Rev. Michael Piazza celebrates 20 years at Dallas’ Cathedral of Hope

by Tammye Nash of Dallas Voice

The Rev. Michael Piazza has seen his share of highs -- and lows -- since he first came to Dallas in 1987. And as he prepared to celebrate the 20th anniversary of his installation as senior pastor of the church now known as Cathedral of Hope, Piazza admitted that when he first arrived in Dallas, he had no intention of being here this long.

Piazza explained his reasoning with an analogy he said he uses in counseling young ministers:

When a minister first comes to a church, the congregation gives the minister a handful of change. As that minister makes popular or easy decisions, he or she is given more change. But when the minister is forced to make necessary but difficult changes, he or she has to spend that change.

When the change is all gone, it is time for the minister to move on.

Piazza said he knew that to lead the church into the next decade and to the place he felt it needed to be, he would have to make a lot of those necessary but difficult decisions. And he believed his handful of change would last too long.

During a recent interview at his office at the Cathedral, Piazza said, he had heard people talking about what was then known as the Metropolitan Community Church of Dallas in July 1987 at the General Conference of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches.

"Everyone said you'd be crazy to go to Dallas right then," Piazza recalled. One reason is that the church was looking for a replacement for the Rev. Don Eastman, and Eastman had "left some very big shoes to fill."

But there were other reasons, too. The Dallas church was in turmoil, struggling under the weight of financial burdens and the ever-growing number of church members lost to AIDS.

Piazza had already turned down two requests from the Dallas MCC when, after receiving a third letter inviting him to apply, Piazza's partner, Bill Eure, suggested they consider the move.

"I came home and Bill said, 'You got another letter from the church in Dallas. You know, maybe we are being arrogant [in not considering the post]. Maybe we should listen to what they have to say,'" Piazza said. "We weren't crazy about Dallas. But I thought, I can do this for four to six years."

Piazza made his first trip to Dallas to preach at the Dallas MCC on Halloween weekend in 1987 before returning to be installed as the church's senior pastor on Nov. 7, the day he also celebrated his seventh anniversary with Eure.

It wasn't long before he began wondering if he had made a mistake.

When Piazza arrived, the church had two balloon note payments, each for $80,000, coming due. In fact, the first one, a payment on the church's activity center, was due the day Piazza arrived in Dallas. The second, an $80,000 payment on the sanctuary, was due exactly one year later.

The note on the buildings was held by a nursing home operated by the Church of Christ, and "they weren't about to negotiate with us," Piazza said.

"The economy was horrible," Piazza said. "The budget of the church now is about $40,000 a week [and more than $2 million a year]. Back then, the total budget for the year was [$316,680] a year. I took a $6,000 cut in pay to come here, and the third week I was here, they couldn't pay my salary."

Piazza and the church managed to make both payments. But it wasn't easy. And money wasn't the only problem. Piazza found himself watching the congregation of his new church withering away before the onslaught of AIDS.

"We were burying people every week," Piazza said. "In January of 1988, two months after I came here, I performed 18 funerals for people who had died of AIDS. And the church only had 280 members then. Sometimes it felt like nobody would survive."

Piazza said he realized quickly that one of his primary focuses at his new church had to be on establishing an AIDS ministry.

On top of that, he found himself being called on time and time again to step outside the bounds of his pulpit to represent the wider LGBT community as that community took to the streets to fight for better government response to the AIDS epidemic and to fight for equality and civil rights.

"William Waybourn [one of the community's most vocal activist leaders at the time] called me at least once every single week and said, 'Put on your collar and come on,'" Piazza said, recalling his participation in protests such as those around the Dallas Police Department's refusal to hire lesbian Mica England and District Judge Jack Hampton's statements after handing down a relatively light sentence to a teenager convicted of murdering two gay men.

Piazza's activism landed him in jail in 1991 when he confronted two police officers who had followed a car carrying church members into the church parking lot. He was charged with interfering with the police officers' duties, but the charges were later dropped.

His arrest led to protests by church members and apologies from City Council members who were friendly to the LGBT community.

Above all, Piazza said, he believed his mission in Dallas was to lead the church into new facilities that could meet the congregation's need, then and in the future. He knew it wouldn't be an easy job.

"I knew that to make the changes necessary to do that, I would probably have to leave a few years down the road," Piazza said. "This church was in debt. I believe the church as a whole was clinically depressed. But I believed I was here to lead the church into a new facility."

After selling its buildings on Reagan Street to the Dallas Gay and Lesbian Alliance and moving temporarily into a garishly-painted, pink-and-purple building on Maple, the congregation planned first to purchase existing church facilities. But the churches they visited refused to sell to a gay church.

So MCC of Dallas decided to buy land and build a church. But there were roadblocks there, as well. Banks would not loan the church the money, so the congregation decided to sell bonds. But companies that handled the sale of church bonds wouldn't work with them, either.

Part of it, Piazza said, was homophobia. But another part was the MCC congregation's high mortality rate; the banks and the bond companies were afraid the church would die out, literally, before the bonds could be paid off.

So, Piazza said, the church decided to sell the bonds itself.

When all was said and done, members of the church that had changed its name to Cathedral of Hope had purchased about $2.2 million worth of bonds to finance the construction of its new sanctuary at 5910 Cedar Springs Road.

"We were the designers of the building. We were the general contractors. We cleared the land. We did a lot of the work ourselves. We just wouldn't take no for an answer," Piazza said. "We moved into our new building [in December 1992] by the skin of our teeth. But it was ours."

It was, he said, the high point of his 20 years so far in Dallas.

"The moment we moved into that sanctuary -- on Christmas Eve, 1992 -- was my proudest moment here," Piazza said. "We finally dedicated the building in February of 1993, and I could have died a happy man right then. I felt like I had accomplished what I came here to do."

