It was daunting when the Rev. Brandon Thomas Crowley, at age 22, replaced a beloved pastor who had ministered to one of suburban Boston’s most famed Black churches for 24 years.
It was more daunting — at times agonizing — to reach the decision six years later, in 2015, that God wanted him to tell his congregation that he was gay.
To his relief, most of the worshippers at Myrtle Baptist Church in Newton, Massachusetts, embraced him. Crowley’s career has flourished, and he has now written a book — “Queering the Black Church” — that he hopes can serve as a guide for other congregations to be “open and affirming” to LGBTQ people rather than shunning them.
Crowley, 41, was born in Atlanta and raised in Rome, Georgia. He admired the preachers he heard as a child, especially at Lovejoy Baptist Church, his home congregation.
One Sunday, however, the pastor preached a fiery sermon against homosexuals.
“He called them all types of names, using derogatory phrases and really describing it as a detestable group and a sinful thing, and I just sort of knew he was talking about me,” Crowley said in an interview. “That was my first introduction to really knowing the beauty of who I am as a queer person.”
Crowley said his great grandmother repeatedly assured him that he was made in the image of God. She also told him about getting pregnant at 14 — and breaking away from her own church after refusing its demand to apologize to the congregation.
“She would say, ‘God loves you,’” Crowley recalled. “She said, ‘They almost made me take my own life when I was pregnant, but I came to know a God beyond the church, and I’ve got beyond what these preachers say.’”
Nonetheless, throughout this period, Crowley felt he was called to be a Christian pastor — a preacher of the social justice gospel.
Believing he had to hide his sexual identity in order to pursue that calling, he began dating a girl at Lovejoy.
He had still not come out by the time he…
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