When I drive up to the foot of Twin Peaks on a Sunday morning to attend the Liturgy of the Divine Feminine at herchurch, the congregation inside is friendly and welcoming. Part of the reason, no doubt, is that I'm a newbie, fresh meat, a potential recruit. Among the roughly 50 adults in the sanctuary, fewer than 10 are men. The 90-minute service is structured much like the traditional Catholic services of my youth, except that this one includes soft acoustic folk music, a prayer with a Tibetan bowl and bell, and an ecstatic call-and-response in an indigenous language that sounds like a Pentecostal channeling the Spirit — or, if you prefer, scat.
I pick up some maracas and join in. The homily that follows includes a rousing defense of the selfie stick as a point of entry to divine grace.
If you've lived in San Francisco for any amount of time, you've likely driven past this big purple church across from Tower Market. One of the highest commercial addresses in the city, herchurch sits at the intersection of Portola Drive and Woodside Avenue, essentially at the foot of Twin Peaks Boulevard and within view of the controversial Mount Davidson cross.
On the one hand, herchurch feels like a bizarre outlier. It's a small congregation that might hide in plain sight in an overwhelmingly secular city were it not for its geographical prominence and its paint job. But beyond the Gothic Revival majesty of traditional Christian churches such as Grace Cathedral or the still-thriving Roman Catholic Archdiocese, herchurch is one of several houses of worship in San Francisco that marries a left-wing social justice tradition with a theological outlook that embraces pantheists and atheists along with what one might think of as traditional Christians. These churches may be unorthodox, they may be LGBT-friendly — in one case, they may even consider the late jazz legend John Coltrane a saint — but they are anything but anomalies. They represent a thriving counterculture of specifically Christian-based churches in a city long known for its spiritual alternatives.
Herchurch is technically Ebenezer Lutheran, a 131-year-old congregation. But earlier this century, the church altered its theological orientation to a degree that might rival, say, an early Christian basilica replacing a wine-soaked temple of Dionysus. While still part of the large and fairly liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church of America, herchuch's minster, the Rev. Stacy Boorn, says she felt challenged by the overt masculinity in the language of Scripture.
The Bible, Boorn says, erects "domination structures rather than partnerships." She wanted to reconcile the masculine and feminine aspects of "the Divine One," but within the Lutheran context of "a life of gratitude and justice and grace." The name of the church came about for the most pragmatic reason: When the fledgling congregation began to build a website, nobody had yet registered herchurch. "Much to our excitement and dismay, the domain wasn't taken," Boorn says. "I say 'dismay,' because [it suggested] someone hadn't already used that on their spiritual journey."
Boorn is a cherubic woman who speaks with a soothing lilt, and gesticulates with such vigor that at one point she knocks the glasses off her face. If the very idea of herchurch might make some people roll their eyes at hippies and the things they do, Boorn is a theologically grounded woman who first preached at age 19 and graduated from Berkeley's Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in 1987.
Quite likely owing to the season (Lent), nearly everything at Ebenezer Lutheran is purple or lavender: the vestments, the candles, the altar coverings, some of Boorn's hair, and the pen that's passed around so that we can all sign her birthday card. Apart from some diaphanous banners and paintings in a second-wave feminist style, the décor is otherwise austere and Protestant, since the building was erected for a larger congregation more than a century ago. It feels oversized, like a child wearing a hand-me-down several sizes too big, although the voices of herchurch's enthusiastic congregants fill the space even if their bodies do not.
The vibe is more informal than what I'm used to, the tolerance for cellphones and unruly toddlers higher, and the homily — selfie stick reference and all — considerably more contemporary. Boorn reads from the "reconstructed" Gospel of Mark out of a spiral-bound book that members physically touch. Communion, which I'm specifically invited to participate in, consists of a delicious, still-hot loaf of bread — with a gluten-free alternative — that makes the consecrated wafers of my youth seem like Kraft singles to cave-aged Gruyere.
Am I actually having fun here?
