August 25, 1998 (David W. Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061-0368, fbns@wayoflife.org) - The Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC), a homosexual denomination, is building a 2500-seat, $25 million dollar Cathedral of Hope in Dallas, Texas. With 2,000 members, the Dallas branch is the largest of the Metropolitan Community churches.

The UFMCC was founded in 1968 by Troy Perry. In the early 1960s he was excommunicated by the Pentecostal Church of God of Prophecy when he announced he was a homosexual. Within a few years he was divorced from his wife and founded the first Metropolitan Community Church in Los Angeles. The denomination has 500 ordained ministers, 50.6% of which are women. Seventy percent of UFMCC "clergy" come from other Protestant, Roman Catholic, and Pentecostal denominations. The denomination has a school called Samaritan Institute of Religious Studies in Lewisville, Texas, with an enrollment of roughly 300 students annually.

The UFMCC claims to have 42,000 members worldwide. It has five congregations with a membership of more than 1,000 -- in Dallas and Houston, Texas; in Los Angeles and San Francisco, California; and in Fort Lauderdale, Florida (Ecumenical News International, Jan. 27, 1998). Besides the United States, the UFMCC has congregations in Canada, Europe, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Argentina, the Philippines, Nigeria, Puerto Rico, Mexico, and Chile.

In November 1997, UFMCC founder Troy Perry participated in a White House conference on hate crimes in America. Homosexuals are striving to make it illegal to speak against their abominable lifestyle or to refuse to hire them or to rent housing to them, etc., on the basis of their perversions. They want homosexuality to be given civil rights protection alongside of race and gender. President Bill Clinton has done more than any other president to offer assistance to this wicked agenda. He has appointed large numbers of homosexuals to positions of authority within the United States government. He has exalted homosexuality to a place of civil rights protection among government workers.