A Letter From The President

Worship Service a Huge Success

 Bob Dorr, PFLAG Omaha

 Posted on April 18, 2007

The GLBT/Ally community’s response to Focus on the Family’s gay-fixing conference--a worship service celebrating God’s love for ALL people--turned out to be a huge success. It drew 275 people, more than organizers expected, and some audience members commented afterwards that the service had been deeply meaningful to them in a very personal way.

The April 13 service at Omaha’s First Central Congregational Church came about as a response to a conference at Trinity Church Interdenominational in West Omaha asserting that it is both possible and desirable for gays to become straight. That message causes great harm to many people, participants in the worship service said. “We pray for those who are subjected to a message of hatred. Particularly we pray for youth whose despair will be deepened because of this message,” said Rev. Chad Anglemyer, senior pastor of First United Methodist Church .

Rev. Anglemyer was among nine ministers and one lay leader of Omaha churches who supported the service and took part in it. The other churches were: First Central Congregational, North Side Christian, Metropolitan Community, First Unitarian, Countryside Community, Peace Presbyterian, First Christian, Presbyterian Church of the Master and Lowe Avenue Presbyterian.

Michael Pack, an Omaha PFLAG member, gave testimony at the service about the harm that he believes fundamentalist, anti-gay religion has caused in his life.

The collection raised more than $1,500 for the Citizens for Equal Protection scholarship fund for graduating high school students who will enter college this fall. An event called Bowling for Gandhi drew a moderate, steady stream of bowlers who had a lot of fun Saturday afternoon. The profits from that event added $300 to the scholarship fund.

A number of people wrote letters describing their personal experiences with fundamentalist, anti-gay religion. Those letters were to be delivered to the leaders of Trinity Church to help them understand our life experiences.

We sought news media coverage not only of our events, but also of Michael Pack’s experiences in going through reparative therapy. Michael’s story was told in The World-Herald, The Reader and the Omaha City Weekly. The news coverage seemed to me to be fair and balanced. That’s all we can ask.

The worship service and other activities responding to the Focus on the Family event were planned by a coalition consisting of PFLAG ( Omaha and Lincoln chapters), Citizens for Equal Protection, River City Gender Alliance and Metropolitan Community Church .

Bob Dorr,
Omaha PFLAG president