This is got to be one of my biggest pet peeves. Nothing makes me more angry than this Orwellian redefinition of a common word like "welcoming." Welcoming is a far cry from excluding and stigmatizing, like these cruel churches do. I don't know what makes me more angry —the fact that they discriminate against queer people, or the fact that they twist a common word to try make themselves look better. Queer people would be well advised to steer far clear of these gaslighting bigots. Nothing could possibly be more cruel than advertising yourself as welcoming when you're actually exclusionary, and then expecting the excluded to be okay with that.

"Welcoming churches" are churches that exclude people based on their sexual orientation and gender identity. They're not run by good people. They're run by cruel homophobic bigots, by ignorant, self-righteous, superstitious moralizers.

In my area of Michigan, there was recently a huge brouhaha after a Catholic church in Traverse City fired a musical director and organist who had been filling his role for literally decades. Somebody decided it because he's gay he can't hold a leadership position in church.

This church says that it welcomes queer people.

If I welcoming, they mean morally condemning and firing a gay man for being gay, then they have no idea what the word welcome means. They also fall far short of even the most basic common human decency.