Afterwards, over coffee and brownies, I meet Kathryn, who started coming to herchurch when the conservative Lutheran church she was born into told her that her daughter was going to hell for being in a lesbian relationship. I also sit with Dionne Kohler, the fiftyish "Drumming Priestess" who'd led the tribal call-and-response song. Kohler, who's been drumming since high school, wears her hair tucked in a beret. When she discovered later in life that she was part Native American, Kohler learned that her birth father had been a musician, too. Like several other members, she first encountered herchurch after driving by it — in her case, for 20 years. Kohler says she's not sure of the language of the song she led during the service, but says it's a legend about three bears who save a starving tribe. (So much for scat.)
Fellow parishioner Alison Newvine, who'd written the words of another chant (and who serves as both yoga instructor and president of the Church Council), has an even more striking appearance. Fair and lithe, she wears her hair under a long kerchief and bears a faint resemblance to Girl With a Pearl Earring. Newvine, like Kohler, was raised Catholic. So was another woman, who asked to not be identified because she teaches at a Catholic school and fears she could be fired.
The crowd thins before I can find anyone who's been at Ebenezer Lutheran since the pre-herchurch days, but I do learn there are only five of them left.
One might assume that herchurch is a lightning rod for online criticism, the very distillation of what conservatives guess goes on everywhere in San Francisco. But in a sense, Boorn is correct: Hers is a small congregation that largely flies under the radar. When I admit to being a journalist, she half-jokingly asks if I'm a conservative spy ("we've gotten some of those"), but a little internet sleuthing reveals only a few marginal cranks cherrypicking quotes to conclude San Francisco is now officially hell's waiting room. Boorn is undeterred by this. Besides, she doesn't believe in hell, anyway.
"People say it's impossible to evolve into a community that honors the Divine Feminine from out of the Lutheran condition," Boorn says. "But for me, it just seems the obvious step."
Boorn isn't sure how many other Evangelical Lutheran pastors are doing what she's doing. She's earned some criticism from traditionalist quarters for "using the term 'Goddess,'" she says, "which I think a lot of feminists in Christianity and other patriarchal religions don't want to do, because it's a hot-button word." But there's been no large movement to oust her.
Although even-keeled and undeniably personable, Boorn bristles at the term 'alternative,' even when I use it as a neutral descriptor. "We are a mainline Christian (Lutheran) denomination and chose our direction to be the core expression of our community," she tells me by email, "not some alternative group that meets once a month down the hall."
That's fair enough, but it's also true that Boorn has put in years of sweat equity to rebuild a church that, in her own words, "fell apart" upon embracing the Goddess. And while its prominence may have piqued many people's curiosity and lured them in, Ebenezer Lutheran's location does count against it in one way. Almost everyone who arrives must do so by car, which results in a decidedly middle-class congregation, with few people of color. I speak to the only Latino male under 40 that I can find, a 21-year-old San Franciscan named Daniel who declined to give his last name. (He's with a female friend who's 22. She was raised Jewish but converted to Catholicism in her teens, and lives in Berkeley.)
What keeps Daniel coming back?
"The community is very here and now," he says. "It's not, 'Be good so you can get into heaven,' where heaven's the goal and life is sort of an obstacle you have to get through. Here, it's like, 'Take care of the earth.' And people are laughing all the time."
Daniel, too, was raised Catholic.
If Ebenezer Lutheran has a complicated relationship with its larger denomination, the Metropolitan Community Church is free to chart a course that can be considered truly radical. Having been consecrating same-sex unions since 1972 and pioneering memorials when mainline churches wouldn't let people with AIDS inside, MCC is now, as Senior Pastor Robert Shively puts it, effectively "post-Christian."
As a congregation, MCC occupied a church on Eureka Street in the Castro for decades, only to slide into a state of irrecoverable disrepair once the HIV crisis years passed. Benefiting from the neighborhood's gentrification, MCC sold the property this year and moved to a new building on Polk Street owned by the United Church of Christ.
Shively identifies as a "panentheist," which means, he says, that "God is in all of creation, but all of creation doesn't offer the total of God. God is in everything, but God is more than that." An openly polyamorous leatherman, Shively is adamant that sexuality and spirituality are inherently compatible. It is enough to make anyone who's ever sweated over an act of fornication break into a smile. "God is a seductress," he continues, "a sultry leatherman going, 'Come on, there's more. Don't you want this?' There is a seduction to the future, a pulling us forward in a kind of deliciously erotic, juicy way towards being fully alive, fully affective human beings."
