You are here

North Jersey religious groups welcome gays, demonstrating new act of faith

The vigil at All Saints Church in Glen Rock.
By: 
Jeff Green / The Record

[The Record] North Jersey religious leaders, some breaking with the norms of their institutions, have forged new traditions of welcoming gay, bisexual and transgender people into their houses of worship, a process that seems to have accelerated in recent years.

Conservative Jews in Ridgewood are celebrating the same-sex marriages of their children during pre-wedding rituals at their synagogue. Episcopalians in Clifton and Unitarians in Paramus are learning to understand and embrace transgender people. A Roman Catholic parish in Pompton Lakes is launching its first LGBT ministry for those who have felt detached from their own faith.

Meanwhile, churches like All Saints Episcopal in Glen Rock have built a legacy of gay pastors and a reputation as a safe place for LGBT people to worship.

Maybe the clearest evidence of the wide appeal of all these efforts was that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people, by the hundreds, turned out for prayer vigils and marches in North Jersey in the wake of the massacre at a gay nightclub in Orlando, Fla., the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history.

The events may have been hastily organized, mostly by Episcopalian and Congregational churches, but they were attended by representatives of many other faiths, including Judaism, Islam, Sikhism and Hinduism.