Asbury Park, NJ - Attendees of Gay Pride festivals are used to seeing religious activists, whether they are lending support to the cause or condemning homosexuality as a sin from afar. But over the weekend, at a New Jersey Pride festival, 150 to 200 members of a local Baptist church took what appeared to be a third stand.

From her glassware booth at the annual gay pride celebration here, Bobbie DeVoll had some thoughts on Sunday about the evangelical church group at the booth next door.

"I asked them if they were trying to change us," Bobbie DeVoll, who had a glassware booth at Sunday’s festival, told the New York Times. "They said they were here because they wanted to change."

Members from the conservative Baptist church in Basking Ridge attended the festival as part of an outreach that the pastor, Tim Lucas, called Gay Pride Meets Christian Humility. They wore light blue T-shirts bearing the name of their ministry, Liquid, and gave out free bottles of water.

Lucas hoped that Liquid, which is part of a conservative Baptist church that considers homosexuality a sin, could avoid both the scolds of some evangelical Christians and the acceptance of more liberal churches. Without endorsing homosexuality, he said: "We want to dismantle the invisible hierarchy of sin that many evangelicals promote that puts gays and lesbians at the top of the list. That sense of self-righteousness and superiority runs rampant in our church like a cancer."

Parade organizers who met with Lucas before the event remained wary.

"This idea raises flags," said Laura Pople, president of Jersey Pride, the organizers of the event. Pople said she had been recruiting support from liberal clergy but had avoided churches like Lucas's.

"Theirs is a community that fundamentally takes issue with who I am as a person," she said. "I'm not changing. So the issue is, is there a way to get along? But we would be foolish not to be as forearmed as possible."

For the members of Liquid, an alternative ministry within Millington Baptist Church, the event was a mission into new territory. At a final strategy meeting last week, a handwritten sign in the back of the room listed reasons for the outreach, and the first was "to challenge stereotypes of 'Christians.'"

Lucas told church members not to get into arguments or try to convert anybody, according to the New York Times. "We're not going there to hand out tracts," he said. "These people have been marginalized and hurt, often by us.

"If they say, 'What are you doing here?' keep it simple. Just say, 'We're here to show you God's love.'"

Lucas, who said he had had little contact with gay people before now, describes himself as "an ex-homophobe whom Jesus is changing." Four years ago, when his wife wanted to invite a gay colleague to dinner, Lucas rejected the idea, using an expletive and an anti-gay slur.

While he said he still believes homosexuality is a sin, he said, "we try to look at it from a biblical perspective, but to transcend that to discuss the ways we are all sexually broken."