How GLIDE Memorial Church Transcends the Worship of Capital

When the sun dims out, and the song-sound fades, and the stars lose their light forever, will you remember what you owned, child?

God knows you can’t take money to the grave, but what if you can take your debt?

What if my debt, real, grave-transending debt, lives under the pseudonym of the one thing money can’t entirely buy: Human Connection.

Where can I find salvation, now, when it’s just me, God, and the religion of money?

My mom loves to tell the story of finding me at the age of five, kneeling at the edge of my bed, hands together, eyes closed, rapt in deep prayer. She chuckles while remembering that not only was I not praying in silence, but I was praying to a congregation of stuffed animals…

“Please God keep us safe, all I want is the health and happiness of my family,” I would recite dutifully.

Whether or not this strict nightly routine could serve as a precursor to my later diagnoses of OCD, or an indicator of the sadness that took hold of a great portion of my childhood, is truly neither here nor there, as I was certain, as a child, that there was a spirit bigger than myself, who I was determined loved me and my “family” unconditionally.

I didn’t grow up attending church much at all; my father was raised Muslim, and my mother Catholic. At times, we would attend Catholic church services with my cousins, where, much to the despair of my uncle, while leaving the service, I would promptly ask,

“Why wasn’t anyone smiling, if God is so good?”

This endless inquiry and apparent fascination with God and religion (despite my limited adolescent exposure) were eventually met with grace by my Aunt Jodi, who introduced me to GLIDE Memorial Church.

My aunt was an active member of the church congregation, close friends with both the founders of GLIDE (as it is known today), Cecil Williams and Janice Mirikitani.

To this day, my aunt never ceases to describe GLIDE as the place where the sorrows of her own life were melted over the flames of a fire that told her that ‘tradition wasn’t where the image of a family must be both born and die’ and a place that throughout her life made her feel as if, “I am never alone.”

I remember my first encounter with GLIDE clearly. It was Christmas, maybe 2011 or ’12, when my aunt brought my entire family to the place we’d come to hear her call home. The pews were packed from balcony to first floor, from the aisles to right up on the stairs of the minister’s altar. The music was loud, and even the minister, still Reverend Cecil Williams at the time, couldn’t help but dance while he spoke words that surpassed my intelligible understanding, but reached my heart in the way that they moved the people around me. While I wouldn’t be able to be a habitual attendee for a great while. I can still vividly see the colorful rays from the stained glass windows touching the faces of people I’d never seen before, people who were smiling.

It was not until I was 17 years old that I had one of my most meaningful encounters with GLIDE.

My mother, my wonderful, gracious, and ceaselessly energized mother, suffered from great bouts of mental illness throughout my childhood life. I remember one time hearing someone say, ‘only angels on earth experience such pain, as a way they filter the truth that they know, but no one else seems to understand,’ and later in reading Cecil Williams and Janice Mirikitani’s memoir, Beyond the Possible, that ‘it was the most intelligent who experienced the most suffering.’

I was deeply hurt at the time, having experienced grave loneliness at the hands of social outcasting from my peers, who had either learned about my various familial situations or witnessed one of their abnormal outbursts. I had long felt on the outside of the traditional families my friends seemed to come from, and I had fallen into crowds of people who, like me, were lonely and had begun turning to substances, which I would see deviating the paths of some of their lives nearly fatally.

My aunt called me one Saturday evening, September 2022 and told me to be up early, as she was taking my cousins and me to GLIDE. I remember being leery of the idea, but ending up in the pews early the next morning. They were unrecognizably empty. COVID had run its societal damage to GLIDE’s usually packed, rambunctious audience, as I assume it had done, to a degree, on all of our lives. Minister Marvin had replaced the late Reverend Williams, and a new vibration seemed to have been cloaked over GLIDE. Then the Minister began to speak, and a spirit I had long forgotten returned to me.

