The Rev. Patricia Leffler was a late bloomer--personally and spiritually. Even with a 17-year mar riage, seven kids and a house in the suburbs, she didn't feel she knew who she was or what she wanted.

Finally, at age 37, the missing pieces of her life began coming together. She went to nursing school, divorced her husband, came out as a lesbian.

And, after a lifetime as a devout Catholic, she found herself seeking a new church where she would meet with acceptance rather than rebuke. She found it in a gay congregation.

"I was dealing with the unhappiness in the marriage and in the Catholic Church and going through it all alone. It was just a coincidence that I found my lifestyle orientation and spiritual life at about the same time," she says.

Now 50, Leffler has her own congregation at Christ Chapel Metropolitan Community Church in Santa Ana, where, she says, many gays and lesbians come wounded from earlier religious experiences that made them feel like sinners.

Her congregants are often deeply spiritual and struggle to reconcile those feelings with the rejection of homosexuality that is doctrine in many of the faiths in which they grew up.

"My main goal is to assure those who come here of God's love," Leffler says.

For many gays and lesbians, shame went with the holy water or Hebrew lessons. Social conservatives still denounce homosexuality as anti-Christian and immoral. Conservative Christians staged protests and waved banners at Orange County gay pride festivals as recently as 1991. Today, many houses of worship welcome gays and lesbians but still denounce same-sex love, emphasizing it is the practice of homosexuality, not the homosexual, that God warns against.

Some take their acceptance of gays and lesbians a step further. Southern California is home to a growing interfaith ministry specifically geared to the gay and lesbian community, according to Barbara Muirhead, coordinator of the Orange County Federation, a group of lesbian, gay and AIDS support organizations.

She estimates that about a half dozen churches, temples or other religious organizations focus on gays and lesbians and another dozen are reaching out by advertising in gay publications. That's about twice as many organizations as a decade ago, she says.

Among the mainstream churches openly welcoming gays and lesbians are Irvine United Church of Christ, Unitarian Universalist of Orange County in Anaheim, the Episcopal Church of the Messiah in Santa Ana, Community United Methodist Church of Huntington Beach and Red Hill Lutheran Church of Tustin.