SAN FRANCISCO — San Francisco residents have always celebrated the new, the innovative, the cutting-edge. The weirder, the better. But these days, they are flocking to a surprising venue for the cool factor: a church that is older than the city itself.
High atop Nob Hill, above the clanging cable cars and luxury hotels, stands the majestic Grace Cathedral. The Episcopal congregation dates to 1849, the year before the city was incorporated, when pews were filled with miners tossing gold dust into the offering plates at a precursor to the current building.
The Gothic cathedral, built in 1927 for the same congregation, has for decades been home to traditional religious rites and events: Sunday services, baptisms, weddings, funerals and Christmas choral performances. But in the past few years, it has boomed for reasons that have nothing to do with the Bible. Just the other week, a public art display featuring colorful lasers beamed from the roof of the nearby Fairmont Hotel into the big, round window at the front of the cathedral. The event drew more than 1,000 onlookers, including Sergey Brin, the billionaire co-founder of Google, and Kudra Kalema, a Ugandan prince and tech founder.
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Rapper Kanye West has visited the cathedral during quiet hours to play the organ. Bobby McFerrin, the singer made famous by his 1988 hit, “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” regularly leads cathedralgoers in improvised song circles.
But it’s not just star power fueling the interest in Grace. In a city where office buildings remain among the emptiest in the nation, many remote workers in San Francisco are longing for a real-world community.
Two years ago, the San Francisco cathedral created Grace Arts, a program designed like a museum membership that charges an annual fee in exchange for benefits that include discounts on classes and events.
It has proved so popular that Grace Arts members now outnumber regular church members. About 820 households subscribe to Grace Arts, compared with 550 churchgoing households. Annual surveys show the average age of a Grace participant has dropped from 63 to 40 in just two years, signaling the new program is drawing a younger crowd.
Kimberly Porter-Leite volunteers at the cathedral’s twice-weekly yoga classes, sessions so popular she has to perform what she calls “mat Tetris” to ensure everybody fits between the columns and pews. The Fire Department has even required the cathedral to block off an open path with colorful cones so that the yogis can get out in an emergency, she said.
Porter-Leite, wearing black leggings and heart socks at a recent session, said she felt incredibly lonely during the pandemic, a hole made worse by the death of her mother.
She is not religious and is married to a woman she described as “a recovering Catholic” who felt mistreated by the church for being a lesbian. A cathedral was an unlikely place for her to spend her time, but she lives nearby and knew that Grace had a reputation for being liberal and welcoming. In 2021, she tried out a yoga class and was hooked.
“This place was a lifeline for me,” she said. “It is so weird and quirky and lovely and inclusive. It was such a relief.”
Darren Main has taught yoga classes at the cathedral for many years but said they used to be small and only recently have swelled. He, too, is gay and felt shamed by the Catholic Church in which he was raised.
“A lot of people here left the church, not feeling particularly welcome or safe,” he said. “But we still need a space where we can be together for some reason besides bickering about politics.”
Others are finding community and joy at the cathedral by packing monthly sound baths, where they nestle into their sleeping bags to listen to musicians play by candlelight. They are dancing in the pews at tribute concerts to Sting, Queen — and, of course, Taylor Swift.
They are joining tours that allow them to venture into nooks of the cathedral that were long barred to visitors — including the closets where the bishop’s vestments are kept, the bell tower and the catwalks overlooking large stained glass windows featuring biblical scenes in vibrant colors. In some areas, the clearance is so low, visitors must don hard hats.
The cathedral has even hosted carnivals, drag queens and trapeze artists swinging from its soaring ceilings.
“Crazy San Francisco! Isn’t it great?” joked the Very Rev. Malcolm Clemens Young, the dean of Grace Cathedral, who regularly ditches his collar for a T-shirt and shorts at yoga class.
The groundswell of interest may seem unlikely in a city known for its counterculture and where organized religion is not a focus of many residents’ lives — except on Easter Sunday when they pack the hills of Dolores Park for the annual Hunky Jesus contest. One 2020 study, conducted by the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies, found that 35% of San Franciscans were religious adherents, compared with nearly 49% nationally.
Young said he was heartened that people of all religious stripes, as well as those who are agnostic and atheist, were joining the fun at the cathedral.
“We always say you can belong before you believe, or you can belong and never believe,” he said. “There’s such a spiritual hunger. We’re always going to look up at the stars in wonder. And we’re always going to ask why we’re here.”
Of course, the unusual offerings were designed out of self-interest, too.
Grace is just one of many churches around the country that has tried to pay the bills in an era in which fewer people are going to church and tithing every Sunday.
Maintaining the cavernous structure and paying for staff and utilities cost a staggering $17,000 a day. The cathedral relies mostly on large private donations, but its Grace Arts membership fees, as well as charges for one-off classes, tours and concerts help, too. Praying and meditating at the church remain free.
Some churches have had after-lives as cafes, nightclubs or fraternity houses. Housing proponents see an opportunity for congregations with a surplus of land, such as expansive parking lots, to build affordable units alongside their churches, using the slogan YIGBY, “Yes in God’s Backyard.”
Mark Elsdon, a consultant who works with churches on transitioning their properties to other uses and is also an ordained minister, said more and more churches will face these conundrums.
“It’s a wave, a tsunami, and we’re actually just on the beginning of it,” he said. “There just isn’t the need for all that space.”
Young said he hears from the deans of cathedrals in Washington, D.C., New York City and elsewhere who want ideas on how to draw more people to their buildings, if not to their church services.
“We definitely consult with each other,” he said. “But we are the ones who are pushing the envelope more than they are.”
Or unfurling the yoga mat as the case may be.
On a recent Tuesday evening, Paul Wong performed his weekly routine: arriving early to claim a prized yoga spot on the labyrinth at the center of the cathedral, and stripping off his work clothes to reveal shorts and a T-shirt.
He is a religious agnostic but said he feels at home at Grace.
“It does feel like going to church a little bit, but it’s not pushed on you,” he said. “Whatever worries or stresses I have, it helps me release them.”
He lay down on his back and gazed up at the waning sunlight streaming through the stained glass windows. He took a deep breath. He was at peace.
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