‘Open and Affirming’: Irvine Church is a Haven for LGBT
On a hot day in June 1991, about 130 church members packed the Irvine United Congregational Church sanctuary.
The air conditioner wasn’t working. At least, that’s how it felt.
“It was tense,” said the Rev. Fred Plumer, the church’s founder and pastor at the time. “There was a lot of excitement and anticipation.”
They’d all come to cast their votes. The issue? Should they become an “open and affirming church?” In other words, should the church welcome LGBT members?
The two years leading up to this vote had been contentious.
Plumer, backed by a majority of his congregation, was the only clergy member in Irvine at the time who spoke out against the City Council’s decision to remove the words “sexual orientation” from the city’s civil rights ordinance, denying gay people the right to rent in the city.
The church got bomb threats. Death threats. Someone slipped into Plumer’s office and plastered the room with yellow sticky notes scrawled with obscenities.
Each day, as he got ready to leave the church, the pastor dropped his keys to the ground and discreetly checked the undercarriage of his car for explosives.
Church members held town halls, prayed. Then, the big moment arrived.
As Plumer prepared to pass out the ballots, a man stood up.
“We don’t want to vote anonymously,” he said. “We want to stand up and be counted.”
And that’s what they did. The entire congregation, except for one family, stood up. They were now an open church.
The room erupted in cheers.
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On Sunday, the 32-year-old church celebrated 25 years of remaining “open and affirming” with a special 10 a.m. service led by Plumer, a Southern California native and UC Berkeley graduate who came to Orange County with dreams of establishing a progressive, civic-minded church.
Plumer retired in 2005 after doing exactly that and serving the congregation for more than two decades.
He returned Sunday to tell the story of that day and moment 25 years ago that, he says, defined his church and paved the way for its onward journey – becoming an oasis for progressive issues in a county that is predominantly conservative.
Although the service was joyful, it was also poignant because of the shooting at Pulse, an Orlando, Fla., gay nightclub, that left 49 dead and many more critically injured.
“Today, more than any other day, we needed to be here in a church where we are welcomed as gay people and such an act would be unthinkable,” said the Rev. Paul Tellstrom, senior pastor and openly gay minister, who has taken over since Plumer’s departure. “We needed to be lifted up.”
As people in Orange County, Fla., were struggling to make sense of the hatred of LGBT people that might have spurred such a heinous act, in Orange County, Calif., an open and affirming congregation celebrated its decision 25 years ago to be welcoming and accepting.
Since that vote 25 years ago, church members have made their voices heard on a variety of issues.
They joined hands with members of the Jewish and Muslim communities to foster interfaith dialogue after Sept. 11, 2001.
The church’s office was ground zero during the Proposition 8 campaign in 2008 – a statewide measure seeking to ban gay marriage – where community members came to pick up “No on 8” placards and bumper stickers.
Congregants rallied for civil rights when George Zimmerman was acquitted in the slaying of Trayvon Martin.
They hosted meetings calling for universal health care and staged peace rallies when the nation was at war in Iraq.
In 2010, when a Florida pastor threatened to burn the Quran on the anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, Tellstrom conducted a service to bless copies of the Islamic holy text.
In 2014, Tellstrom got married to his longtime partner in the church before congregants and their families.
“We’ve become an alternative church in Orange County, a place for people who are otherwise unable to become part of a faith community,” Tellstrom said.
A longtime member of the church, Felicity Figueroa, was one of the forces behind the Orange County Equality Coalition, which was housed at the church during its early years. Figueroa says she has always felt surrounded by like-minded people there.
“It has been truly wonderful to find a church where people are concerned with social justice and civil rights issues,” she said.
The church has been “a longtime hub of support” for the LGBT community, said Rusty Kennedy, executive director of the Orange County Human Relations Commission.
“They became an open and affirming voice for LGBT people long before it was illegal to discriminate and before gay marriage was even considered,” he said. “They’ve had that same prophetic voice with interfaith relations. They’ve taken a leadership role in the Orange County faith community in terms of accepting people who are different.”
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Lorraine Fox of Mission Viejo, raised as a Christian fundamentalist, was ostracized from her church because she was gay.
“They kicked me out of Bible school,” she said. “For the next 25 years, I stayed away from church. I just couldn’t sit with people who sang about love but didn’t practice it.”
In 1991, she heard about the church in Irvine that had opened its doors to the LGBT community.
“The minute I walked in, I cried,” she said. “And I cried the entire service. I felt like I’d come home.”
Fox says she has never wanted to go to a “gay church.”
“It’s just like going to a gay bar,” she said. “It’s like I have to hide for being gay. But here was a place where I could practice my faith and be myself.”
That was exactly how Christine Roy, a transgender woman, says she felt, too. Roy had stopped going to church when she “got serious” about her identity because she believed the two were mutually exclusive.
The Irvine church was the first one she “went to as Christine.”
“It’s a big deal to be able to go to church as yourself – your true self,” said Roy, of Laguna Hills. “That’s how you get a deeper connection to your faith.”
Roy also took part in the church’s ministry to LGBT detainees placed on immigration hold in Santa Ana.
“It meant a lot not just to be helped but also to be able to reach out and support someone like me,” she said. “I felt like I was no longer an outsider. I’m someone. I’m part of a community.”