When Angela Kirwin first stepped through the doors of the Hot Metal Bridge Faith Community, she found the safe place she had been seeking in Pittsburgh.
“When I came out, I immediately scoured the internet for any way of reconciling my faith and sexuality,” she recalled of that tumultuous time in 2007, three years before she found Hot Metal. Many of her family and childhood friends were in congregations that did not accept LGBTQ members, leaving Kirwin with little support.
Nationally, attitudes among Christians are shifting toward greater acceptance of LGBTQ people, though the pace and meaning of that shift varies widely by denomination and congregation. The GALIP Foundation, which has tracked religious views on LGBTQ issues since 2003, reports that the number of U.S. churches that explicitly identify as fully affirming — meaning they perform same-sex weddings and welcome LGBTQ people in leadership — has more than tripled in that time, to 10,844. That figure represents a small share of the roughly 350,000 congregations nationwide, though many others have adopted more nuanced or evolving approaches to inclusion. A 2024 Pew Research Center study found that 48% of LGBTQ Americans identify with a religion, underscoring how many queer people remain connected to faith communities despite longstanding barriers.
Kirwin’s search initially led her to More Light Presbyterian churches, which affirmed her identity as a queer woman. She credits the acceptance she found there with saving her faith, but says they were not the best liturgical fit for her.
Several news articles, as well as a PFLAG endorsement of the Hot Metal Bridge Faith Community, encouraged her to check out the “rather rogue” South Side ministry in 2010.
Kirwin’s search mirrors a wider reconsideration unfolding in Pittsburgh and across the country. As more Christian denominations scrutinize long-held positions on LGBTQ inclusion, local congregations must decide whether to affirm queer members, split from their traditions or hold fast to existing doctrine. The conversations are often fraught and deeply personal — and they are reshaping the region’s religious landscape.
Hot Metal’s move toward acceptance
When Kirwin began attending Hot Metal, it was not yet LGBTQ-affirming, said founding co-pastor Jeff Eddings. Along with founding co-pastor Jim Walker, they had envisioned a different type of church than they had experienced, but had not yet hammered out all of its theological stances.
“We were centering it toward young people, arts, creative expression and storytelling, the countercultural scene,” said Eddings. The duo wanted to create an open and inclusive space, though, at the time, both of the denominations they were ordained through (the Presbyterian and United Methodist churches) were not fully affirming of the queer community.
They weren’t intentionally noncommittal, said Eddings. The church was on a journey to find out where they stood. “The space was appealing to a lot of people,” he said. The fledgling congregation attracted folks from all walks of life. “We were doing this thing for Jesus, and everybody was holding on for dear life. We were in survival mode.”
Eddings said he came to understand that ambiguity was the wrong response as people he had come to care deeply for wanted to know if they could serve in the church and be married within it.
A question over appointing gay members as elders forced church leadership and members to come together and decide where they stood.
Through a process of reading “A Time to Embrace,” watching “For the Bible Tells Me So” and hosting community discussions, Eddings said Hot Metal decided to include and affirm LGBTQ Christians in its community fully.
“We are going to take a stand, so to speak, we are going to be fully affirming,” Eddings said, recounting the consensus. “… We need to be a place that folks will come and that will be safe.”
For Kirwin, that safety was life-giving.
“I had no family support as they considered being gay an abomination,” she said. “The pastors were there for me when I needed support and counsel in a couple really tough first relationships.” Kirwin said the church had stated that LGBTQ relationships were “consecrated” in the same way heterosexual relationships are. That acceptance felt like a salve after the pain caused by traditional churches.
Some churches use the so-called “clobber passages” of the Bible to make LGBTQ Christians feel unholy or unwelcome. “One only needs to look at the ‘clobber passages’ through an accurate cultural lens and with the overview of absolute belovedness and love that is the integral thread in the ancient text,” according to Kirwin. “In my opinion, good theology and accurate interpretation of the Bible is affirming.
“… Queer folx need to know, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that we are beloved and beautiful reflections of God’s image, just as our straight siblings are.”
From monk hairstyles to sexual diversity
For many congregations in Pittsburgh, those questions are still playing out in pews, church councils and denominational meetings with no clear endpoint in sight.
The Rev. Liddy Barlow, executive minister of Christian Associates of Southwest Pennsylvania, has witnessed this wrestling in congregations across the region for decades.
“There are issues where people choose to disagree … I think the carpet in the social hall should be red, I think the carpet in the social hall should be blue. … But over the past few decades of Christian life in America, human sexuality has been a church-dividing issue,” said Barlow.
read more about religion in pittsburgh
Immigrant communities find faith homes in Pittsburgh’s southern neighborhoods
Her organization brings area congregations to the table to discuss complex issues, including human sexuality and gender. She said Pittsburgh has been integral to the national conversation on the topic, pointing to a 2008 rift in which the Episcopal Diocese of Pittsburgh voted to leave the denomination after the ordination of a gay bishop in New Hampshire.
Barlow does not expect this church-dividing issue to resolve soon, but is not surprised by growing inclusion. “I don’t see a moment in the visible future where … everyone agrees on this,” she said, but she is encouraged by the direction discourse is moving.
Barlow suggested taking the long view and laughed as she described a debate over the hairstyle of monks in the 700s that became a church-dividing issue.
“It’s really fascinating to wonder 600 years from now, 1,000 years from now, how are Christians going to understand these questions around human sexuality? Is it going to be something that is still church-dividing, or, I think more likely, is it going to be something that our descendants look at and say, ‘Huh?’”
Going broad in the ‘battle of the verses’
Walking the journey Eddings traveled a decade earlier, Pastor Leeann Younger of Cityview Church in East Allegheny’s Deutschtown section said her path toward affirming queer Christians involved taking a deep look at how the Church has historically twisted scripture to oppress groups.
“As a Black woman … when you first understand the theological gymnastics it took to centralize men and marginalize women … then you understand the theological gymnastics it took to affirm that certain people on this Earth were born to permanent servitude,” she said of previous stances on women’s rights and slavery within Christian spaces.
“It’s not very far off to start understanding that there are a lot of things that are done to exclude people who the majority wants to exclude, who the powerful want to exclude.”
Since their decision to affirm queer Christians, Cityview Church has had to leave their previous denomination and is in the process of purchasing the Tripoli Street Community Center, where they gather and support the needs in the North Side. Younger describes the split as amicable but necessary.
Younger said that in the theological debate that she calls a “battle of the verses,” she’s more interested in a broader reading of scripture. She said stories like that of the eunuch in the Book of Acts — a marginalized outsider welcomed into the early Christian community — give us a glimpse into how Jesus felt about people who did not meet societal norms around gender and sexuality.
Younger goes on to explain that viewing the Bible through a Western individualistic lens centers the powerful. People can pluck singular verses that harm the poor, the powerless and the marginalized — it’s been done for millennia.
“If you are shaped in love and grace and mercy and wearing a communal lens, you can find affirmation for being as inclusive as possible,” Younger said. The Gospels and Acts of the Apostles reflect “a constant broadening of the narrative.
“More and more people get to come in, to the point where I just come to the conviction that, in the same way the sun rises and sets on all of us, I think that acceptance, affirmation and inclusion of everyone is the only role for a divine being. Nothing that Jesus did would say anyone was excluded from anything.”
Meg St-Esprit is a freelance journalist based in Bellevue. She can be reached at megstesprit@gmail.com or on Instagram.
This story was fact-checked by Jamese Platt.
MOST READ STORIES
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
