Keeping the faith amid holy vitriol

Gay and lesbian Christians can find solace in a small church which caters to their spiritual needs, writes Tim Cribb

A Christmas tree welcomes the faithful to a make-shift church on the 12th floor of a commercial building in the backstreets of Sheung Wan, the light from four candles twinkling off the decorations.

This church, like many of the more than 12,000 across Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories, has none of the grandeur of the 115-year-old Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Caine Road, recently honoured with a 2003 Unesco Asia-Pacific Heritage Awards.

Its congregation is small, about 50 or so this Sunday afternoon, but they count themselves among the 550,000 mostly Chinese Christians of myriad denominations who worship God, even though the more fundamentalist of their brothers and sisters damn them.

The Blessed Minority of Christian Fellowship is a homosexual church formed in 1992. It caters for gays and lesbians who do not believe their sexual orientation disqualifies them from Christian worship.

The debate over homosexuality and Christianity has been a heated one this year, with the issue of same-sex marriage entering the political agenda of many countries and the consecration of an openly gay bishop in the US opening cracks in the worldwide Anglican Church.

Catholics were reminded on July 1 by the Vatican that homosexuality is immoral and incompatible with the teachings of the Bible, and that marriage is for procreation and hence can only be between a man and a woman, not couples of the same sex. The Greek and Russian Orthodoxies echoed the same view.