In his early 50s, Shively has kind eyes and a well-groomed beard that's grayed almost to white. He looks like a junior varsity Santa Claus, years away from assuming the top position and in better shape. If you see him around town, he's likelier to be wearing a rebel cap and motorcycle jacket than any pastoral vestments.
There's little indication of anything quite so provocative as a Leather Daddy deity when I attend a Wednesday evening Taizé prayer service along with about 20 others. The service is named for a multilingual region of France where, to transcend language barriers, the lyrics of the sacred music are deliberately easy to learn. Here, the atmosphere is respectful and contemplative. An octagonal quilt in the center of the room functions as an altar, with votives, pillows, pinecones, a Buddha, a sepia-toned globe, a map of San Francisco, and other offerings spread over it. There also is a bowl of ash, made from prayers written down at the Eureka Street church, and mixed with sand.
The three elements of Taizé are silence, singing, and prayer, and that's exactly what goes on during the hourlong service, along with some extemporizing. In contrast to herchurch, the tone here is muted, even somber, although the crowd has a more even mix of genders. Perhaps the most touching moment comes when a woman who appears to be homeless prays for "people choosing between housing and their children's education." (She gives her name only as "Sunshine" and shies away from talking about herself, but tells me she was referring to First Friendship, a Western Addition shelter for families that has strict policies on admission.)
According to Shively, MCC's "post-Christian" theology differs from progressive Christianity in that it rejects both the hateful dogma in Christian Scripture and anything scientifically dubious, such as the virgin birth of Christ and most of Genesis. "We know the basic premise is wrong," Shively says. "God didn't create a static paradise. He created an evolving, creative, ever-changing universe." Yet Shively believes "there is worth in sacred texts," but "you have to do a lot in order to find it. It is not casual reading." At the Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley where Shively earned his Master of Divinity degree, students encountered both the Quoran and the Bhagavad Gita, but, he quips, "The Ethical Slut was required reading."
"Love is the basic thing in the universe," Shively tells me at least three times, phrasing it in various ways. It "pulls apart the patriarchal power of Christianity." He calls himself a spiritual evolutionist and notes that MCC recognizes Charles Darwin's birthday (Feb. 26), in addition to the usual Dec. 25 celebration of Christ's birth.
Shively refers to his mission as "LGBTQQAAI," the latter half of which stands for "queer, questioning, asexual, ally, and intersex." If that sounds like it encompasses everybody — and it does — that's because Shively is convinced everybody can feel like an outsider and need healing. He says that when a straight woman once confronted him about heterosexuals' exclusion from the abbreviation — and by extension, the church — "I was like, 'No, you already get everything.' Then I thought, 'No, they don't.' And that's the whole point. Oppressions and systemic stuff are bad, but personal pain transcends all those letters."
When it was in the Castro, the Metropolitan Community Church was best known for its ministry during the AIDS crisis years, a situation that has gradually and mercifully diminished. But the biggest issue facing MCC as a larger denomination is that the progressive society the church has fought for may be its undoing. If LGBT people aren't being pushed out of traditional churches in the numbers they once were, that's objectively a good thing, even if it means empty pews at MCC. Shively is sanguine about this, noting that the MCC's founder, the Rev. Troy Perry, "started the church saying he hoped that one day LGBTQQAAI folks would be so welcome you wouldn't need to have an MCC."
Still, if disbelief in heaven or the act of downplaying Easter's theological significance doesn't put a damper on interfaith outreach, the giggly candor with which MCC embraces human sexuality might. "You can go to sex clubs but you're not going to talk much about faith there, although I do," Shively says. "I like to wear leather with my cross that I got at the Folsom Street Fair, which is really big and aggressive. It's fun! You can be an aggressively sexually expressive persona and a faithful person at the same time."
When it comes to expressive, the Rev. Karen Oliveto of Glide Memorial Church wins the prize. When Oliveto preaches, she sounds like a Democratic politician going off on a stump speech to ignite the grassroots, peppering her sermons with "Amen!" While Ebenezer Lutheran and the Metropolitan Community Church are small spiritual communities that most seek out as discontented adults, San Francisco's best-known nontraditional church is larger by at least a factor of 50, and frequently full of children.
