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"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.
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