On Sunday, October 23, 1983, a notable event occurred in San Francisco. A celebration of music, word, and prayer commemorated the five-hundredth birthday of the great Protestant reformer, Martin Luther. Leaders of the Episcopal, Baptist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Congregational, and Lutheran traditions took part in the service. Representatives of many other denominations marched in the processional singing “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God.” Choral settings from the Greek Orthodox service framed the liturgy. Most remarkable, the Roman Catholic archbishop of San Francisco opened the ceremony, and the event took place in St. Mary's Cathedral. Reformation-rooted Protestant Christianity thus was recognized by a broad panorama of world Christian traditions that had lived side by side for well over a century in the strongly Catholic City of Saint Francis by the Golden Gate.

Ten miles east of Bighorn Canyon in northern Wyoming, you start to climb up out of the desert heat toward Medicine Mountain, looming in the distant haze. At this point, Highway 14A begins a torturous seven-mile ascent along a 10 percent grade, rising ever higher into sweet clover and green meadows, spruce trees and lodgepole pines. Staying in first or second gear the whole way up, your engine still overheats by the time you have reached the crest. But, if you follow the small National Forest sign off to the left near the summit and walk another mile and a half after parking the car, you come to what seems to be the top of the world: the Great Medicine Wheel, high in the Big-horn Mountains, an ancient eighty-foot diameter circle of rocks with a cairn in the center and twenty-eight spokes radiating out to the rim.

“It seems to me, now,” reflected Troy Perry, four years after founding a successful new Protestant denomination, “that it must have been a matter of timing, and I think that it was fate, too! God chose me for my mission at a time when He knew the world would respond, once the need was made clear.” While the question of divine ordination is a bit outside the scholar's jurisdiction, the question of timing is a crucial one for historical inquiry, and Perry's remarks show an insightful awareness that the success of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC) was due in large part to timing. As with any successful religious group, however, the seeds of the UFMCC germinated, sprouted, and grew as a result of a multitude of interconnected factors, including both external back-ground factors in American society at large and internal factors within the UFMCC itself. This article relates the history and early growth of the UFMCC to this constellation of factors in order to gain a clearer understanding of both the denomination itself and the social changes of which it was an integral part.