But it was moving to San Francisco that really set him on the path to becoming a roller-skating devotee. Miles arrived in the late ’70s, when skating had exploded all over the city, especially in Golden Gate Park. According to the park’s own estimates, in the summer of 1979, anywhere between 15,000 and 20,000 skaters would show up to cruise along JFK Drive on Sundays. Miles quickly became part of the scene.

The boom in skating also caused contention with city residents, who pushed for a total ban on skating in San Francisco. Miles joined the Golden Gate Park Skate Patrol, a skating ambassador group formed to keep skaters in the park safe and in designated areas. They skated all the way from San Francisco to Sacramento to make their case to the state of California that cities should be allowed to regulate, but not outright ban, roller-skating. They won.

By the late ’80s, Miles was making a living exclusively with skate lessons and events. In 2000, he attended Burning Man for the first time — it would become a regular occurrence for him. He’s part of the camp that builds the Black Rock Roller Disco, which they run 24 hours a day the whole week of Burning Man. There is clearly Burning Man influence in Miles’ skating outfits, too, and in the space that would become the Church of 8 Wheels.

David Miles skates back to his DJ booth at the Church of 8 Wheels in San Francisco on Sept. 20, 2022. (Beth LaBerge/KQED)

From church to roller disco

The building that now houses the roller rink, at 554 Fillmore Street, is part of what was formerly the Sacred Heart Catholic Church complex, consisting of the church, the rectory, the convent and a school. The church was designed by architect Thomas John Welsh, who designed many other Catholic churches and schools in the Bay Area. Built in 1897, it survived the 1906 earthquake and the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake.

Sacred Heart Catholic Church, on the corner of Fell and Fillmore streets in San Francisco, 1939. (Courtesy of San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library)

In 2004, the Archdiocese of San Francisco announced the church would be closed, due to the high cost of seismic repairs. The property was sold to a private buyer. The building has since been designated a historic landmark in the National Register of Historic Places.

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James DeLange was an established Lutheran minister from Minnesota when he accepted the call to rescue St. Francis Lutheran, a charming but crumbling old church with a small, struggling congregation in San Francisco’s Castro District.

It was 1981. The AIDS crisis was starting to kill the parishioners at “Our Lady of Safeway,” as it was known, due to its proximity to the grocery store on Market Street. To fully immerse himself in the pandemic, the new pastor moved to the neighborhood and started attending AIDS walks and vigils. He had a wife and two kids, but he also became family to those who had been abandoned because of their sexual orientation.

In the late 1980s, the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America had declined to ordain any minister who was openly gay and not celibate, so DeLange offered to ordain them at St. Francis. This radical inclusiveness got St. Francis suspended from the church in 1990. But it also gave the congregation strength and resolve, celebrated in its annual “Feast of the Expulsion.”

A riveting speaker with a deep, rousing voice that carried across a cathedral, DeLange was serving as guest minister at St. Marks Lutheran Church on O’Farrell Street in 2017 when he started losing his train of thought and was noticeably scattered while delivering a sermon .

Diagnosed with dementia, DeLange spent his final years at his home in Eureka Valley with a view of his old congregation, and even the Safeway sign on Market Street. On Aug. 20, two Lutheran ministers who mentored DeLange came to his home to deliver the Lutheran prayer for the dying, much as DeLange had done at the bedsides of men dying of AIDS.

An hour after the prayer session, DeLange died in bed, wearing his red-and-blue St. Francis Lutheran T-shirt and facing the view out the window. His death was confirmed by his daughter, Lynn Krausse. hey what 88

“Jim DeLange was a remarkable and uncommon individual,” said former state Senator Mark Leno, who knew DeLange through community service both in the Castro and citywide.

“He felt and believed deeply, and he had a stiff backbone when the Lutheran church challenged him and his local colleagues on his inclusivity of the LGBTQ community. He had my admiration for that,” Leno said.

DeLange’s impact transcended the Lutheran church. After the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989, he was invited by then-Mayor Art Agnos to join a committee that was forming what would become the San Francisco Interfaith Council in response to both the displacement of people from the earthquake and the growing homelessness population in the City.

“Jim was one of the first to open up his church sanctuary for people to stay during the worst of the winter,” said Agnos, “and he immediately assumed a leadership position in recruiting religious organizations of all faiths to join him in responding to the crisis for the homeless.”

