RICHMOND, June 3 - Sheep and shepherds were the focus of scripture readings during worship on the final morning of the General Assembly. So preacher Chris Glaser began his sermon by talking about dogs.

"I have two very friendly dogs named Calvin and Hobbes," he began.

Glaser, an elder and author of Uncommon Calling: A Gay Christian's Struggle to Serve the Church, went on to make connections between sheep and dogs.

Once, he said, when his friend, the late Henri Nouven, was planning to visit him in Atlanta, Glaser asked him, "Do you mind dogs?"

Nouven said he didn't mind dogs "as long as we don't talk about them all the time."

Confessing that he and other people with pets do tend to talk about them a lot, Glaser observed, "Pets, like other distractions, can get in the way of intimacy."

We have other kinds of distractions in the church, he said. "When we try to talk about controversial issues, we trot out our pet dogmas" instead of seeking real intimacy and understanding.

Glaser told about a gay man he knew who came back to church after years of estrangement. His past contacts with Christians had made him so angry he couldn't even bring himself to say Jesus's name.

But after attending worship and Bible studies, and talking regularly with Glaser, he not only was able to say the name of Jesus - he accepted him as Lord and Savior and joined the church. He even quit his job as a bank vice president to become the church's custodian and spend more time volunteering in its outreach ministries.

"It would be too easy to hear this story as that of a lost sheep returning to the fold," he said. "But it's also a story of the lost fold returning to the sheep left out."

Good shepherds seek and welcome the lost sheep, he said. "We may have our pet dogmas, but we can't let them get in the way of welcoming each other."