Nineteen months ago, the Rev. Irene Elizabeth Stroud gave a sermon that began and ended with Jesus saying, "Peace be with you." In the middle, she told her congregants that she was living in a "covenant relationship" with another woman. "I have come to a place where my discipleship, my walk with Christ, requires telling the whole truth, and paying whatever price truthfulness requires," she announced from the pulpit on the Sunday after Easter 2003. Stroud's disclosure was no surprise to her flock at the First United Methodist Church of Germantown, a 210-year-old Philadelphia parish that welcomes gay men and...