What's Happening at Glide: Facts and Analysis

Iconic San Francisco UMC Faces Uncertain Future

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Last night, 18 June 2018, the President of the Glide Foundation sent out an email to members revealing that the Methodist Church will no longer be assigning pastoral staff to serve at Glide United Methodist Church. This is devastating news and it brings a conflict that’s been bubbling behind the scenes into the public. So far, the congregation has been fighting in the dark, without much of an understanding of what’s going on. Based on my experience, research and conversations with people at Glide, what follows is my best guess as to what is happening.

John 8:31 is often quoted by those in search of the truth, but it’s rare to see the full verse. It’s about truth, but it’s also about the discipline and discipleship required to find truth. Here’s the whole thing:

31 Then Jesus said to the Jews who had believed in him, “If you continue in my word, you are truly my disciples; 32 and you will know the truth, and the truth will make you free.”

Truth, in this context, isn’t a preference or an opinion. It’s a thing that can be known in some sense, but that knowledge requires discipline.

Here’s my truth:

I came to San Francisco about 3 years ago. This move coincided with having rediscovered my Christian faith so I was looking for a Church home. A friend pointed me at Glide United Methodist Church, a storied and influential Church in the heart of San Francisco’s Tenderloin. I began attending here in 2016 and have found it to be a fulfilling, challenging and frustrating experience. It’s also my home.

I grew up in the Church of the Nazarene, an offshoot of the United Methodist Church, and many of my friends and family are pastors, educators and lay leadership within that Church. I know a little bit about church administration. Coincidentally, I also helped start a large-ish nonprofit, served on its board and worked as senior staff there at various times during my career, so I also know a little bit about nonprofits.

Church denominations, formed in schism, are prepared for individual churches that decide that they no longer want to abide by the rules of that denomination or otherwise want to go it alone. Denominations have strong legal frameworks to empower the church’s leadership (bishops) to assign and move pastors, allocate funds etc. and thereby keeps these individual churches in line. The most high-profile fight along these lines has been in the Episcopal church. When the denomination moved to the left on gay priests, its rural, conservative members tried to leave the denomination. Often, churches that try to do this discover that the larger denomination holds significant legal leverage, not least of which is the deed to the actual building that the congregation occupies. Many congregations were shocked to hear their denomination say, in effect: “We’re sorry to see you go. Leave the keys to our building under the mat on your way out.” After the events of last night, I’m wondering who holds the deed at 330 Ellis.

UMC Pastors don’t work for the congregation. Instead, they are employees of the UMC and are assigned to churches by their Bishop, who has ultimate discretion over assignments. [Editor's note: While Mr. Chasteen's understanding reflects that of many church members, ordained clergy are not considered "employees of the UMC." They are instead self-employed professionals and covenanted through their annual conference membership to itinerant ministry as appointed by a bishop]. In this way it is more like the military than a normal employment situation. This is by design. Churches have a mission that is not customer service-focused. Rather, the entire idea of Church is that the people who comprise it (including pastors and Bishops) are inherently sinful and not to be trusted. Humans need discipline. Hence the UMC Book of Discipline.

Normally, pastors are assigned to congregations for a period of years and then move on. This is both for that pastor’s career development and, as in the government, serves as a check against fraud and other shenanigans on the part of any single pastor. There’s a limit to how weird you can get with your accounting when you know someone else will be in your chair in just a few years.

In 2000, Rev. Cecil Williams, the iconic pastor of Glide UMC for 37 years, reached the mandatory UMC retirement age of 70. At this point, he was no longer a serving minister of the United Methodist Church. No doubt fearing the loss of the truly remarkable and unique community that is Glide, Rev. Williams and his wife did something unorthodox. Rather than retiring, leaving the church and allowing leadership to shift to a new head pastor, as is tradition, they restructured much of the institution that is Glide into a 501(c)(3) nonprofit(s) under their control, rather than the UMC’s. This led to an unusual problem: within the same building there now exist effectively two organizations vying for control: Glide UMC and Glide Foundation.

The latter, Glide Foundation, feeds and shelters the homeless, performs laudable social justice work and gets state, local and federal grants (some of which likely can’t be awarded to churches or used for religious purposes) to provide these services. It raises significant sums from the finance and tech industry in high-profile fundraisers. Accordingly, rather than being elected from within the congregation, the board of the Glide Foundation is made up primarily of wealthy individuals from these sectors who can raise money. This is a primary and completely legitimate responsibility for nonprofit boards.

Glide UMC, on the other hand, is part of The United Methodist Church, with pastoral staff assigned by and answering to the United Methodist Bishop of the San Francisco Episcopal Area. As far as I can tell, it doesn’t have a board. This is in violation of the UMC Book of Discipline, which has specific requirements for how such boards must be selected from the congregation and outlines their financial and other oversight duties.

The perennial question of Glide, then, is who is in charge? Given its staffing and significant community services, Glide Foundation must have a significantly larger budget than Glide UMC. The President of the Foundation, like the foundation itself, is not ordained or affiliated with The United Methodist Church. The pastoral staff of Glide UMC, however, are part of the UMC and serve at the pleasure of the bishop.

