Beyond the Possible: 50 Years of Creating Radical Change in a Community Called Glide - Hardcover

Williams, Cecil; Mirikitani, Janice

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0062105043 ISBN 13: 9780062105042

Publisher: HarperOne, 2013

Synopsis

In Beyond the Possible, Reverend Cecil Williams, one of the most well-known and provocative ministers in the United States, reflects on his fifty years creating radical social change as the head of San Francisco's Memorial Glide Church.

Williams' innovations, such as HIV testing during services, have drawn protest from more conservative factions within the Methodist Church, but his work in the community has drawn praise from the likes of Bill Clinton, Oprah Winfrey, and Warren Buffett.

Written with Glide Church founding pastor Janice Mirikitani, and with a foreword by Dave Eggers, Beyond the Possible is a book of wisdom, providing lessons that Reverend Williams has learned so that readers can learn to embrace their true selves, accept all those around them, and fully live day to day through social change as worship.

About this title

About the Authors

For more than fifty years, the Reverend Cecil Williams has been recognized as a national leader on the forefront of change in the struggle for civil and human rights. Janice Mirikitani is the founding president of the Glide Foundation and was San Francisco's second poet laureate. Cecil and Janice have been married for thirty-one years.

Dave Eggers, a former professional stundman, is the editor of McSweeney's and the author of the New York Times bestseller A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

From the Back Cover

Love
Acceptance
Community

With admirers ranging from Harvey Milk and Huey Newton to Warren Buffett, Maya Angelou, and Dianne Feinstein, Glide Memorial Methodist Church in San Francisco has been inspiring, infuriating, welcoming, and changing the world for fifty years.

Now in Beyond the Possible, the two founders, Reverend Cecil Williams and Janice Mirikitani, show how Glide transformed a dwindling all-white congregation into a diverse and energetic community of the poor, the disenfranchised, the homeless, the addicted, the mentally ill, the newly immigrated, and the politically passionate.

A vivid storyteller, Cecil describes removing the trappings of conventional religion to make way for a new spirituality—one that embraces gay rights, jazz in the sanctuary, the antiwar movement, and Celebrations that fill the church to this day. In prose as gripping as her acclaimed poetry, Janice recalls starting out at Glide as a nonbeliever in the 1960s who found herself drawn to Cecil's vision for social justice.

Soon we see how Cecil's charismatic power, combined with Janice's organizing genius, created a model for wraparound health care, a million free meals a year, apartments for the homeless, and a stand-up pride that confronted police brutality, riots, racism, and institutional bigotry. And we discover that Glide's insistence on inviting rather than avoiding controversy has revolutionized approaches to drug addiction, racial conflict, and domestic violence.

Both a personal love story and a riveting view of American history, Beyond the Possible demonstrates what is truly possible for all of us. Here is Obamacare with a human face. Here is Martin Luther King Jr.'s vision of "the beloved community" come to life at last. And here is a courageous couple facing impossible odds—and discovering the power of unconditional love time and time again.

Reviews

Tracing the meteoric rise of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco, Williams and Mirikitani explain what brought them to the dying church and how it became a transformative presence in a long-forgotten city neighborhood. Born into a big, loving family, Williams knew he was destined for the church at an early age. Growing up during segregation and one of five African American men who attended a formerly all-white seminary, Williams was profoundly impacted by the broken state of race relations in the U.S. He found his calling at Glide Memorial in the early 1960s, when it was a failing United Methodist Church in the heart of the Tenderloin district, an area known for its strip clubs, prostitutes, adult bookstores, and gay bars. Grounding Glide in the ideas of liberation theology, Williams began to completely transform the church from one that actively locked out the surrounding community to one that invited them in with open arms. Mirikitani balances Williams, giving the nonclerical perspective of an involved member of the church. A significant slice of religious and cultural life in the sixties. --Eve Gaus

Edition details

• Publisher: HarperOne
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0062105043
• ISBN 13: 9780062105042
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 336