This collection consists of materials relating to the origins, history, and ministry of the Metropolitan Community Church (MCC), including both its governing body, the Universal Fellowship of Metropolitan Community Churches (UFMCC), and the individual congregations that make up the Fellowship. The materials include brochures, bylaws, calendars, circulars, congregation meeting minutes, correspondence, financial papers, flyers, handbills, installations of pastors, invitations, news releases, newspapers clippings, orders of worship, pastoral letters, programs, sermons, and photographs. Because of the method in which the collection was created (see the Note below), the materials are fragmentary: the most substantial records relate to the Beach Cities congregation in Santa Monica, California; the Los Angeles congregation for the years 1969-1979; and the New York City congregation for the years 1974-1977.

Note: Prior to the engaging of professional archivists in 2006, the staff of the International Gay & Lesbian Archives, predecessor to ONE Archives, would occasionally remove materials pertaining to a specific subject, individual, or institution from whatever personal or institutional collection in which they were found to a specially created "historical collection". This procedure not only compromised the integrity of the collections from which the material was removed, but also resulted in collections that did not present consistent coverage of the intended subjects. The Metropolitan Community Church Historical Collection is one such "artificial collection": parts of its contents can be traced to the collections of J. J. Bertrund Belanger, Fred Bradford and Chuck David, Jim Kepner, Morris Kight, John O'Brien, and Johan Vessup. Returning individual items to the collections from which they were taken is impractical; this finding aid indicates the origin of a specific file whenever this can be determined.