It seems clear to me now that, when our exciting new pastor the Rev. Jay Williams (no relation to Rev. Cecil Williams) accepted his assignment as head pastor last year, he thought he was going to be in charge. When he resigned last month, less than a year into his tenure, he said the reason was that he was “not being allowed to lead.” I think this means that he was trying to actually do his job and as senior pastor take leadership of the overall Glide organization as Cecil before him. I suspect he wanted to look at the budgets and understand what was happening inside the organization of which he was the purported head. It’s clear that he was not given control of or even perhaps allowed to see Glide’s budget or IRS Form 990s (federal tax reports required of tax-exempt organizations), whose lack of publication or audit is becoming increasingly odd.

When Rev. Jay resigned, I think that Bishop Minerva Carcaño, the UMC’s first Hispanic woman Bishop and relatively new to the San Francisco Episcopal Area, came to see Glide as a church that had slipped its moorings, putting ministers she assigned to that church in an impossible situation. While on paper they were empowered to carry out the mission of the Church, in reality the funds and organizational control were in the hands of others.

I think that Bishop Carcaño talked to the Glide Foundation leadership and demanded that, unlike Rev. Jay, the next senior pastor that she assigned to Glide must actually be allowed to lead Glide, with control and oversight over the organization’s budget. As far as we can tell, The Glide Foundation refused.

The Glide Foundation was betting that the bishop, like previous bishops, would back down and allow things to continue as they were. They were betting that she wouldn’t use her authority to discipline Glide publicly. From the foundation’s vantage point, this would be unacceptably embarrassing for the UMC and risk killing the Golden Goose that is Glide, one of the most high-profile, high-revenue and popular congregations associated The United Methodist Church.

That’s not what happened. During the regular summer assignment season, Bishop Carcaño reassigned (promoted) the remaining Glide pastoral staff away from Glide and told the Foundation that, under the circumstances, no replacement UMC staff would be forthcoming. From the Bishop’s perspective, if Glide isn’t a church led by pastors anymore, it doesn’t really make sense to send pastors there to lead.

What’s going to happen next? I don’t know. This is ugly. It hurts everyone at the worst possible time. Glide Foundation has been powered by their personalities, but Cecil and Jan are effectively at the end of their careers. Fundraising without them has always been a question mark. It gets even harder if, on their way out, there’s question about budgets and the lack of disclosure and oversight that comes with denominational affiliation. And Glide is Glide because it’s a church, and a mainline denominational church at that. Despite its aggressively progressive politics and liberation theology, its UMC affiliation granted a stability and gravitas that allowed it to outlive the tarnish of other, ill-fated 1960s San Francisco religious communities like the People’s Temple.

The UMC is making it clear that Glide is no longer endorsed, overseen or audited by a mainline denomination. This is an aggressive act. It will make donors wonder what’s going on at an organization that insists that standard nonprofit financial norms don’t apply to them because they’re a church. Well, they’re not a church anymore.

If Glide Foundation wouldn’t show their total budgets or allow budgetary input to the head pastor of Glide this is … not a great sign. It’s not uncommon for a church or a religious institution to forego publication of its IRS Form 990s, but it’s illegal for most secular nonprofits. I’ve been inside nonprofits that are afraid to show their books. It doesn’t necessarily mean malfeasance or shenanigans. Even the best nonprofits struggle to get their budgets into a shape that isn’t embarrassing. But not publishing your 990s, impact studies or detailed budget documents will make a lot of sophisticated donors decline your grant proposal, so it’s generally something that even religious nonprofits avoid.

I love Glide. It’s a place that seems to really be living its values. It’s inclusive, sincere, smart and effective. By all accounts it spends its money well and pays reasonable salaries. I don’t think anything particularly shady is going on here. Glide’s UMC pastors are serious about their vocation and their theology, and the Cchurch finds a balance between welcoming all faiths and backgrounds without forgetting where it comes from or apologizing for its heritage. I’ve looked at other churches in San Francisco and, like many at Glide, nothing else feels like home for me. It’s worth fighting for.

Faced with the prospect of a Glide without Cecil and lacking a clear consensus on what Glide is let alone where we should go, we thought we had a bit of time to figure out what “Glide 2.0” looked like. Glide has been the kind of place where we’ve all been allowed to “have our own truth.” Perhaps, but we’re not entitled to our own facts, or our own ledgers. At the end of the day, Glide will need discipline to define clearly what it is, at least legally and financially. And the bishop is going to need us to decide whether we’re going to continue to be part of The United Methodist Church, which by definition means submission to the oversight, audit and discipline of the UMC General Conference, the California-Nevada Annual Conference and its bishop.

The truth might set us free when we find it. But if we’re still a church, like it says on the front of the building, we’ll need discipleship to get there. If that discipline isn’t going to come from The United Methodist Church, then it’ll need to come from somewhere else if for no other reason than ensuring the congregation and donors that the funds entrusted to Glide are being used appropriately and in pursuit of clearly-articulated and agreed-upon goals.

Editor's Note: The author asks that comments on this article be made at his original post on Medium.com so that he can keep track of the conversation.

David Chasteen of San Francisco, a member of Glide Memorial United Methodist Church, describes himself as "Hoosier, Nazarene, Veteran, Veterans Advocate, Tech Executive, National Security Professional, wannabe theologian. In that order." This post is republished with the author's permission from Medium.com.