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Metropolitan Community Church of Pittsburgh

A Local History

Metropolitan Community Church of Pittsburgh has a long, almost 40 year, history of maintaining a safe and sacred place for members of the LGBTQ community to grow spiritually. From our first service on January 26, 1975 until today we have provided worship experiences and a wide variety of ministries. We have throughout the years endeavored to provide volunteers to organizations and needy individuals in our community.

 

Over the years we have had 5 Pastors - Reverend Frank Scott our founding pastor, Reverend Joseph Houle, Reverend Karon Van Gelder, Reverend Roberta Dunn who cared for us for 27 years and Reverend Todd Goewey who has been our interim pastor since April 2011.

 

In this first 40 years we have also nurtured and sent out 9 church leaders, who continued to do God's work both in this and other denominations.

 

MCC Pittsburgh has founded, or been involved in founding many service organizations that have served the greater community. We founded the Gay and Lesbian Community Food Bank in 1985, and helped in starting the Lambda Foundation, The Pittsburgh AIDS Taskforce, Shepherd Wellness Community, Ministerial Network on AIDS, and the Interfaith Pride Worship Service.

 

In 2012 we began holding morning worship services in the former St. Martin's Episcopal church in Monroeville, PA. In January 2014 we moved our office, food bank, and all of our worship services, and social functions to St. Martin's where we continue to serve and grow.

 

Through 2014, we continued to answer our calling by working with our denomination, The Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, to do the work we have always done and move further along the path of becoming a social action/social justice church working for human rights locally and globally.

 

This year as 2015 rolled in, our congregation again decided because of necessity that we needed to start the search for a worship space that provided easier access for our members, a location that had better visibility to the community and was easier to find.  The move brought us to The Good Shepherd Luthern Church, at 4503 Old William Penn Highway in Monroeville just blocks from the other location.  We are now located in the parish rectory building in front of the church, which is both bright, and highly visible from the surrounding streets. As we dream of the ways we will grow and change over the next 40 years, We invite you to visit a worship service and stay to help us do God's work and write the next chapters of our history.

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