Glide Evangelistic Training School Bishop Donald Tippett was appointed to the Board of Trustees in late 1949. Pastor John H. Kenney was hired in February 1950 to replace a former pastor whom the Board held responsible for leading Glide Memorial Church into “a dark period in the Church’s history,”90 as Kenney describes:

I was not unfamiliar with [Glide Memorial Church’s] problems and was aware the Church had sustained losses in membership and leadership, but did not know how far reaching those losses were…. We are [now] seeking to regain lost ground…. Our task is almost like starting over again in building a significant church in the heart of San Francisco…. I am not looking for or expecting a miracle to happen, so suddenly the church is filled and overflowing. I believe we can accomplish this in time, but it will take time.91

It was around this time that the Board, along with Pastor Kenney, began to discuss changes that would ultimately set the course for a new Glide Memorial Church. Speaking in 1951, Tippett summarized his goals:

[We] owe to the community of San Francisco a down town leadership. In order to attract the people to Glide Church the program must not be a narrow one, but a full program to appeal to all people. We must not neglect the evangelistic approach and the carrying out of the wishes of Mrs. Glide as expressed in the Declaration of Trust.92

The Board of Trustees and Kenney were focused on the same two priorities: increase church membership, especially by reaching out to people who lived downtown (e.g., Kenney proposed hiring religious-social workers to work in underprivileged areas of the city); and create a school of evangelism.

The idea of a “full program” church was a long overdue fulfillment of Lizzie Glide’s vision of Glide as being a center of evangelism, as stated clearly in her Deed of Trust.93

The school started out small. Bishop Tippett hosted a School of Bible in late 1950, followed by a leadership training school for clergy in the area. Glide’s educational component was formalized in January 1953 with the inaugural Glide Evangelistic Training School, held for a week in the Chapel of Sacred Memories and funded by the Glide Foundation. The keynote speaker was Bishop Charles W. Brashares, who also conducted classes on preaching ministry and how to prepare and deliver a sermon.94 The Glide Foundation supplied financial assistance to ministers on mission assignments. The first Glide Evangelistic Training School was considered a success, as Pastor Kenney testified:

We believe that this School of Evangelistic Training, repeated and varied from year to year as experience points the way, can be one of the most significant contributions to California Methodism and the building of God’s Kingdom.95

The school was repeated every year, with attendance increasing each time. By 1956, the Glide Evangelistic Training School had broadened its reach by collaborating with the Board of Evangelism of the California-Nevada Annual Conference of the Methodist Church, as well as the Japanese Provisional Conference (“in recognition of their splendid spirit of the Japanese in this area and their need to meet the challenge of bringing Christ to their people”).96 Those collaborations extended for several years.

Bishop Tippett was instrumental in widening the scope of the school and procuring “top flight men” to be lecturers, notably Professor (later Dean) Joseph D. Quillian Jr. of the Perkins School of Theology at Southern Methodist University.97 Quillian taught at the Glide school in 1956 and 1957. An important connection to note here is that Glide Memorial Church’s current minister, A. Cecil Williams, graduated from Perkins in 1955, a year before Quillian lectured at the Glide Evangelistic Training School. Williams and four of his cohort were the first African Americans to be admitted to and graduate from Southern Methodist University.