I am a Sociology Professor....for six years, I took students from Huntingdon College in Montgomery, Alabama to work for eight days at Glide. Cecil Williams said I was the first person to bring students to volunteer at Glide. It proved to be a transformational experience for me and many of the students. The students each got two hours credit for volunteering. We sat in crack cocaine recovery sessions, helped feed the homeless, passed out condoms to prostitutes and participated in AIDS prevention programs. Cecil has created a place Glide is the most spiritually loving, accepting place I have ever visited. Glide is my favorite church because it practices what other only preach......Christianity in motion. Next time you ae in San Francisco, be sure to go to a Sunday Morning Celebration there.....at 9 or 11am. You will remember it for the rest of your life.

The Church does a lot for the community, with free meals and HIV testing, as well as housing and other services to those in need. I checked out a service about a year ago. It consisted of a whole lot of people crammed in a mini auditorium type setting, probably at least 500 people. It's a lot of singing and holding hands. There's a choir up there most of the time and there's preaching, but not in any specific religious denomination. You can hear the words "Praise the Lord" over and over but no readings, or real messages given across. Nonetheless it's a lively and different experience.

I'm not particularly religious, but I love attending the Glide services. Always lots of music and the celebration of life from a minister who has made his church a model for service to the poor, runaways, people with AIDS and other undesireables. The Reverend Cecil Williams has a great deal of respect from all walks of life, from the city pols to the average street person. Probably one of the most racially integrated churches in the country. Some of the hardcore orthodoxy in the Methodist church aren't too impressed with his colorful blend of Christianity and humanism, and so each year they call for his defrocking and ex-communication. Each year it fails.