AIDS forever changed Castro Lutheran church

In September 1981 James DeLange, a straight married man, assumed his duties as pastor of St. Francis Lutheran Church in San Francisco's Castro District.

At the time a small, struggling congregation, DeLange expected his main focus would be filling the pews of the Danish-built brick church that had survived the 1906 earthquake. The 1970s had ushered in sweeping changes to the neighborhoods surrounding the Church Street house of worship.

As gay men moved into the old Victorian homes in Duboce Triangle and Eureka Valley (the gayborhood's former name) further south on Market Street, many of St. Francis's longtime straight parishioners had moved to other parts of the city and Bay Area. And not many of the new residents attended the Lutheran services.

"There were some gay men in the congregation when I became pastor. It was a small congregation," recalled DeLange.

But DeLange soon found himself providing pastoral care to many gay men raised Lutheran who had succumbed to a mysterious disease that had only been discovered that summer.

"Mostly what happened is there were people in the congregation who said their friends were sick and asked if I would go visit them," he said. "The hospitals would also call to say there was a gay man here who is Lutheran and very sick. That got me involved."

As more and more of the city's gay male population succumbed to what became known as HIV and AIDS, St. Francis would be forever transformed by the epidemic raging outside its front door. The church reached out to the gay community, running ads in the Bay Area Reporter to promote its welcoming LGBT parishioners.

It also called upon two openly gay "non-stipendiary" pastors to assist DeLange. The first, in 1982, was the Reverend Jim Lokken, who had been an active member of the church. The Reverend Michael Hiller, who had joined the church that year, became a pastor in 1984.

"The AIDS epidemic had stimulated part of the outreach to gay men, and would prove to overshadow the next 15 years at St. Francis. Several people who were already members became ill; others, diagnosed with HIV, joined St. Francis to reclaim their faith and their relationship to the church," wrote St. Francis parishioner Paul Goth, an architecture professor at UC Berkeley, in a history he compiled about St. Francis.

Longtime parishioner Kirsten Havrehed said the 1980s were "terrible years" for the church and its members as they dealt with so much death and sorrow.

"We had many members at St. Francis who died of AIDS. We became a community who took care of those people," said Havrehed. "Every week we had big bingo games to raise money to take care of people with AIDS in the hospice."

DeLange, with the help of Lokken, now deceased, and Heller, currently the interim rector at Saint Mark's Episcopal Church in Berkeley, would provide comfort and care to many Lutheran parents of AIDS patients who would learn their sons were gay when they arrived at the hospital.

"Within 15 minutes they would find out he was gay, he had a partner who was the roommate, and third he was dying," recalled DeLange. "Part of our ministry was not just dealing with the dying and the bereaved, who were often sick themselves, but also helping the families process this."

Its outreach to people living with AIDS led St. Francis to be branded the city's "gay Lutheran church." While some older straight members turned to other churches, new parishioners took their place.

"By 1987, more than half of the now-larger congregation was made up of gay men. Membership was growing enough to have three membership classes a year," wrote Goth in his history on St. Francis. "St. Francis was ready to plunge into a new national advocacy for full inclusion of lesbian and gay people in the life of the church and society."

The church's involvement in caring for people living with HIV and AIDS helped lay the groundwork for its taking on an even greater stance in the fight for gay rights. In 1990 St. Francis, along with First United Lutheran Church of San Francisco, called three out non-celibate reverends to be their pastors. The decision would lead to their decades-long expulsion from the national church and touch off an international discussion about the role of openly LGBT clergy that continues to this day. (St. Francis rejoined the Evangelical Lutheran Church of America after an official ceremony earlier this year.)

Even as St. Francis fought to change the national Lutheran Church's policies, it continued to care for those living with HIV. Grant Burger found himself walking through its doors in September 1993 two years after learning he was positive.

"I was born and raised Lutheran. My relationship with God is very important to me independent of what the church told you," said Burger, who had been referred to the church by the Lutheran Gay and Lesbian Ministry. "They recommended I come to St. Francis and check it out, so I did and never left."

What he found, Burger said, was a support network that helped him through his darkest moments, especially prior to the introduction of protease inhibitors in 1996 when he was close to dying.

"I found a family, not just people sitting in some pew," he said. "It was just huge to know St. Francis welcomed me unconditionally and loved me with no shame at all. It speaks to just what love is all about."

Looking back at the role the church played during the early years of the AIDS epidemic, DeLange believes he and his colleagues were able to offer many people comfort.

"The positive thing that came out of the AIDS movement was that families for the most part changed their minds about what it was to be gay. They stood by their adult children," said DeLange, adding that few of the parents he worked with turned their backs on their gay sons. "Another positive side to it is that a lot of gay people were able to reconcile their sexuality and their spirituality. The negative part of it is we lost a whole generation. There are too many people who had so much to contribute to our society and to our culture who are gone."