Glide Memorial, at the corner of Ellis and Taylor streets, is a part of the United Methodist Church, a fairly loose federation whose adherents include George W. Bush, Hillary Clinton, and Elizabeth Warren. Glide Memorial, founded in 1930 by an heiress named Lizzie Glide, achieved notoriety in the mid-1960s when the Rev. Cecil Williams took over and turned the church into San Francisco's largest provider of social services, a civil rights beacon, and a force for LGBT equality.
Now 86, Williams retired in 2000, though he remains active as a Minister of Liberation. Having joined in 2008, Oliveto is currently the senior pastor, and she believes Glide is more of a movement than a church. It has a free legal clinic, a walk-in program where people can get help navigating the complexities of government aid, and Montessori-based Sunday school in which children engage with sacred stories through creative play. Glide serves 800,000 meals every year (which requires about 60 volunteers per day) and, of course, it has a gospel choir that can be heard over the ambient din of the Tenderloin, and whose music director was once a part of Sly and the Family Stone.
"The starting point is with the poor and those on the margins," Oliveto says by phone. It's her day off, and she's driving through the Napa hills, so our conversation cuts in and out. "When Glide is at its best, it's a spiritual movement based on unconditional love and acceptance. On any given Sunday you'll find anything from recovered Catholics to atheists to everything in between."
With homelessness a perennial issue in San Francisco and housing availability worse than ever, I ask if Oliveto sees the problem metastasizing. "We see it stretching to communities we haven't seen before," she says. "Students coming for meals because they have to choose between books and something to eat. We're seeing more families, senior citizens." In fact, The Pursuit of Happyness — the schmaltzy Will Smith movie — was based on the memoir of a real-life Glide parishioner and his struggle with housing instability, and many of homeless people the church serves found work as extras on the film.
An unflinching commitment to social justice places Glide firmly on the progressive left, which risks creating a greater tension vis-à-vis its larger denomination than San Francisco's other nontraditional churches have to deal with. For instance, officiating the first same-sex union ever held in a United Methodist Church won Oliveto an ecclesial complaint. And the format of Glide's service likely makes it something of an outlier.
"The preaching moment may include poetry, song, art, drama, or even the occasional flash mob," Oliveto says.
Glide is radical to the core. The Rev. Williams removed the crucifix from the altar all the way back in 1967, believing that it inspired complacency in the pews. And perhaps most importantly of all, Glide's 11,000-strong congregation is racially and economically diverse in a way that not only provides an exception to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s decades-old dictum that the most segregated hour in America is Sunday morning at 11, but also stands in stark contrast to all the white faces at MCC and Ebenezer Lutheran.
Speaking of multicolored faces! With her aquiline nose, severe Kabuki makeup, and penchant for feathered headdresses, Sister Roma of the Sisters of Perpetual Indulgence commands attention whether she's emceeing Pride or observing a novice nun collect donations at the gates of Pink Saturday. Her group, which started out as a guerrilla theater troupe, has been pushing the envelope of acceptability for 36 years, to no small amount of controversy, even within the LGBT community.
"There were gay people who hated the Sisters for a very long time," Roma says.
If Glide's liberation theology is rooted in Scripture, and its dedication to tackling injustice and inequality leavened by the full-throated praise of its choir and jazz band, the Sisters have found a different way to combat social ills. Their promiscuous use of glitter makeup and wordplay has made them an instantly identifiable presence at bingo, at the Hunky Jesus and Foxy Mary contests on Easter Sunday, and, until this year, running Pink Saturday.
In 2014, when Facebook was gunning hard for its "real names" policy, Sister Roma's online identity briefly switched to the borderline-anonymous "Michael Williams," a change that felt as jarring as the act of stripping the burqa off a devout Muslim woman. The policy changed back after a delegation of drag queens, Roma included, met with Facebook executives. (One imagines Mark Zuckerberg and his attorneys quivering before a majestic nun with angry eyebrows drawn in the middle of her forehead.) Now in her 28th year as a fully professed nun, Sister Roma was initially drawn to the order because she saw the profound effects such a small group of people could have on people's lives.