And, Piazza continued, "I could have left Dallas then. Now sometimes, I think I should have."

Because that was the time when his job as pastor of the Dallas church changed, and Piazza admitted, he wasn't ready for it.

"We had been so busy for so long, trying to get this building built and trying just to keep the church alive while we were in the pink building on Maple," he said. "It could have died then, but instead, it grew. The church grew 27 percent while we were in the pink building.

"It had really never occurred to me that this kind of growth would happen," he continued. "I was not prepared, the church leadership was not prepared for what would happen."

By Easter of 1993, Piazza said, the Cathedral of Hope had "exploded in growth." That meant the church had more members in general, more members with AIDS, more attention from the media to deal with.

"It was exhausting. And I think that was my greatest mistake in Dallas. I just was not prepared to lead a church of that size," Piazza said. "Because of that, we made some bad decisions, and we struggled to figure things out. This church was a phenomenon, and there was no one I could turn to for advice, because no one had ever pastored a gay church of this size before."

And still the Cathedral of Hope continued to grow, with parents both gay and straight and their children making up a large segment of this new membership. That presented even more issues for church leadership to deal with.

When Piazza and Eure and their two daughters were featured in a story in the Dallas Morning News in the mid-90s, Piazza said, the media spotlight grew even brighter and hotter.

"We had no one to talk to [about establishing programs for families and children]. We were just making it up as we went along,' he said. "Then our story was in the newspaper with that photo of Bill and me sitting on the floor of the nursery in our home folding baby clothes. We started getting tons of hate mail. We were succeeding on so many levels, but at the same time, the police had me on their 'most endangered species list.' They even wanted me to start wearing a bullet-proof vest."

About the same time, following a highly publicized shooting at a mainstream church in Fort Worth, church leaders decided it was time to have visible security at the Cathedral.

"We had always had undercover officers sitting in on services. We had always had people trained to deal with emergencies. But we had never wanted uniformed officers at the church because it would make people uncomfortable," Piazza said. "But after the shooting in Fort Worth, we decided it was time to have uniformed officers there."

Then about four years ago, the pressure went up several notches when a church member filed a complaint against Piazza and other Cathedral leaders with officials of the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches, the denomination with which the Cathedral had always been affiliated, accusing them of mismanaging funds.

The complaint led to widespread coverage of the church and its situation in both the LGBT and the mainstream press, much of which included comments from those criticizing Piazza and his style of leadership.

"One of the complaints was that we gave health insurance to a volunteer worker who had AIDS. They said he was not a paid staff member, but I said he would die without insurance. I said, 'We will not take him off the insurance. He will not die because we would not give him insurance,'" Piazza recalled.

He said that decision was ultimately validated by the state insurance board, but he also admits he may have handled it wrong.

"Maybe it was hubris on my part. But I think it was more about being overwhelmed and still trying to do the right thing," Piazza said, pointing out that the church recently received the results of its fourth external audit since the complaint was filed, none of which ever found evidence of wrongdoing.

"They have yet to find a single missing penny," he declared.

Many of the complaints about Piazza's management style focused on his efforts to raise money for a new sanctuary that would cost tens of millions of dollars. Critics were concerned too much money was being spent on fundraising efforts outside of Dallas, and that the church would never be able to afford the construction.

Eventually, the discord led to Piazza voluntarily surrendering his credentials as a UFMCC minister, and to a vote by members of the Cathedral to withdraw from the UFMCC. The uproar affected the Cathedral's membership rolls, as some members left to form a separate church, but Piazza said the vote to leave the UFMCC and another vote to keep him as senior pastor reaffirmed his belief that the church was on the right path.

"That was another moment of pride I never got to really feel," he said. "I had been here 17 years and after all those years of spending my change, the congregation vote for me by about 90 percent."

But the discord took its toll, and, Piazza said, he felt it was time for his role in the Cathedral to change.

Eventually, the congregation voted to call the Rev. Jo Hudson, a United Church of Christ minister, as senior pastor and rector of the Cathedral, and Piazza announced that he would retire as senior pastor.

He is still national pastor of the church and dean of the Cathedral, as well as president of Hope for Peace and Justice, a foundation formed two years ago by the church to focus on peace and human rights issues.

"When I came here in 1987, this church needed a prophetic pastor, and that's what I am -- a rough-edged, prophetic voice to help the church survive," Piazza said. "And then it grew, and it didn't need that prophetic voice anymore. It needed an institutional leader with a pastor's heart, and that's what Jo Hudson is."

Today, Piazza said, he spends about half his time working for the church, and about half working for Hope for Peace and Justice. He said the foundation is "a great adventure" that will "give me the opportunity to continue doing what I love...speaking out against injustice."

Letting go of his role as the head of Cathedral of Hope, he admitted, has been "both good and difficult. This has been a long goodbye, and I am grateful to have that chance to not to have to walk away all at once from the church where I baptized my children. Still, it is difficult sometimes to play second fiddle. There are these little griefs that happen all the time, like the first time we received new members and it was Jo and not me who welcomed them in."

Piazza also said it amazes him sometimes now to think back over the last 20 years and see how much the cathedral -- and the Dallas LGBT community -- has changed.

"Twenty years ago, if someone had told me a member of my church board would become sheriff, that a member of the church would become county judge or that a member would run for mayor -- I never would have believed that. But look at it now," he said.

"Like the Crossroads [Cedar Springs at Throckmorton] has changed and is changing, this church has changed, and it's changing. So many people have died, have moved on. And so many new members have come in. But we are still here.

"The first time I preached in Dallas, Carl Lewis was signing for the hearing impaired. He still does that at our services. There are others who are still here from those days, like Sue Schrader. I'm not the only one, and that is very meaningful to me. We are still here."