Editor's Note: This is part four of a five-part series addressing the gay community and its relationship to organized religion. Part four focuses on a local church that offers a ministry dealing with homosexuality.

Like many churches, Westview Community Church in Manhattan, believes homosexuality is a choice and is wrong.

Unlike most churches, however, Westview takes a proactive stance, offering a program, called "Living Waters" to help individuals who want support resisting homosexual urges.

Many oppose Living Waters's belief that homosexuality is a choice.

"All major national mental health organizations have officially expressed concerns about therapies promoted to modify sexual orientation," states a pamphlet from the American Psychological Association released in May 2008. According to the pamphlet, there has been no adequate scientific research to prove that therapy aimed to change sexual orientation is safe or effective.

Joyce Baptist, assistant professor in marriage and family therapy, has a similar view.

"I have never found a gay person who said that it was a choice they had," Baptist said. "It was who they were, and it was an identity that formed over time."

She said she finds it aggravating that programs offered to people are not based on accurate information about human sexuality.

Baptist has conducted research for her dissertation, entitled "Coming Out: One Family's Story," on the gay and lesbian population, primarily gay men. She looked at the process men went through when they realized they were gay, and studied how they chose to live as homosexuals and the effects on their families and communities.

"One of the basic Christian ideas is that we are created in the image of God," said the Rev. R. Kent Cormack, pastor and teacher at First Congregational United Church of Christ in Manhattan "So to say that people who are made one way instead of another implies that they are not a full reflection of that image of God."

Deb Kluttz, the executive pastor of Westview, disagrees. She said the issue of homosexuality is becoming more black and white. She said the "gray area" is fading and people and churches find themselves having to choose whether to attend a church that allows openly gay worshippers or not.

"Biblically, where I stand, I think inside there is a place where we know it's just unnatural, and an unnatural way to live," Kluttz said. "I think that people want out. They just feel like this is not OK. ‘I'm not OK, this is wrong.'"

She said the Living Waters program had two participants who were seeking help resisting homosexuality, and since their completion of the program they continue to struggle.

While Living Waters uses a group-based counseling system, conversion and reparative therapy programs often use more aggressive measures to change a person's orientation. These programs cite research conducted by Robert L. Spitzer, who has purportedly provided scientific evidence that sexual orientation can be changed.

Spitzer, a retired psychiatry professor at Columbia University, was hailed as an ally to the gay community when he assisted in the 1973 removal of homosexuality from the psychiatric manual of mental disorders. In 2003, Spitzer lost that status when he published results of a 16-month study reflecting homosexual orientation could be changed with therapy.

Eleven percent of the men and 37 percent of the women in Spitzer's study reported a complete reorientation from homosexual to heterosexual after the 16-month study.

The APA does not recognize Spitzer's research as legitimate because it does not follow the scientific method of a study, said Clinton Anderson, associate executive director and director of the LGBT concerns office for the American Psychological Association.

"The sample he studied voluntarily engaged with hopes of changing so you cannot use the data to say the treatment caused the effect," Anderson said.

He said only a handful of adequate scientific studies have met the criteria for examination, and there is little or no evidence that treatments change orientation. There is more evidence they change behavior, but that is more voluntarily controlled, Clinton said.

Kluttz said homosexuality is influenced by many factors. The influences are where Westview church puts its focus. Kluttz said many homosexuals have been sexually abused, typically by men.

"Gals that have been sexually abused by men, I've seen them go one of two ways," Kluttz said. "They either go extremely promiscuous because their boundaries were just mowed over, or they gain weight, they don't wear makeup, they try to draw no attention to their body. The body has been a source of pain and they want to disconnect from their femininity."

Jenine Reimer, a former small group leader and a marriage and family therapist, said above all else, her priority is to do what is best for the individual. She said the church offers intense screenings to ensure no one is "destroyed" in the process of the program.

"I struggle with whether it's a choice or it's genetic," Reimer said. "If you come from a stance that it is a biological genetic thing, then I would have to agree that Living Waters would not be best for a person like that because, it could, in the process hurt them more and make them feel shameful and damage their self esteem in that regard."

Reimer was the small group leader of the victims of sexual abuse during the first Living Waters program at Westview. She is scheduled to return for the second session of Living Waters as a guest lecturer on proper boundaries.

Kluttz said all people chosen to lead groups first receive certification from Desert Streams, and most leaders in the Living Waters program have been through trauma of some type in their own lives.

"This is kind of simplistic terms to say this, but who can better help someone who's an alcoholic than someone who has been there and come through it?" Reimer said. "They may not have master's training in it, but they have life training in it."