It was September, suicide awareness month, and we happened to be there on the day when suicide and mental health would be the topic of the entire sermon. I turned, accusatorially to my aunt, thinking she had planned this as some sort of reflection of the pain that my mother, and recently, my best friend had been challenged with, but she too turned to me in just the same surprise. The service continued, and the witness, who is a community member who has chosen, or been chosen to share their personal testimony, a long-time tradition of GLIDE’s, appeared on the stage to share their ‘reason.’ That day featured a woman whose sister had died by suicide, and she wept while describing how GLIDE had given her tears a home to grow flowers.

I must’ve written my mom’s name on about one-hundred ‘prayer cards’ that day.

As Janice Mirikitani writes, “it was their [the magnitude of different people who witnessed at GLIDE] ability to remove every boundary between us. We didn’t just listen or applaud or root for them; the longer they talked, the more we saw ourselves in them.” I derive an ever deeper sense that “I am never alone.”

I now return to GLIDE after periods I’ve taken more regularly attending the Catholic church, after beginning my continued education at UC Berkeley, after taking a class there on the nature of fascist and anti-fascist practices, and where I am met with an external, social aversion to the idea of God and religion altogether.

I’ve come to realize that it would be ignorant for me to insert some positive scripture-adjacent ‘God is love’ and ‘loves you’ nonsense, without the critical inspection of religion as it functions outside and through GLIDE as an institution in America. Recently, I’ve come to internalize the question that has been chasing me for years:

Is it possible to conceptualize and worship an all-loving, benevolent God within a society whose guiding doctrine is money?

My hunger for an offering to such a giant ask has grown sans reading the memoir and literature of great periods of struggle, in my “fascism” class, and the societal horrors of my own, which the corridor of adulthood has revealed to me, so has my deepened search for an answer to that question, one I was hoping I’d particularly like.

My questioning of such an all-loving God has transcended its adolescent innocence, because the more I’ve learned about the American church’s inspiration and entanglement with Capitalism, slavery, racial violence, and acceptance, the greater I’ve come to understand people’s disbelief in religion as a place that sanctions love, but instead a place that stands complacent to violence. If American capitalism has long measured human worth by the body’s capacity to produce, labor, and materially own, then the church, as an institution, has too often aided in sanctifying such monetary measurements and sold them as “religion.”

Dating back to the formation of America, capitalism has not simply shaped economics but also the way we view ourselves and our relationships with one another. The institution of American enslavement turned human beings into “labor” and “profit,” not only violently separating the human body from spirit, but also radicalizing and monetizing the practice of religion and the confines of God.

As argued further by James Cone in The Cross and the Lynching Tree, American Christianity not only often failed to confront this violence, but at many points in time helped excuse it, hiding the hypocrisy under the sheet of framing morality and purity as directly tied to whiteness and capital.

So what makes my questioning of the presence of a benevolent God surviving such institutions so urgent? I would beg the same conditions that suffocated it to begin with, as well as the current state of America, which proves its bleeding effects.

In the midst of a time where half of Americans, particularly those from low-income communities, are suffering from loneliness, in an era professionals have deemed an epidemic of such loneliness, youth between the ages of 18 and 22 are suffering in the greatest numbers. Where, within such loneliness, despair-induced suicide, drug abuse, and alcohol related injuries are claiming the lives of over 150,000 people per year. The people suffering are combating more than loneliness and are also experiencing shame and anxiety at the responsibility of a system that has long framed these struggles as the product of moral failure, rather than as a result of adverse circumstance and the teetering modules of a fractured system.

I knew then there was one place I wanted to turn once more, the one place that has aided my aunts, my friends, and my own despair…

It was during my initial interview with GLIDE that I was reminded once again that I was at home, among thousands of others. There, Francesca Delgado-Jones and I undoubtedly agreed that if there were to be a place where this love from God (which, now, I and so many questioned in existence) could exist purely, it would be at GLIDE.

GLIDE Memorial Church sits at 330 Ellis Street, in the heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin District, a geographic cove that bears witness to the suffering of one of capitalism’s most glaring failures. A place that Cecil Williams quotes as “the last circle of hell.” During the prohibition era, the Tenderloin became flooded with speakeasies and underground bars, and is now a place of incessant violence, drug addiction, prostitution, and unprecedented crime.

