Our Mission

We are a community of LGBTQIA+ folx and allies embodying the liberating heart of Jesus where everyone is invited to come as you are, believing as you do.

Our Vision

Everyone Belongs. With remarkable warmth and bold, progressive worship, we are cultivating a joyful, supportive congregation where you can explore your relationship with God on your own terms. We strive to be a hub for the entire LGBTQIA+ community, creating a liberating movement within and beyond our church walls. Together, we commit to racial and social justice while embodying an optimistic hope for the future. We invite you to bring your full self to unite your spirituality, sexuality, gender identity, and heart for justice. Come, join us!

OUr Core values:

Core Value of Radical Inclusion: Love is our greatest moral value and resisting exclusion is a primary focus of our ministry. We want to continue to be conduits of faith where everyone is included in the family of God and where all parts of our being are welcomed at God’s table.

Core Value of Queer Community: Offering a safe and open community for people to worship, learn, and grow in their faith is our deep desire. We are committed to equipping ourselves and each other to do the work that God has called us to do in the world.

Core Value of Spiritual Transformation: Providing a message of liberation from the oppressive religious environment of our day or to those experiencing God for the first time is what guides our ministry. We believe that when people are invited to experience God through the life and ministry of Christ, lives will be transformed.

Core Value of Justice & Mercy: Working to talk less and do more, we are committed to resisting the structures that oppress people and standing with those who suffer under the weight of oppressive systems, being guided always by our commitment to Global Human Rights.

What We Believe

We are committed to following the example of Christ and embracing progressive values. To help explain what that looks like, we have adopted these "Eight Principles of Progressive Christianity" that were developed at the Pacific School of Religion:

The Metropolitan Community Church of Greater Saint Louis is a Progressive Christian Community.  By calling ourselves progressive, we mean that we are Christians who…

  1. have found an approach to God through the life and teachings of Jesus;

  2. recognize that others have other names for the way to God's realm and acknowledge that their ways are true for them, as our ways are true for us;

  3. Invite all people to participate in our community and worship life without insisting that they become like us. This includes:

    • believers and agnostics,

    • conventional Christians and questioning skeptics,

    • women and men,

    • all sexual orientations and gender identities,

    • all races and cultures, all classes and abilities,

    • those who hope for a better world and those who have lost hope;

  4. understand the sharing of bread and wine in Jesus's name as a representation of an ancient vision of God's feast for all peoples;

  5. know that our actions toward one another and toward other people is the fullest expression of what we believe;

  6. find more grace in the search for understanding than we do in dogmatic certainty—more value in questioning than in absolutes;

  7. form ourselves into communities to equip one another for the work we feel called to do:

    • striving for peace and justice among all people,

    • protecting and restoring the integrity of all God's creation,

    • bringing hope to those Jesus called the least of his sisters and brothers;

  8. recognize that being followers of Jesus is costly, and entails selfless love, conscientious resistance to evil, and renunciation of privilege.

What we mean when we say queer

To Queer: To differ from the norm -- not exclusively in relation to sexuality and gender expression, but in looking at every force active in our lives and in the world from an open, spacious, non-binary, perspective. To “queer” something is to look for the non-dominant expression, experience, understanding; to look at something not only “from below” but also beside, adjacent, betwixt. When we queer, we make visible that which many disregard, dismissed, or things we don't tend to see.

- Rev. Lauren Bennett