Metropolitan Community Churches: The Founding

During the four Sundays of October we will be celebrating 44 years of MCC. We will begin by sharing MCC's early history...the date and make-up of the first worship service.

The story of Metropolitan Community Churches begins with one individual, defrocked by his Pentecostal church for homosexuality and recovering from a suicide attempt, who dared to believe God's promise of love and justice for all people. MCC was conceived when Troy Perry, then 27 years old, shared his faith with a friend who had just been arrested during a police harassment of a gay bar.

"Nobody cares!" his friend Tony Valdez lamented. "God cares," Troy responded. This is the essence of MCC's message, an idea so powerful that over the next 44 years it would birth churches and ministries circling the globe.

MCC was born several months later, on October 6, 1968, when Rev. Perry led 12 worshipers in the first worship service of what was to become Metropolitan Community Church of Los Angeles. Foreshadowing the diversity that was to blossom over the next four decades, the congregation that first morning included a person of color (Latino), a Jewish worshiper and a heterosexual couple, their backgrounds both Catholic and Protestant.

The church quickly outgrew its first meeting space, a pink duplex home in Huntington Park (a suburb of Los Angeles) where Rev. Perry lived.

Within months of the first worship service, Rev. Perry began receiving letters and visits from people who wanted to start Metropolitan Community Churches in other cities.

Today -- 44 years after MCC's first worship service -- Metropolitan Community Churches has grown into a worldwide denomination with churches, programs and ministries touching 37 countries around the world.