In a basement on the Upper West Side Pastor Brown offers a space where LGBT and other socially marginalised people can be at home with their Christian faith

In the late afternoon of Easter Sunday, in the sparse basement of the Church of Saint Paul and Saint Andrew on New York City’s Upper West Side, Derisse David sat in a bright orange skirt and a paisley shirt, waiting for the sermon to begin. A former dominatrix brought up in a strong Baptist family in Queens, David sat beside her old friend of eight years, a black lesbian minister, former police officer and daughter of a reverend.

The congregation of Rivers of Living Water, which for the past two years has held its service in this makeshift space, filled the purple plastic chairs set out in neat rows. Ladies in traditional Sunday best, with black frocks and white hats on, clicked on heels past middle-aged women in loose tuxes and ties, while young men in tight jeans and T-shirts squeezed into one corner of the room. As pastor Vanessa Brown changed into her blue and white robe, her wife and a choir singer, both with shaved heads and dramatic eyeliner, rushed around making last-minute preparations.

I first heard about this church through David, who I met in law class. She was working on her master’s thesis, which focused on the spiritual lives of sex workers. She told me the women she interviewed spoke about their work as a calling, a healing and spiritual endeavor.

“If I’m a religious person and I’m a sex worker, I should have the right to practice my religion and my sexuality,” she said. She told me she now attended a “radically inclusive” church that accepted her for who she was.

Her great grandmother, with whom she grew up in Queens, was deeply religious – a “straight Baptist, church every Sunday, the whole black church culture”. As a young girl David went to Bible study every week, and Bible camp every summer. Jesus was her whole life.

But around the age of 16, she began to experiment with drugs and explore her sexuality, and stopped going to church completely. At church there wasn’t any space to speak openly about that part of her life, she said, and it started to feel hypocritical.

One night in her mid-20s, a friend brought her to a fetish club downtown. A short, voluptuous woman, David had men trailing behind her, and by the end of the night a woman who ran an erotic wrestling service asked her if she wanted a job. She went to work as a dominatrix, and it was empowering. But while David was proud of it, it further distanced her from church. “Sex work made me feel like I couldn’t go to church, in that if I went I couldn’t tell anyone what I did,” she explained. “But then I knew me, I knew I would tell everyone.”

After 16 years of absence from church, she went to a sermon in Virginia and felt a sudden need to reconnect with her faith. “I had to get back to Jesus,” she said. Finding a new church where she could be proud and open about her past was a struggle, but her cousin convinced her to come to Rivers, where she met Brown, a black lesbian pastor who told her “just be – be who you are”.

David let out a deep sigh. “It was like I could breathe again, spiritually.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Pastor Brown: her congregation is strong and growing. Photograph: Pastor Brown

Born and raised in Harlem and once a big-shot producer at the Apollo Theater, Brown founded Rivers eight years ago after a long time pastoring and preaching as a straight, married woman at traditional churches. In the process of coming out, she worked to create a space that was “radically inclusive”, where those often marginalized by the church, including drug users, LGBT people and sex workers, were not just tolerated but embraced for who they were.

Brown tries to address the everyday challenges her congregation faces, from holding HIV testing drives in church to creating a safe space for people to speak out about their experiences of homophobia and sexual assault.

The service has been based in the Upper West Side for nearly two years now, but Rivers has only ever had a temporary home. Before that, they moved four times within two years. Sometimes it’s an issue of rent hikes or needing more space, but Brown believes there has also been veiled hostility because of their openly LGBT members and their acceptance of same-sex marriage.

But despite challenges, the congregation is strong and growing. A retired woman dressed in a loose grey suit had come all the way from Connecticut for the service – the second time she had made the journey to come to a congregation where, unlike other churches she had tried, she said she felt fully accepted.

During the service, pain was palpable. Slick young men in suits and felt hats stood at the back wiping tears from their eyes. A towering man in a massive black hoodie cried freely as a friend in a baseball hat laid a comforting hand on his back. A woman in the corner was bent over sobbing, surrounded by people caring for her. There were also joyful cries of hallelujah, people raising their arms wide and dancing out of their seats. At one point, Brown called the congregation’s children to her and more than 10 youngsters gathered, proud parents jostling in the aisle taking keepsakes on their smartphones.

The mic held close as she preached the gospel according to Mark, Brown spoke about the huge stone that sealed off the tomb where they laid Jesus’s body before the resurrection. “Here today, some us are weighed down by the stone cast upon us,” she said. “Don’t let the stone stop you,” she repeated over and over, her voice wavering as the fever built. Her wife stepped up as she spoke and gently dabbed her brow with a white tissue. “Break through the barriers that stop you being you,” she challenged. “Break through the barriers of homophobia and transphobia, when you get to where you’re going the stone will be rolled away.”

Nazea, a young black man in a black blazer and tight acid wash jeans and high boots, was called to the altar. The soft-spoken 20-year-old, who lives in Harlem, has been coming to Rivers for almost a year and the congregation is like home to him. “This is my family,” he said. “I can be myself here, I can wear my heels – it’s my life and they’re not going to judge me.”

After the sermon, over sushi at a nearby restaurant, David told me about her plans to get her minister’s license. Her hope is to create a ministry through Rivers that would be an open, non-judgmental space for sex workers who want to reconnect with the church.

“I think I’d make a good minister,” she said. “I think that people who are sex workers are some of the most spiritual people.”