"In 1987, Sister Luscious Lashes introduced me to the group," Sister Roma says. "I learned that at the time there were just six active members who were passionate about civil rights and caring for the community. They were the first group to hold an AIDS fundraiser and produce a safe-sex pamphlet. They performed an exorcism in Union Square. I was blown away."
Since 1979, the one-time theater group evolved into a registered nonprofit that's been at the forefront of every issue from support of LGBT youth to the fight against breast cancer. The Sisters' San Francisco chapter, the largest in the world, has some 60 active members, and while today no LGBT-friendly politician would think of running for office in the city without at least a nod to the Sisters, it wasn't always that way.
"Dianne Feinstein did not like the Sisters. When Sister Boom Boom ran for Supervisor [in 1982, listing "Nun of the Above" under occupation], the poster was him as the Wicked Witch of the West flying over City Hall on a broom and the caption was, 'Surrender Dianne.'" Feinstein, then mayor and now California's senior senator, has since come around, even issuing proclamations honoring certain San Francisco drag queens for their years of service.
Although by no means a proper religion, the Sisters are not without ceremonial trappings modeled after pre-Vatican II Catholicism. Veilings, in which novice nuns become fully professed, may be public spectacles sometimes held on the Eagle Tavern's back patio. The group also performs "saintings," an honor which Sister Roma notes has been bestowed on Lily Tomlin, Harvey Milk (posthumously), many longtime HIV/AIDS volunteers, and Margaret Cho.
"Margaret sent a huge puppet to accept her award at Easter," Sister Roma says.
Pink Saturday may be gone, a victim of its own success in an era when thousands can message their friends to join a party without caring what the party is about, but Hunky Jesus and Foxy Mary live on, and the Sisters are still veiling new nuns. Sister Agnes Dei'Afta Tamara, the current Mistress of Novices, explains the four-tiered structure as volunteers, postulants, novices, and fully professed nuns. A volunteer is merely someone who expresses interest. Postulants spend several months getting to know the order, and novices take an additional six months to shadow a nun, performing projects that prove their merit and get the rest of the chapter to vote for them.
Novices wear white veils, work volunteer shifts at the Eagle beer bust or various street fairs, cannot speak to the media on behalf of the order, and must be accompanied by a fully professed nun while in public. (Once fully professed, Sisters have the freedom essentially to do as they please.) Currently, Sister Agnes has six applicants in the first three stages, and is always looking to recruit more. She herself is new — having professed four years ago — and seconds Sister Roma's count of 60 active nuns, adding that there is some mystery to the total number.
"There are some sisters from the original group that I've never seen," Sister Agnes says.
If people are judged by their nemeses, the Sisters have particularly choice enemies. However, it's not necessarily the Catholic hierarchy that hates them. San Francisco Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone — no shrinking violet when it comes to opining on public policy — hasn't said much about them even after the nuns protested his installation in 2012. Typically, opposition comes from blowhards such as Fox News personality Bill O'Reilly or the Catholic League's William Donohue, who uses the Sisters' supposed heresy and moral turpitude as fundraising bullet points in a never-ending hate campaign.
For her part, Glide Memorial's Rev. Oliveto says of the Sisters, "They are amazing! I love them."
If there is one throughline for outsider churches, it is that the titles people hold can be quite magnificent. But beyond the pageantry, the commonality is simple. As Sister Roma succinctly puts it, "We know that there is more."
Undoubtedly, when one calls oneself a "spiritual person," it all too often translates as self-satisfied, content-deprived mush masquerading as a moral credo. But the nontraditional churches and Christian-rooted spiritual movements across San Francisco prove that it is possible to escape that morass of passive therapy-speak, and improve the world in measurable ways.
Whether founded in the recent past or formed with the intention of poking a little fun at ancient institutions that have given meaning to billions, these groups of spiritual soldiers may access universal truths all the same. Consider, for example, the following words: "I take no small delight in the fact that the iron in my blood was born of a supernova, and eventually our sun will explode and we will go back into the cosmos, and the iron molecules in me will still live out in the universe and may coalesce into something fabulous."
That statement could be a militant atheist rhapsodizing about the material world's poetic sheen, or it could be a polyamorous pastor who ministers to HIV-positive Tenderloin residents. In San Francisco, there may no daylight between them.
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