Summer Fellowship: Waking Up at Glide Memorial

Submitted by John Helmstadter on July 2, 2008 - 8:14pm.

My Beatitudes Society Summer Fellowship has landed me at Glide Memorial Methodist Church, a wild, passionate, engaged, liberating church/social services network that grounds its ministry on the principles of “Unconditional Love” and “Recovery is for Everyone.” Glide is in the heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin district, the neighborhood with easily the highest concentration of homelessness and addiction in the city, so these principles are vital to their work in that community. The vast majority of those who receive the array of social services that Glide offers are from the extreme margins of society. They are those with the most visible addictions, disabilities, diagnoses, and scars of oppression and isolation. For many at Glide, the conditions that mainstream society places on acceptance, much less love, must seem hopelessly distant. This is why removing the conditions on love is so vital for an organization that seeks to be in supportive community with the most disenfranchised.

Working at Glide, and seeing the power of unconditional love at work, I am laid low by the realization that our churches are so often places where love is not only conditional, but extremely so. This, I believe, is due to a combination of factors, but one of the biggest contributors to the conditionality of love in our churches is that they are places where morals and values are proclaimed. Proclaiming moral truths is part of the prophetic vocation and is essential to a church’s purpose, but the problem is that we in the church all to often misinterpret Christian morals as norms to be measured against instead of ideals to be chased after.

This is where Glide’s second principle becomes key to their mission. Reaching out to the disenfranchised is often a self-serving, self-aggrandizing activity that ends up reinforcing vertical power structures. At Glide, they recognize that all people—whether they are giving or receiving—are hurt, fragmented, and addicted in some way, yet also capable of healing from the wound, recovering from the brokenness, and attaining liberation from the disease of addiction. This recognition requires looking at recovery beyond just the realm of substance addiction to include all blocks that hold us back from being what Glide calls “our highest, most human selves.” Such recognition levels the playing field and creates the potential for reaching out without condescension and self-glorification. The first question I had to ask myself as I became more involved at Glide was: what is it that I need recovery from? As I delve into that question I discover painful yet powerful connections and tethers to my brothers and sisters in the Tenderloin that extend far deeper than simple Christian obligation.

» John Helmstadter's blog

Strengthening the progressive Christian network for justice, compassion, & peace