accident. He said at the time, she was a graphic design major at Susquehanna University and a member of the bells choir at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Emmaus. 

She was only 20 years old.  

Kasinecz said after the loss of his daughter, he turned his back on the church, blaming God for the tragedy. 

“I thought, ‘I’m a good person. How could you do this to me? How could you take my daughter?’” Kasinecz said. “I wasn’t a believer anymore.”  

It had been more than a decade since Kasinecz attended a church service when his partner, John Shipley, recommended he visit the Metropolitan Community Church of the Lehigh Valley. 

Shipley was introduced to the church through a friend at his Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and thought it might be the right place for Kasinecz to rekindle his relationship with God.

“He would tell me about how great the pastor was and the music and how inspiring it was for him,” Kasinecz said. “So, I went once or twice with him, and it really just renewed my spirit.” 

Kasinecz is now entering his 10th year as a church member. The church celebrated its 40th anniversary on Oct. 6, 2024.

According to the church’s website, at its inception in 1984, the church consisted of only 12 members and was led by Lutheran Rev. Craig Stahler. Four people pastored the church over the next five years before the late Rev. Peter Helt moved from the Metropolitan Community Church in Minneapolis to serve as the Lehigh Valley pastor from 1989 to 1999. 

During the early ‘90s, the congregation was composed almost entirely of gay men. Beyond providing a safe and welcoming space for LGBT people to practice Christian worship, its main goal was to support individuals and families affected by the HIV and AIDS epidemic of the ‘80s.

In the mid-‘90s, more LGBT women gradually joined the congregation. 

Around the same time, Elizabeth Goudy graduated from the University of Chicago Divinity School with a masters’ of divinity and planned to work in social justice within the Roman Catholic Church.

“It didn’t quite turn out that way,” Goudy said. “I started the coming out process and realized I wasn’t going to be able to be openly LGBT and serve in the Roman Catholic Church.”

After a few brief stints in  various religious occupations, Goudy soon discovered Metropolitan Community Churches. They completed a year of student clergy training at the Metropolitan Community Church in St. Louis, just in time to fill the opening at the Lehigh Valley location in 1999. 

It was then that Goudy met Liz Bradbury and Patricia Sullivan, co-founders of the Bradbury-Sullivan LGBT Community Center in Allentown, who had been fighting for LGBT rights in the Lehigh Valley since the early ‘90s.   

“When we met, Goudy’s office was actually a closet on the third floor of the Unitarian church,” Bradbury said. “Ironic.”

The three worked in tandem to pass an anti-discrimination ordinance in Allentown in 2002, adding “sexual orientation” and “gender identity” as prohibited bases of discrimination in employment. 

When an anti-LGBT group started the petition process to rescind the ordinance, Goudy, Bradbury and Sullivan called and visited the petitioners’ homes and asked them to reconsider. 

“It was really hard work, but I also knew it was critical work,” Goudy said. “And the only way that we can do that critical work, going door to door, asking people difficult questions, is with one another.”

In the early 2000s, the church shifted its focus from the fallout of the HIV and AIDS crisis to the burgeoning issue of marriage equality. 

Starting in 2003, Goudy led Freedom to Marry Day demonstrations every year on Feb. 12. 

They said a group would convene outside the Allentown courthouse and protest before marching in and demanding marriage licenses. 

“And of course we’d be denied,” Goudy said. “But then we’d have an interfaith service that night where we’d marry a same-sex couple and give them a religious ceremony.” 

Demonstrations continued for a decade until states like New Jersey passed marriage equality laws in 2013. 

That year, Goudy and dozens of other LGBT members and supporters gathered in Easton, right on the border between Pennsylvania and New Jersey. 

They walked across the bridge into Phillipsburg, New Jersey, where Goudy legally married three same-sex couples in a parking lot. 

Walking back, the crowd stopped in the middle of the bridge, where the marriages were no longer recognized.  

Nearly 100 people attended the demonstration, including former Easton Mayor Sal Panto Jr. 

