The Rev. Martin McLee: Welcoming all to the church

Last June, Union United Methodist Church threw open its doors to host the annual Boston Pride Interfaith Service, a pre-parade tradition that goes back 30 years. It marked the first time a historically black church hosted the event.

While the event made headlines, coming as it did just days before the legislature was to take a second and final vote on an anti-gay marriage amendment, Union pastor Martin McLee was nonchalant as he discussed the event during a recent interview. He said he agreed to hold the service at his church after being asked by Boston Pride organizers, who explained to him that the parade had been rerouted and was starting from the South End neighborhood where Union is located. "I said sure," McLee recalled. "I talked to the church council about it, I talked to some of my gay members. I said okay, when, when? It would be a great opportunity. So that was it."

"That was a great opportunity to celebrate with folk," said McLee. "And it was a faith experience. It wasn't the parade, it was a service, it was a worship service and so doing the God thing even in the uniqueness of an interfaith journey, it was a touching, it was a wonderful thing to experience."

Indeed, you're unlikely to see McLee leading the Pride Parade, or lobbying for LGBT issues at the State House, as many clergy members have done over the past few years. But he's no less committed to the LGBT community both within his denomination and out in the community that surrounds the stone walls of his historic church. In the past, McLee has opened Union United's doors to a GLAD-sponsored event featuring lesbian activist Mandy Carter. He has been a leading voice in the effort to engage black churches and pastors in the fight against HIV/AIDS. And in November, Union United hosted a day-long symposium organized by the Church Within a Church Movement, a progressive United Methodist organization working for a more racially and LGBT inclusive church.

"I think Martin D. McLee has done more to advance inclusion of LGBT folks into the Christian black church on a local and national level than anybody I know for sure - any non-gay identified person that I know for sure - and as much as anybody else in the country," said Douglas Brooks, an openly gay member of the congregation and the vice president of health services at JRI Health.

Brooks says that while most of the LGBT members of the congregation are African American and people of color, McLee "is also is very intentional and committed to opening the doors of that church to all LGBT people and people of all colors.

"And one of the most powerful moments of my 10 years in that church was the Sunday a gay white male couple walked down the aisle hand in hand to join that church," said Brooks. "Right down the center aisle."

McLee prefers to live out his commitment to LGBT equality quietly. And he sees himself more as a bridge builder than an advocate for any particular constituency. "My approach is to lead by example with a resolve of seeking justice and finding ways to be in community," he explains. "One of my biggest challenges as a person - forget a pastor - in Boston is to build community in a place where people are so comfortable just being in homogenous groups. And I'm not used to that and don't want to ever get used to that. So for me bridging divides is a healthy and normative experience and certainly to the gay and lesbian and straight communities, bridging those divides is a helpful journey. It's part of [how] I see myself in my ministerial role - in my humanity role - trying to get folk to just come across the street and meet your neighbor."

McLee arrived at Union United from a congregation in Texas seven years ago, just after the church had completed a two-year course of study and voted to become a Reconciling Congregation, meaning one that advocates for the full inclusion of LGBT people in the life of the United Methodist Church. Union United was the first historically black church in the country to take such a step. McLee immediately set about the task of leading the congregation into living out what it means to be a reconciling church, which he called a natural progression given the church's activist history in the underground railroad, the civil rights movement, the Boston busing crisis and the anti-apartheid movement. "And being in a community that has transitioned to be a place where there's a large population of gays and lesbians, it just makes sense that we could continue in our activism, that we wouldn't veer off course," he said.

But his support for the LGBT community put him in the middle of opposing factions when the debate over same-sex marriage reached a fever pitch in 2004. McLee is also a board member of the Black Ministerial Alliance (BMA) an influential organization of black pastors who joined forces with the Catholic Church and local and national right-wing organizations to push for an anti-gay marriage constitutional amendment. McLee refused to wade into the debate, and activists on either side of the issue were unsure of how to interpret his silence. Even now, McLee seems hesitant to discuss what he was thinking at that time. As we first broached the subject, McLee leapt out of his chair when the church doorbell sounded at the same moment. "Saved by the bell!" he exclaimed with a laugh. When the subject is raised again later, McLee acknowledged that "it was tough" to be caught between the two communities. "Folk were trying to drag me into a place where I did not choose to go," he said. "Folks were like, 'We want you to say this,' I said, 'No, I'm my own man.'" He decided to keep quiet in the interest of preserving the integrity of his own work. The marriage battle, he concluded, was not his fight. "I tell folk it's Massachusetts law. It's not a fight. It's Massachusetts law. Through the whole process my focus was to not get into that."

At the end of the day, same-sex marriage isn't really an issue for McLee. Although he makes clear that under United Methodist Church Law, he cannot marry same-sex couples, he says, "I embrace my married folk who are same-gender loving in the same way that I embrace [straight couples]. I have absolutely no problem with folks who are same-gender loving and married.

"I got a couple here, I call them the husbands," he says, prompting this reporter to laugh. "That's what they are!"