FL Church To Paint Rainbow Crosswalk On Campus After Street Mural Removed

SARASOTA, FL — In response to the Florida Department of Transportation targeting and removing street art, most notably rainbow crosswalk murals, throughout the state, The Harvest, an inclusive evangelical church in Sarasota, is taking matters into its own hands.

The church will paint a rainbow crosswalk on its campus at 3650 17th Street after its Sunday morning services. Volunteers are invited to help paint the mural.

The rainbow has long been a symbol associated with the LGBTQ+ community. And while FDOT officials claim the removal of these street murals across the state is a safety issue and that the works are inconsistent with the agency’s design manual, many activists believe state leaders are actually targeting cities with diverse communities.

“I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the first crosswalk they painted over was at the Pulse Memorial,” Pastor Dan Minor, Harvest CEO and president, told Patch.

Pulse, an LGBTQ+ club in Orlando, was the site of a 2016 mass shooting that killed 49 people. A rainbow crosswalk near the site, now a memorial to those who died, was painted over by FDOT workers in August.

Minor said he has “deep ties to Pulse.” He attended Booker High School with one of the shooting’s victims, Eddie Sotomayor, whose funeral he officiated at Robarts Arena.

This marked “a huge shift” for the pastor, he said. “I was privately inclusive but publicly I had the pressure of the evangelical community. So, I wasn’t public about what I felt privately. We just weren’t out there saying the things we’re saying now.”

Today, Harvest is an LGBTQ+ affirming church with a diverse congregation of all ages, races, economic backgrounds, genders and sexual orientations.

By officiating Sotomayor’s funeral, Minor expected to lose his position at the church, which his father founded decades earlier.

“At the time, nine years ago, it felt like it was probably the end of my job,” he said. “I figured the board would probably let me go. But I got out there and spoke from the heart. I told them, ‘If Jesus walked the face of the Earth today, he wouldn’t treat you the way pastors and the church have treated the LGBTQ community.’ I walked through an apology to the community on behalf of religious leaders.”

He spoke to nearly a full house of mostly gay men, giving the eulogy between a Tina Turner-inspired drag performance and a showing of Greg Holden’s music video for “Boys in the Street.”

“It was so beautiful, especially coming from an evangelical background,” Minor said. “It was so beautiful and wonderful and, of course, tragic at the same time.”

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After the funeral mass, about 300 gay men lined up to speak with him.

“One after the other, sharing their heart and what they heard growing up in the church,” he said. “They didn’t think they’d ever be loved by God or seen as an equal. It gave them hope.”

Sotomayor’s friends and family invited the pastor to board a bus and join them at the St. Pete Pride parade.

They marched in the parade, which was attended by “a massive quarter of a million people” that year, and then held a candlelight vigil for their lost friend, he said. “Growing up, Pride was the most evil day of the year. But all these people were on the side of the road with tears of grief, and not just the LGBTQ community, but really anyone who was decently human. I never looked back from that moment.”

Harvest faced a difficult few years after Minor went public with his personal views on LGBTQ inclusivity.

“We lost about 80 percent of the congregation and 80 percent of our income because of my inclusion, but the majority of the board stuck with it and supported it and we just didn’t stop,” he said. “It just felt like the right thing to do. But we had less than 20 people at services at one point.”

Today, the church welcomes more than 200 people to its weekly mass.

“And there are probably about 500 to 600 people who would call themselves members,” according to Minor.

This puts it probably in the top five post evangelical churches that are fully affirming and inclusive in the United States, he added. “It’s both awesome and sad that a church that has 200 people out on a Sunday morning is in the top five. But we’re only going up from here.”

When he and church parishioners learned about the FDOT targeting street murals, including the rainbow crosswalks at Second Street and Cocoanut Avenue, he reflected on Sotomayor’s funeral and thought: “We have to do something.”

He added, “We’re not just going to stand by and watch [these symbols] be erased.”

Anybody, even those who don’t attend Sunday mass, are welcome to join them in painting a rainbow crosswalk, the full Progress Pride flag, between the Harvest’s two main buildings on campus, the Learning Center and the Life Enrichment Building.

Minor stressed that it’s not a political move.

“A lot of people are being turned off by what’s happening in our state and our country and believe it’s not humanly decent, but I don’t believe Jesus is Republican or Democrat,” he said. “The only time I get kind of political is when it infringes on human rights. I don’t believe the rights of any human should be a political football. And since I have a platform, that’s the only time I speak up.”

The mural is more about empowering the gay and transgender community, the pastor said. “I don’t think it’s going to shut down the government or show the government or any politician who’s boss … It’s just our small part to tell every LGBTQ person that they’re not erased on our watch.”