Rev. Terri Steed Pierce has encountered hate before. People have stood outside her church and shouted that as a gay woman she is an affront to the gospel. Videos of her sermons have been altered to make her sound like a cartoon character and used in social media campaigns to disparage women and the LBGTQ+ community.

But Sunday, March 9, was the first time the hate found its way inside Joy Metropolitan Ministries, as protesters entered the Orlando church and interrupted her service shouting “synagogue of sin” to the majority LGBTQ+ congregation.

“They actually came inside our sanctuary and spewed hate from our safe space,” said Steed Pierce.

Another Orlando church — one with a gay pastor — faced similar protests this month. At both churches, leaders have now hired off-duty police officers to serve as security guards for their Sunday morning services.

The protests at local churches mirror a national trend, with anti-LGBTQ incidents doubling in the last two years to more than 1,100 tallied from June 2023 to June 2024, according to GLAAD, a national LGBTQ advocacy group.

“I have received emails from people talking about ‘We’re bringing back Donald Trump to essentially get rid of your kind, to take back churches from woke-agenda type stuff’,” said Rev. Rushing Kimball of Broadway United Methodist Church, which faced protests the past two weeks.

Last Sunday, a couple from Oregon stood outside Kimball’s church holding signs that read “abortion is murder” and “homosexuality is sin.”

The Central Florida Pledge, a group formed last year to promote kindness and respect, said at least two other Central Florida churches have faced similar protests. Last week, the group put out a “call to protect our neighbors and the freedom to worship” and about 70 people affiliated with the Pledge group stood outside Joy Metropolitan to form a “circle of protection” so the church’s members could worship without disruption.

Steed Pierce’s church is “unapologetically gay,” she said, and after the 2016 Pulse nightclub shooting was a daily gathering place for those mourning the deaths of 49 people, many of them members of the LGBTQ community, in the shooting massacre.

Broadway United is a more traditional neighborhood church but has been targeted because, Kimball said, a video of him preaching while wearing makeup at a Pride event in St. Petersburg went viral last year, garnering millions of views and many hateful, and sometimes, violent comments.

Casie and John Peterman, the Oregon couple that protested outside Kimball’s church, said they are staying with friends in Orlando who showed them a video of Kimball. In it, he supported drag queens, they said, and that prompted them to show up Sunday morning with their signs.

“In our hometown we do this as well. We do a lot of churches,” Casie Peterman said. “They always ask us, ‘Why are you here?’ Well this church is affirming sin.”

The Orlando church, she added, is “everything God hates” because it is “pro abortion and pro homosexuality.”

In November, Orlando resident Maurice Price, his wife, Brittany, and their young daughter stood outside Kimball’s church with a camera and a “Repent or Perish!” sign.

A video of the incident that Price, who played in the Canadian Football League and on NFL practice squads, posted to his YouTube page shows him clutching a Bible and shouting into a microphone that being gay is a sin.

The video was viewed by more than 10,000 people. Price’s channel includes other such videos, including one shot outside Joy Metropolitan in January.

“We want to clarify that we are not merely protesting outside LGBTQ-affirming churches — we are there to shut them down in the name of Jesus,” Brittany Price said in an email this week. “And we’re not stopping — we will be out there again for Pride in October to continue exposing this lie.”

On Sunday, March 9, when Kimball arrived at his church, he was greeted by a group of men whom he recognized as members of Remnant Revival Outreach Center in Sanford, a group with an active social media presence.

“Their hands were raised in prayer, like they’re Pentecostal, like they’re trying to cast out demons or some sort of thing. And at that point, I just had this gut feeling that there was going to be more. So I called the police,” Kimball said.

The group is led by Richard Lorenzo, Jr., who has an Instagram account with close to 300,000 followers, where he speaks out against gay preachers and labels people of other faiths sacrilegious, saying Hindus, for example, worship demons.

Lorenzo’s group was told to leave Broadway United by the police. A short while later, they showed up at Joy Metropolitan, where they acted as if they were there for the service and were welcomed inside by the congregation, Steed Pierce said.

The group of seven adults and three children waited until the children’s sermon started, she said, before they got out of their seats to shout “synagogue of sin!”

Then the church band started playing, drowning out their words with music.

“We had a plan, if something happens we’ll start singing. Because you can drown it out. We have drums. We have a piano that we can turn up the volume on, because it’s electric. So we just started singing, so nobody could hear what they were saying,” Steed Pierce said.

Steed Pierce and other church officials opened a back door and escorted out the group, who left the building without putting up a fight, she said. Steed Pierce had someone from her staff call the police. But by the time they showed up, the group was already gone.

Lorenzo declined a request for an email comment or a phone interview.

The encounter seemed to frighten some members of the Joy Ministries congregation, Steed Pierce said, as some were not there the next week.

“We have some families that have little children. They were not there on Sunday, and I don’t blame them. It could cause people not to come back,” Steed Pierce said.

But the congregants that did show up saw people rallied by The Central Florida Pledge gathered around their church.

“When we heard that this had developed into a pattern, that a number of churches had been targeted by these same folks, on two days’ notice, we organized a community stand up,” said Joel Hunter, the group’s chairman and a longtime Central Florida religious leader.

No one showed up to disrupt services that day, but the Pledge group waited outside until the service was finished.

Pledge members and First Presbyterian Church in Orlando also are pitching in to pay an off-duty police officer to guard the Joy Metropolitan church for the next two months.

The couple protesting outside Kimball’s church last Sunday stood on a sidewalk, not church property, to show their dislike of the gay clergy and left as soon as the service ended.

Val Mobley has been attending services at Broadway United since 1997. She has seen protesters only in the last few months and has been shocked at the venom spewed at her church’s leader.

“They’re just so mean. I can’t get over the meanness of things that are said right to his face, and these are supposed to be Christians,” she said.

Mobley said members of the church support Kimball as do others in the community, who’ve shown up at services to show solidarity.

“Everyone in the neighborhood hates it,” Mobley said of the protests. “Everyone that has met Rushing loves him.”

Kimball said police officers and other security measures now seem a requirement at his church. On Wednesday evening, he was standing in the doorway of the church when a couple walked by and the man said to the woman, “This is a faggot church.”

That same day, neighbors reported seeing a woman spit on the church’s sign.

“I am experiencing a new level of anger amongst people, in ways I haven’t experienced,” Kimball said.

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