GLIDE was originally founded by millionaire cattlemen’s wife, United Methodist, Lizzie Glide, in 1929 (right on the brink of Prohibition), whose vision for the church was one where a traditional Sunday service with people dressed up and properly behaving could commence. However, by the time Cecil Williams, a Southern, social-justice committed United Methodist pastor from San Angelo, Texas, arrived at GLIDE in 1963, it was apparent that the church was dying. Despite GLIDE’s location in the Tenderloin district, its remaining members included thirty-five elderly, wealthy, white individuals who continued to make the church’s pristine upkeep their greatest mission. Cecil came to completely change that mission. It’s in a later reflection of this time that he states: “The odd thing was, they [the 35 remaining congregants] were right. I was here not only to turn this church upside down, but I was here to put it out of its misery and start over” (61). Cecil would soon be surrounded by a magnitude of eccentric celebrities, ‘street persons’, and a very important graduate student, employee, and, eventually, regarded as a founder of GLIDE, Janice Mirikirani.

Janice Mirikitani’s journey at GLIDE began as a typist, hired to transcribe the stories and testimonies of queer individuals’ encounters with violent police officers. Like so many others in the ‘60’s, Janice entered GLIDE with a complete aversion to the church and a distrust of religion altogether. However, it was through the raw honesty that the stories of the queer and gay men illuminated that a compassion built up within Janice’s soul. It was there that Janice found a space for her own traumas to become freed and where her commitment to GLIDE and to Cecil became steadfast.

At every turn, Cecil rejected the plaguing limits of the Black church, which he believed embodied an ‘only after-death’ vision of salvation, as well as the United Methodist church, with which he was committed to revealing its division and hypocrisy. He carried out this rejection by directly inviting and welcoming in those whom the church had always rejected, the prostitutes, the gay teens, the trans men/women, the drag queens, the homeless, the addicted, the damaged, and the broken.

With the 35 remaining members still hanging on to any means they could to stop Cecil Williams and his radical vision for the church, they began cutting off any financial support for new food and recovery services that Cecil introduced. Cecil later shared that his vision for GLIDE’s supply services transcended that of other churches’ band-aided approaches of feeding the homeless in separate buildings, or having ‘services’ available by the entry of different or hidden doors; instead, he wanted a “truly radical program [that] had more to do with an exchange of power than an exchange of clothes” (61).

In one of his most extreme efforts to sever any connection between God and the American Christian church institution and its relationship to the capitalist aesthetic, Cecil tore down the huge, white, backlit cross that stood high in the front of the GLIDE, above the altar. He explained that this move was inspired by a local homeless alcoholic veteran who, in one of his particularly delusional stupors, had told the entire congregation about the crosses’ silencing power.

Cecil believed that the cross had stopped representing all people, questioning whether, within the church context, it ever really had. Among the most pronounced moments in their memoir and in relation to the tearing down of the cross, Cecils brings to light a statement which solidifies his vision of GLIDE as what I believe to be the ANTI-Church: “When we were independent of church mythology, we would know where God abides” (135).

Upon removing the cross, Janice worked with local photographers to fill the blank wall space it left with constantly changing projected photographs of ‘street-life.’ Eventually, these photographic art installations morphed into the illumination of newspaper clippings, politically nuanced interactions, and above all, the blueprint for the programs that GLIDE would become most famous for.

Programs such as daily meals, early cop-watch testimonies, STD testing centers, AIDS care, domestic violence protection, organized protests, and meeting spaces for prominent social justice forums such as the Black Panthers, the first ever prostitutes’ union COYOTE (Call Off Your Old Tired Ethics) prevailed at GLIDE. Among the most notable was, The Janice Mirikitani Family, Youth, and Childcare Center which provided parenting classes, tutoring, ESL courses, and a safe haven for mothers and children and Cecil Williams Community House, which eventually became three large apartment buildings committed to housing the homeless, addicted, and most severely disenfranchised.

