Live! Love! Serve!
Building Relationship
- NOT Religion
Lunch Boxes of Love
834 showers
4836 meals served
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Community Like None Other....
St. John's MCC is part of the global movement of Metropolitan Community Churches. Together, we are compelled by an unfinished calling and a prophetic destiny. We are a global movement of spiritually and sexually diverse people who are fully awake to God's enduring love. Following the example of Jesus and empowered by the Spirit, we seek to build leading-edge church communities that demand, proclaim, and do justice in the world.
This App gives access to a list of upcoming ministry opportunities and events at St. John's MCC's Ministry Facility. You can use it to access your Volunteer Schedule quickly. In addition, the App provides information about the work of the Church that you can use while you're on the go and speaking with friends.
The St. John's MCC App is available for iOS devices on the App Store and for Android devices on Google Play. The App is quite small and downloads quickly. Tap below to get the App!
This web site is owned and operated by St. John's Metropolitan Community Church of Raleigh NC (St. John's MCC). We recognize that visitors to our site may be concerned about the information they provide to us and how we use that information. By visiting (www.stjohnsmcc.org), you accept the practices described in this statement. This Privacy Statement may be changed or updated at any time.
St. John's MCC is committed to respecting the privacy of our donors. St. John's MCC does not trade, share, or sell donor lists. Donors who supply St. John's MCC with their postal address or email address may be contacted periodically for solicitation purposes and/or information regarding upcoming events. St. John's MCC does not send mailings on behalf of other organizations.
Use of personal information will be limited to our internal purposes and only to further the program activities and purposes of St. John's MCC. All donors have the option to contact us via email, phone or postal mail to request to no longer receive communications.
All requests to be removed from St. John's MCC's mailing list shall be honored.
We do not collect personally identifiable information from you unless you provide it to us voluntarily and knowingly. If you make a donation, register for an event or register for our newsletter, for example, we may collect your name, mailing address, telephone number, email address, and credit card information. The exception to this rule is that credit card information is destroyed after the donation is completed. We will not keep that information on file for any reason.
St. John's MCC will retain your Personal Information to fulfill the purposes described in this Privacy Policy. St. John's MCC will establish minimum and maximum retention periods based upon the type of information collected (i.e., sensitivity), the intended purposes and as otherwise required by law.
We use high-grade encryption and security protocols (Secure Socket Layer-SSL) when processing financial transactions. This method is the industry standard security protocol, which makes it difficult for anyone to intercept the information you send us. Inside St. John's MCC, data is stored on password-protected servers. Our staff is educated about the importance of safeguarding your information. However, such precautions do not guarantee that our web site is invulnerable to all security breaks. St. John's MCC makes no warranty, guarantee or representation that the use of our web site is protected from viruses, security threats or other vulnerabilities and that your information will always be secure.
Cookies & Indirectly Collected Information
St. John's MCC may use cookies to enhance your experience while using our site. A "cookie" is a small piece of data that is sent to your browser from St. John's MCC's web server and is stored on your computer's hard drive. The site also may use cookies or other technologies to track the specific pages viewed by visitors on the site or to target specific content that might be of interest to you. However, if you would prefer not to receive cookies, you can alter the configuration of your browser to refuse cookies. If you choose to have your browser refuse cookies, it is possible that some areas of our site will not function properly when you view them.
When you visit our site, we automatically collect Aggregate Information about your visit. Collecting this information helps us to improve our site to enhance your experience while on our site, communications and our work. Aggregate Information is non-personally identifiable/anonymous information about you, such as pages most frequently accessed by you, time spent on a page or area of our site, the number of visits to our site by you, types of browser used by you, cookie preferences or search terms entered by you. We can tell the type of computer and web service that you are using, as well as the date, time, and pages that you visit. Aggregate Information is used in a collective manner, and no single person can be identified by that compiled information (for example, the number of people who visited a page of our site on a particular day).
St. John's MCC also may use Aggregate Information for internal purposes, such as tracking demographic data and providing targeted content to make our site more useful to our visitors. The gathering of this Aggregate Information may be accomplished by the use of cookies or web beacons by St. John's MCC and its third-party service providers. In particular, St. John's MCC will collect an IP Address from all visitors to our site. An IP Address is a number that is automatically assigned to your computer when you use the Internet. St. John's MCC may share Aggregate Information with its content providers, sponsors, service providers or other third parties to advance the goals of St. John's MCC and otherwise in fulfillment of our mission. We use IP addresses to help diagnose problems with our server, administer our site, analyze trends, track users' movement on our site, gather broad demographic information for aggregate use in order for us to improve our site, and deliver customized, personalized content. IP addresses, however, are not linked to Personal Information. St. John's MCC also may use a unique assigned number located with our site's URL to determine the website from which you navigated to get to our site. While this number may not be apparent to you, it does not contain your Personal Information.