He urged the local government to take the initiative in recognizing marriage equality and not leave it up to federal officials. 

In 2015, the United States Supreme Court struck down all state bans on same-sex marriage, recognizing marriage equality nationwide. 

Goudy said ever since the Supreme Court ruling, the church has shifted its focus once again to the inclusion of transgender people. 

The church has observed Transgender Day of Remembrance since the early 2000s, but given the solemn nature of the day, Goudy felt it was important to give the congregation a chance to celebrate transgender members in a positive way.

In 2014, the church began holding a monthly “blessing of transgender journeys,” when they invite transgender-identifying members to the front of the room, and the entire congregation reads them a prayer of affirmation.  

“It felt so important to (the church) that we have an opportunity to say to transgender people of any age, at any stage in their journey, that God loves you, and that God is blessing you through this journey,” Goudy said. 

Much of the congregation’s first experience with LGBT identities in a Christian setting was associated with shame and sin, while others grew up with LGBT identities completely invisible in a faith context.  

To address that spiritual baggage, the church strives to incorporate affirmation of LGBT identity into their worship practices. However, there are no roadmaps or guidelines for incorporating LGBT identities in a Christian worship setting, so the church often has to invent its own ways of worship to meet the spiritual needs of the congregation. 

Brian Jones, the music director and Minister of worship and music, said addressing religious trauma and cultural barriers is common practice among all minority community churches. 

Jones has been a minister at a minority community church since he was 10 years old and has seen firsthand how generational spiritual trauma can hold back minority community churches.

The church offers many services to help its members and the local LGBT community build holistic spiritual lives and feel supported in their worship of God.

For example, Goudy and Jones teach weekly spirituality classes, with topics ranging from “What is Worship?” to “Queering the Bible.” 

Jones is currently teaching “What is Worship?” to help inform members on how to manage and foster their relationship with God through every aspect of their lives, not just on Sundays. 

Weekly Narcotics Anonymous meetings are offered to address the higher rates of substance abuse in LGBT communities through group spirituality and self-acceptance. 

Themed social gatherings, exclusively for those in their 20s and 30s, provide a space for young LGBT members and allies to connect and support each other in their spiritual journeys. 

Kasinecz’s monthly trips to the emergency shelter allow members to engage in worship through acts of service and face-to-face connections with the unhoused and impoverished. 

Even the church’s yearly Tricky Tray basket raffle has raised more than $25,000 for local children’s school supplies, food and housing for refugees and the unhoused, and various LGBT-centered charities. 

As the church grows to fit the needs of its members, it has become more than a congregation —  it has become a community. That’s why Goudy refers to it as a “spiritual community.” 

“Community is our middle name, I like to tell people,” Goudy said. “And it seems (the members) connect more with the term community than they do church or congregation.”

Lisa Engle, a member of the church’s Board of Directors, has been a member of the church for just about eight years and runs the committee for the Tricky Tray basket raffle. 

When Engle came out while still living in her home state of Tennessee, she became a stranger to the friends and church community she had been a part of for 20 years. 

Since joining the Metropolitan Community Church of the Lehigh Valley in 2017, Engle has seen how the community’s compassion reaches everyone who attends — regardless of sexual orientation, gender identity, race or religion.  

She joked that everyone at the church has been kicked out of somewhere to end up there, but that shared experience only makes them feel closer. 

“We’re a church full of rejects, but it’s the best church home I’ve ever found,” Engle said.

Bonnie Keeler, who was discharged from the military after revealing her sexual identity, never misses a service. Her tie-dye shirts and signature “whoo!” have become a staple at every Sunday service. 

For Jones, the church has helped him deconstruct the Fundamentalist view of God’s love he once held and given him the chance to show others how to deepen their own relationship with God.

As for Kasinecz, he said he’s rediscovered his belief in God, which he lost all those years ago, and he’s more of a believer now than ever before.

“He will provide, he really will,” Kasinecz said. “You just have to have faith in God. And I have that back again through (Metropolitan Community Church of the Lehigh Valley).”