Cecil, Janice, and GLIDE represented/s everything that the American church rejects — everything unclean, ‘unconventional,’ and broken. GLIDE is an institution where unconditional love and acceptance embody the idea that love exists beyond the capacities of what someone can offer materially and encompasses who a person is without the requirement of any alterations or services.

Today, the church continues its legacy as a 501(c)(3) non-profit organization, disaffiliated from the United Methodist Church since 2020, after years of unsurprising disputes over GLIDE’s controversial worship and outreach practices.

GLIDE offers Sunday Celebration, which takes place every Sunday at 9:00 am and at 11:00 am a place where Minister Marvin gives invigorating sermons and the amazing GLIDE Ensamble and The Change Band’s music transcends the building’s walls, where over 1600 free meals are served in Freedom Hall to those in need each day, women’s feminine needs and mental health are attended to, and LGBTQ+ rights are centered, where HIV/Hep C testing is offered, housing assistance is given, job training is facilitated, and addiction recovery services are made accessible.

Split into two separately conjoined organizations, Glide Memorial Church (faith-inspired services) and Glide Foundation (the outreach branch); Sunday celebrations, daily meals, and the plethora of social justice-oriented services mentioned have continued even after the passing of both Cecil and Janice.

During my conversation with Francesca, the current senior director of public affairs and communications at GLIDE, I was happy to learn about two new additions to GLIDE: a Barber Shop located directly underneath 330 Ellis Street, where free haircuts are given to hundreds of men each day. The shop aims to sustain Black barbering culture, while adding a mandatory mental health screening and conversation at the end of each cut to foster Black male health and excellence. Another new addition includes a Transitional Age Youth Health and Wellness Center located a few blocks away from GLIDE Memorial Church, on 888 Post Street. Run by the GLIDE foundation, “TAY” provides 24/7, 365-day support for homeless or housing-insecure young adults ages 18–27.

With Francesca’s guidance, I toured TAY and became familiar with the large, comfortably furnished, and accessible space. I was struck by the facility’s ability to push back against the usual gray, stark, facility norm and have rugs, couches, TVs, and an open kitchen. One of the housing caseworkers, Sheyenne Rowel, was kind enough to show me around the facility and into her office, where I asked her what she thought the most transformative service they provided was. Shyann answered that it was their housing program, where case managers like herself help individuals find permanent housing after their time working at the center, that felt the most rewarding. She emphasized the importance of long-term and permanent change, something that TAY is committed to and a doctrine I repeatedly hear being echoed in almost all of GLIDE’s work… “putting love into action,” “radical inclusivity,” and “unconditional love.”

Since my meeting with both Francesca and Sheyenne, they have both reached out to emphasize the importance of GLIDE’s connection to service and volunteerism as well as its power to transform. I want to share the links to a volunteer opportunity as well as a recent testimony shared by Sheyenne.

Meal Preparation @ GLIDE Memorial Church (330 Ellis St.)

Manny’s Story

In confronting the history of religion and the American church, as well as extensively immersing myself in GLIDE’s historical and current presence. I return to my question: Is it possible to conceptualize and worship an all-loving, benevolent God within a society whose guiding doctrine is money? and alter it.

I no longer wonder whether a benevolent God can exist within a money-centric society, but instead become more interested in where God’s image of all-love survives it.

I believe that GLIDE is one of the few places where the image of a benevolent God exists.

It exists at GLIDE because GLIDE refuses the compliance and the externalization of suffering that both the American church fosters and capitalism requires. GLIDE invites the most “broken” in, the pieces of glass that the institutional American Church have not only shattered but left behind. Even when GLIDE becomes the subject of controversy and shock, GLIDE dares to ‘talk about the things people do to be accepted in this world’ no matter how ugly and accept them for who they are anyway.

So, when the sun dims out, and the song-sound fades, and the stars lose their light forever, I beg you, child, remember the places where the rock has been picked up, and the sun has been mended.

(an interpretation of Cecil Williams’ quote: “if somebody picked up a rock and let the sun shine in? (52). And Janice Mirikitani’s introduced quote by Roy King: “And then to mend the sun” (38).)

God in the Religion of Money was originally published in Secret History of America on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.