Meeting minutes from this period paint a picture of how difficult it was to operate a downtown church. Lizzie Glide betted on the downtown location for convenience and access to young working-class professionals who lived in the apartments in the Tenderloin. But as demographics shifted and the Tenderloin changed, Glide Memorial Church’s membership not only waned but became a combination of people who lived in neighborhoods outside of the Tenderloin (predominately older and white) and tourists. While the Glide Foundation benefited from a constant revenue stream from its business ventures, growing its capital assets from $500,000 to $3,000,000 in 20 years, Glide Memorial Church struggled to operate on meager tithing from a shrinking membership.83 The Glide Memorial Church did what it could to draw in more members. During World War II, Glide spent $5,000 to open a service center for young servicemen and women, reportedly drawing as many as a thousand people every month.84 In the early 1950s, under direction of Pastor John R. Kenney, the church converted a former game room at street level into the Chapel of Sacred Memories. The chapel, named as a memorial to Lizzie Glide, created an easily accessible space where passersby could drop in for prayer or meditation.85 Pastor Kenney also implemented Wednesday night dinners in an effort to draw members to the Wednesday evening service. He said, “By the time [members] go home from their work, change and return to the Church it is too late and exhausting. They have demonstrated that they will stay down town and attend if a meal is served.”86

Another issue faced by Glide Memorial Church during this period was the loss of long-serving Trustees of the Glide Foundation Board, through resignation or death, and major philosophical differences that arose between the old guard and the new. Trustees who had served on the original Board, along with Lizzie Glide’s daughter, Elizabeth Glide Williams, argued that new Board appointments and a new pastor at Glide Memorial Church violated the terms of the Deed of Trust. Williams expressed her concerns in a letter to the Board:

The last two members of the Board and [the new] pastor of Glide Church [are] in the process of converting Glide Church from a church where revivals were held, souls saved at the altars and believers sanctified, to a church after the so-called education pattern of modern Methodism, which my mother did not believe and with which she did not concur.87

Longtime Trustee Dr. R.P. Shuler decried the addition of one of the new Trustees, Bishop Donald H. Tippett as a “notice to everyone that we were starting in a new direction” and that the terms of Lizzie Glide’s Deed of Trust were being “thwarted.”88 The Methodist Church, Shuler said, “is not in a position to carry out the will and desire of [Lizzie Glide] since it does not now propagate the doctrine it did at the time the Trust was set up.”89

Shuler was correct about Glide moving in a new direction: the addition of Bishop Donald Tippett to the Board of Trustees was a watershed moment in Glide history.