The Rev. Durrell Watkins is senior pastor at Sunshine Cathedral, a Metropolitan Community Church in Fort Lauderdale, Fla., that is predominantly lesbian and gay. The church has a social service unit called SunServe with a support group for LGBT youth.

The Rev. Paul M. Turner is pastor of Gentle Spirit Christian Church, an LGBT-focused church in metro Atlanta. The church actively supports and participates in local Youth Pride events.

Congregation Etz Chaim in Wilton Manors, Fla., is an LGBT-specific synagogue. Email through the website.

Bull Run Unitarian Universalist Church is located in Old Town Manassas, Va. They have hosted an annual gay prom since 2009.

Rabbi Melissa B. Simon is director of lifelong learning at Shir Tikvah in Minneapolis. She was previously a rabbinical intern at Congregation Beth Simchat Torah in New York City, an LGBT-specific synagogue, where she led some of the congregation’s services for LGBT people. She is an advocate for LGBT rights.

Oct. 19, 2009, Religion Dispatches column by Rev. Irene Monroe about black churches’ failure to embrace young LGBT people.

The Rev. Irene Monroe is a syndicated columnist and the coordinator of the African American Roundtable of the Center for Lesbian and Gay Studies in Religion and Ministry at the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif. She has written about the black church’s failure to embrace young LGBT people. She lives in Cambridge, Mass. […]

Art Farnsley  directed the research of the Project on Religion and Urban Culture at the Polis Center of Indiana University. He has extensively studied congregations and social services and is one of the authors of Sacred Circles, Public Squares: The Multicentering of American Religion (Indiana University Press, 2004). His most recent work is “Flea Market Jesus,” on […]

The Crouch-Gregory book followed the publication of a similarly-themed book, Understanding and Transforming the Black Church, by Anthony Pinn, the Agnes Cullen Arnold Professor of Humanities and professor of religious studies at Rice University in Houston. Pinn is also executive director of the Society for the Study of Black Religion, and he co-chairs the American Academy of […]