Scores of people sat on folding chairs, snacking on free doughnuts and coffee and re-reading the poems or stories they’d scrawled on crumpled paper. It was a cold evening, and many of them stayed wrapped in their worn coats.
“It’s almost 5 o’clock, and we always start on time,” boomed a voice from the front of the Tenderloin community room. It was the Rev. Cecil Williams, and he was calling “Speak Out,” the weekly Wednesday open mike night at Glide Memorial Methodist Church, to order.
“We know if we start on time, we will live on time,” he continued. “We will be on time, and we will eat on time!”
He burst into laughter and called the first speaker to the microphone at 5 p.m. sharp, listening raptly for precisely an hour. Williams, who sticks to his busy schedule with the help of an assistant, is keenly aware of time. Yet he has no time for the one event perhaps most expected of any 80-year-old: his retirement.
Forty-five years ago, Williams – whose father cleaned the all-white Methodist church in their segregated west Texas town – was sent by the Methodist church to lead a tiny, struggling church at Taylor and Ellis streets in the Tenderloin. He has since turned Glide into Northern California’s most famous congregation, which counts 11,890 people – including Hollywood stars, hookers and high-society – on its membership rolls.
Vast array of services
The Glide Foundation, which encompasses the church and a vast array of social services, has an annual budget of $17.5 million. But critics say Williams’ reputation is so outsized, some of Glide’s negative impacts on the neighborhood go ignored by City Hall.
While Glide has spent years bracing for his departure, Williams finds the idea alternately funny and offensive.
“It’s not over for me – it’s never over for me,” he said during an interview in his office, surrounded by African art, sculptures of him and his wife, Janice Mirikitani, 68, a large painting of himself, and photos of him with Nelson Mandela, President Obama, Maya Angelou and Oprah Winfrey.
“How do you give up something you helped create?” he said. “You don’t throw up your hands and say, ‘OK, you take over.’ No, no, no.”
The Methodist church requires that ministers retire at age 70, but Williams said he bypassed that rule by officially leaving his role as minister of the church and being hired the next day by the Glide Foundation.
“They can’t touch me now,” he said, laughing some more. “My last breath might be in the doorway of Glide.”
