In San Francisco, Helen Pitt is moved by a church choir that mixes hymns and '60s protest songs.
If you're going to San Francisco, forget about wearing some flowers in your hair as the Mamas & the Papas song suggests. If you want to experience some of the city's 1960s sentiment, don't bother making a pilgrimage to Haight-Ashbury, either. The intersection that was the epicentre of the 1967 summer of love movement is now a Ben & Jerry's ice-cream shop, a shrine to capitalism.
If you seek the spirit that spawned the hippie movement, get thee to a church: Glide Memorial, to be precise. Here you will find, preached weekly from the pulpit, everything but the paisley (the print that was the unofficial uniform of the summer of love). The church choir and band has become so popular, the line of tourists and parishioners queueing for Sunday services often snakes around the block.
It's a gospel choir that's so uplifting it could make an atheist believe in God. The soulful performances of the multi-coloured members of the Glide Ensemble and the Change Band would make Motown proud. The services can only be described as a joyous romp.
At the Sunday service I attend, 1960s protest songs such as Where Have All the Flowers Gone replace hymns. The topic for Bible study that week is "bad girls of the Bible". The Bible reading comes with a twist: "The Lord is my shepherd and he knows I am gay." And the sermon includes this message of welcome: "If you're flaming gay, come on in and flame on."
"When anybody comes to San Francisco, they come to Glide, y'all," the Texan-born African-American preacher, Cecil Williams, says.
Williams and his wife, San Francisco's poet laureate Janice Mirikitani, run the church that embodies the liberal activism for which this city is famous. For decades the couple have tended to the poor of the city's Tenderloin district, whose streets are home for people wheeling shopping trolleys filled with their worldly possessions. Church volunteers feed thousands of homeless daily with produce from the church's rooftop garden (the program is called "Graze the Roof" and tour guides take visitors to see the vegetable patch and fine city views.) It also has its own housing and free healthcare programs.
Back in the 1950s, Glide was a dour inner-city middle-class Methodist church (my parents-in-law were married there in 1958). By the time Williams came to the church in 1963, the congregation of mainly white old folks had dwindled. Williams took the cross off the church and set up a council on religion and the homosexual, coinciding with the rise of this city's gay and lesbian pride movement. Thanks largely to his charisma and compassion, Williams's congregation has grown to 10,000 members. Speakers at the church have included the Black Panthers and Bill Cosby. The country's richest man, billionaire Warren Buffett, is a fan and a regular fund-raiser for the Glide cause (lunch with him to support the church recently broke an eBay record, selling for $US2 million.)
"We walk the walk, we don't just talk the talk," is another favourite Williams saying. He is so widely respected that he was called in as a negotiator in the 1970s when the Symbionese Liberation Army took heiress Patti Hearst hostage. He was well known enough to star as himself in the 2006 film The Pursuit of Happyness with Will Smith, which featured Glide's work with the poor .
Williams is often joined by well-known community activist and literary figure Mirikitani, a Japanese American who was interned with her family in World War II. She became involved with the church's social services in the 1960s, when she came for help herself after surviving childhood sexual abuse.
She speaks regularly at the church and the pair are long-time advocates on social issues from supporting Harvey Milk, the first openly gay member of City Hall , in 1978, to the more recent push to overturn the ban on gay marriage.
Churchgoers range from video-wielding international tourists to homeless Vietnam vets in faded army fatigues.
I take my place in the pews between a genteel African-American Southern lady, resplendent in hat and gloves, and a grey-ponytailed baby boomer wearing a T-shirt that says: "I never finish anyth …"
When you come, bring an open heart and some spare change - if not to fill the church coffers then at least to fill the pockets of the district's homeless. No need to bring tissues, though - Glide clergy walk down the aisles handing them out, as many in the congregation are moved to tears by the music. I once sat beside a man who remarked after a particularly rollicking choir and band performance: "That music gets you higher than anything you could ever buy on the streets."
There are Sunday services at 9am and 11am at Glide Memorial Church, 330 Ellis Street, San Francisco. Visitors are asked to arrive at least 30 minutes in advance for seating. See www.glide.org.
Once more, with feeling
Harlem Gospel
New York City, New York
Tour the congregations of Harlem to feel the soul-stirring power of some of the world's best gospel music. Gospel tours take place every Sunday. As well as attending weekly worship, see where jazz legend Duke Ellington lived, the famed 125th Street, the Cotton Club and the Apollo Theatre. The starting point is 690 Eighth Avenue between 43rd and 44th streets. Sunday-best dress is required to attend the church service: no shorts or tank tops are allowed. Reservations necessary; see www.harlemspirituals.com.
Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church
Montgomery, Alabama
For a rousing rendition of We Shall Overcome, the protest song that became an anthem of the US civil rights movement, head to Montgomery, where it all began. See the modest pulpit where Reverend Martin Luther King jnr first preached his message of hope and brotherhood and where he was pastor from 1954 to 1960. Built on the site of a slave pen from bricks gathered by former slaves from an abandoned road, the all-black congregation applauds and sings, accompanied by piano and drums in the Sunday services at 11am. Tours are available of the Dexter Avenue King Memorial Baptist Church and parsonage, which was a central point for the Montgomery bus boycott. A large mural in the church depicts King's civil rights crusade from Montgomery to Memphis. See www.dexterkingmemorial.org.
Acme Missionary Baptist Church
Chicago, Illinois
The Acme Missionary Baptist Church, on Chicago's south side, has been called the best church choir in the US. The Chicago Tribune calls it the little church that could, with "floating harmonies so soft they give goosebumps, other times belting out old-fashioned, hand-clapping, foot-stomping medleys that whip people out of their seats". Choir director Janet Sutton is renowned for her vocal rearrangements of old hymns. As the crowd echoes after 10am Sunday services: "Amen, sister." See www.acmehighestpeak.org.
Mormon Tabernacle Choir
Salt Lake City, Utah
When they sang at his inauguration, Ronald Reagan called them "America's choir". The Mormon Tabernacle Choir is based at the Utah HQ of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Comprising 360 volunteer singers aged 25 to 60, they practise and perform weekly and are accompanied frequently by the Orchestra at Temple Square. Free weekly public rehearsals are held on Thursdays (8-9.30pm). The choir's live weekly half-hour broadcast, Music and the Spoken Word, is the nation's longest-running network program, having run continuously since 1929. The broadcast takes place every Sunday at 9.30am in the Tabernacle on Temple Square. Those who attend should plan to be in their seats by 9.15am. In summer months, broadcasts are held in the conference centre to accommodate the crowds. See www.mormontabernaclechoir.org.
A Prairie Home Companion
St Paul, Minnesota
While not Christian music, Garrison Keillor's nationally broadcast radio show is as much a part of the US weekend music ritual as Sunday church. See the midwestern nostalgia show recorded live most weeks in the Fitzgerald Theatre, or hear it broadcast nationally every Saturday on public radio. It features live music from country gospel to bluegrass. Keillor's weekly fictional monologue recited without notes, News from Lake Wobegon, is as inspiring as any sermon. See prairiehome.publicradio.org.
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