Our Privacy Statement applies only to your use of St. John's MCC website. This site contains links to other sites. We are not responsible for the privacy practices of these sites. Links to other sites do not imply an endorsement of the material or policies of those web sites. You should read the privacy policies of each site you visit to determine what information they may be collecting from you.
This Privacy Statement applies only to our online practices and does not encompass other areas of the organization. By accessing or using the web site, you agree to be bound by all terms and conditions of St. John's MCC Privacy Statement as posted at the time of your access or use. If you have any questions about our policies or compliance, you may call 919-834-2611, or write to:
St. John's Metropolitan Community Church
722 Maywood Street
Raleigh, NC, 27603-2340
1976 - Began as a Bible Study
St. John's Metropolitan Community Church (MCC) began as a small group of individuals that came together on the last Sunday in February 1976 to study the Gospel of John. Facilitated by The Rev. Willie White and his partner, Robert Pace, the group continued to meet and by June of 1976, voted to affiliate with the MCC denomination. Rev. White, who pastored St. John's from 1976 to 1981, began a relationship with the Campus Ministry of N. C. State University which continues today. Other needs of the Lesbian and Gay Community were addressed by St. John's in those early days including anonymous STD screening and rap groups. Within a year of its founding, the church began meeting at Community United Church of Christ. This mutually nurturing relationship lasted 17 years, until our first property was purchased.
St. John's second pastor, The Rev. June Norris, was the first heterosexual woman to be ordained in the United Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC) and was previously the pastor of an MCC outreach effort in Fayetteville. She served St; John's from 1981 to 1988 and continued St. John's participation both in the LGBT Community and the community-at-large, including offering testimony before the Raleigh City Council regarding non-discrimination clauses as well as participation in North Carolina Pride events. During her tenure, the diversity that has always been a central hallmark at St. John's was strengthened.
St. John's found its third pastor, The Rev. Wayne Lindsey, among their membership. He had served as worship coordinator after the resignation of Rev. Norris, and after being asked to preach more and more often was then encouraged to apply to officially become pastor. In the mid-1990's, St. John's began a serious search for a worship center culminating with the purchase of a ministry complex at 805 Glenwood Ave.
During this time, St. John's also became active in the Raleigh Religious Network for Lesbian and Gay Equality. Additionally, Rev. Lindsey worked with Lay Delegate Stan Kimer and the Gulf Lower Atlantic District (GLAD) to secure UFMCC's membership in the North Carolina Council of Churches.
During this era St. John's offered two very different worship experiences, the AM service being more traditional eventually with the Morning Choir and the evening service being more evangelical even Pentecostal with music provided by the Voices of St. John's. The Voices travelled to the UFMCC denominational General Conference and St. John's received the denomination's award for multi-cultural programing in 1997. Also during this time St. John's Assistant Pastor Wanda Floyd left St. John's to found Imani MCC in Durham.
After Rev. Lindsey resigned as pastor in 1999, St. John's had a lay led period of transition. Terri Steed (now Rev.) was worship coordinator and many guest speakers filled our pulpit.
In July of 2001, St. John's called The Rev. Brendan Y. Boone to serve as its fourth Pastor. Rev. Boone had been a deacon at New Life MCC in Norfolk, a long-time member and Clerk of the Mid-Atlantic District Committee, and most recently an Assistant Pastor at MCC-DC. Committed to "find them, bring them in, grow them up and send them out" Rev. Boone's, stirring preaching and inspirational leadership blessed St. John's with a new vision for ministry. Four clergy trained and were ordained with Rev. Boone's leadership and many more lay leaders found their ministries. In 2014 Rev. Boone moved on from St. John's at the end of December 2015 initially to follow his wife who made an essential career move to Florida.
Rev. R. David Smith, former pastor of MCC Baltimore for 15 years, also a former member of the Mid-Atlantic District Committee and most recently Assistant Pastor at Vision of Hope MCC in Lancaster and York, PA, was appointed as Interim Pastor of St. John's in March of 2016. He served during a time of intentional transition, preparing us for our next settled Pastor.
St. John's MCC found its fifth and current Pastor among the membership once again! The Rev. Vance Haywood was elected by the congregation unanimously in December 2017 and began his term as Pastor on January 1, 2018. Vance prior to becoming Pastor, had served the past 2 years as Worship Coordinator and was a part of the Preaching Team that worked together during our transitional period.
Prior to becoming Worship Coordinator, Vance served as a Deacon for several years and was a member of the Board of Trustees.
Today Vance is leading the church in our charge to Build Relationship and Not Religion by being the Church and putting our words into Action in our Communities.
Look for us in our new home at 622 Maywood Avenue near Raleigh's Farmer's Market between Saunders and Lake Wheeler just off I-40. After many years in our own building on Glenwood we decided to find a more spacious building with more parking and all meeting spaces located on the same level. Come see what God has provided and what God is doing with us.
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Rev. Carlton Rutherford
Resources in Our Community