reid
"Come to church with me," my friend Gretchen urged.
"No way. I don't do church. Or synagogue. Or any of that. Sorry," I shook my head.
"This is different," she insisted. "It's like no church you've ever been to. And it's fun and unique and definitely very
San Francisco."
It took a bit more urging on her part but eventually she convinced me to come along. And she was right. When we got there, church was packed with attendees crammed into pews, the upstairs balcony and flowing out into the aisles.
We somehow managed to squeeze next to a male-male couple sitting in a wooden pew and as we sat down, one leaned over and whispered excitedly: "Sharon Stone is down in the first row."
Just another day at Glide Memorial Church where upbeat tunes are accompanied by a live electric guitar, where the cross on the wall was taken down so as not to offend the church's regular Jewish clientele, where the homeless congregate alongside celebs and politicians such as Bill Clinton, Maya Angelou and Sharon Stone and where the pastor, Reverend Cecil Williams, urges strangers to hold hands and hug each other.
Aside from leading one of the United State's most charistmatic and infectious Sunday services, for the last 43 years Reverend Williams has been a friend to the so-called marginalized masses.
Glide Memorial Church is located in San Francisco's drug, homeless and poverty ridden Tenderloin district and welcomes the poor, homeless, gay, addicted, persons-of-color, and counterculture types into church each Sunday.
Williams has personally tansformed Glide Memorial from a dying congregation in a rough-and-tumble neighborhood into a powerful and nationally recognized force for
social change.
Over the years Williams has conceived and implemented more than 80 programs to help those in need using the church as his house for change. Programs include housing, child care, job training, medical treatment, mental health counseling and substance abuse treatment aimed at the City's low-income residents.
One such program, Glide's Free Meals Program, has earned the organization national attention. What began as a small weekly potluck for about 50 people now serves an estimated 1 million meals each year and employs 27 full-time staff members - most of them former clients - and tens of thousands of volunteers.
True to his modest form, Williams takes little credit for the program, maintaining it is the volunteers who are the heart of the Glide machine, the spirit of community involvement and the foundation of the Glide philosophy.
"It's one thing to have people come together on Sunday; it's another thing to have people work in the community," he explains. "What we do on Sunday, we must do on Monday, Tuesday, and the rest of the week. We need to go out and touch the lives of people, and not be afraid to be with people. We have to say to them, 'I am your brother. I am your sister. I am your friend.' If we can't experience our brothers and sisters in full and with great
, as our neighbor and our friend, if we can't do that, then we've missed the mark."
Williams's belief in the importance of giving back is a sentiment shared by Glide's growing roster of high-profile friends. Impressed with the organization's social work, some of Hollywood's, Washington's and the business world's biggest players have lent their support, both financial and otherwise, to various Glide programs over the years.
Since 2000, billionaire Warren Buffett has donated his time to Glide in a most unusual way. Every year Glide auctions off a lunch with the so-called "Sage of Omaha," and proceeds benefit the Glide Foundation. This year's winner paid $620,100, making the Buffett power-lunch the second most expensive charity item every sold on eBay.
Williams argues that if Warren Buffett can find the time in his busy schedule to help out his fellow man, anyone can. "Make time," he says. "If you don't have time to love, how can you accept love? How can you know love in its fullest if you don't have time to reach out also?"
77-year-old Williams retired as full time pastor in 2000 but has remained very active in Glide goings-on as the organization's CEO. While a full retirement is unlikely, the reverend says he is looking forward to being able to hand off the day-to-day responsibilities to a successor.
"Sooner or later, I'm going to step back and survey, and say, 'Is there anything else I need to do?'" he says. "But I can't retire [completely]. I want to be around to raise my hand and say, 'I'm present, I'm here.'"
As for his legacy, the reverend says there's no question as to how he wishes to be remembered: "I want the folks out there on the street, the poor, the lame, those who are suffering, those who are hungry, LesbianGayBisexualTransgender people, people in the African-American community, Hispanics, women, children who come from desperate situations, I want all of them to know that I worked hard to try to
liberate folks. If I can just have that carved on my tombstone: 'Cecil Williams worked to liberate humanity.'