Delange ended up serving on the interfaith council’s board of directors for 23 years, including a long stint as board chair, from 2004 to 2012. The winter shelter he helped launch still exists, and the council mobilizes the city’s 800 communities of faith in times of disaster, including the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Wherever I go in San Francisco people come up to me and tell me how important my dad was to their lives,” said Krausse. “How he’d been kind in the right moment and offered perfect advice and support. If what they needed was money he would hand them 100 bucks. He was out there doing God’s work.”

James William DeLange was born July 6, 1934 in St. Paul, Minn. where he grew up. His father, William DeLange, managed an industrial laundry service that specialized in cleaning the work overalls worn by workers at the 3M plant, which made scotch tape and other forms of adhesives. As a kid, James worked in the plant loading the washing machines and making deliveries of clean uniforms with his dad.

Salvation came through a neighbor who was the pastor at Gethsamene Lutheran Church. DeLange had been baptized Presbyterian but his mom started taking him to the Lutheran services to support their neighbor, the pastor. This led DeLange to become active in youth ministry at North St. Paul High School, where he was also involved in drama.

After graduating in 1951 he attended the University of Minnesota, but the Korean was on. Convinced he’d be drafted into the Army, he joined the Navy Reserve instead. This allowed him to transfer to Concordia Theological Seminary in Springfield, Ill. Luckily, he drew soft duty in the Navy Reserve, assigned to setting up the bowling pins in the officers club in St. Paul.

He was off duty and off base when he met Beverly Hansen, a farm girl who’d come to town to bowl. She met DeLange at the alley. They were married in 1957 and Delange was ordained in the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod, a particularly conservative denomination.

A year later, Delange was assigned to start a Lutheran congregation in the growing Orange County city of Huntington Beach. The flock started in the two-car garage of a house he paid $12,000 for, with a monthly payment of $85. Faith Lutheran Church, as it was named, quickly outgrew the garage and into a campus to fit a congregation that included more than 1,000 families.

In the mid-1970s a schism between facts of the Lutheran Church divided it into a doctrinaire group that wanted to adhere to biblical infallibility, and a more progressive group. DeLange was named Executive Secretary of the progressive faction which split off to form the the Association of Evangelical Lutheran Churches.

This cost him his job at Faith Lutheran, which remained in the Missouri Synod.

DeLange and his second wife moved to the Bay Area in 1976. Delange continued in an administrative position for the new Association until he got the position at St. Francis, which had allied itself with the more progressive faction.

When the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America came out against non-celibate Gay ministers, DeLange was a perfect representative for the opposition, having emerged as a progressive Lutheran despite his bringing up in the church’s conservative orthodoxy.

“He was seeing the cruelty to the gay community every day in San Francisco,” said his daughter. “To have the church then ostracize the gay clergy became very personal to him so he pushed back against the injustice.”

By 1985, he was leading the St. Francis contingent in the Pride Parade and soon helped organize the Lutheran Lesbian and Gay Ministries. St. Francis eventually withdrew from the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America Synod.

“Jim was a straight ally who invested a huge amount of his political capital in the movement for the full inclusion and participation of LGBTQIA+ clergy,” said Jeff Johnson, pastor at University Lutheran Chapel of Berkeley, near the Cal campus.

DeLange was also good with fiscal capital. When the earthquake hit in 1989, the south-facing brick facade of St. Francis Lutheran came down in a pile. That provided the impetus for a capital campaign to rebuild the landmark structure which was constructed in 1905-06. DeLange served as project manager and fund raiser and he did not stop there. He started a church endowment fund that has grown over the last 40 years to benefit organizations worldwide, according to the current pastor at St. Francis, Bea Chun.

“What Jim did for the congregation was give us a blueprint to follow,” said Chun. “We have the inspiration of his courage and his willingness to be an innovator.”

DeLange’s second marriage also ended in divorce. In 1991, he married Diane Nelson, a member of a Lutheran congregation in Mill Valley. She did her part for St. Francis by launching a senior lunch program with Nelson herself doing the cooking for 50 or 60 hungry souls every Wednesday. She died of cancer in 2011.

After retiring from St. Francis in 1999, DeLange continued to be minister and busied himself with Democratic Party politics. His Christmas Day “Green Drink” party was a standard, with people coming by to sip his secret concoction involving Creme de Menthe.

“Jim was the kind whose door was always open,” said Leno “He had such a wide range of acquaintances, from his pastoral work to his community work to his leadership on queer issues.”

DeLange is survived by his sister Rochelle Schrodt of St. Paul; daughter Lynn Krausse of Bakersfield; son Brad DeLange of San Francisco; stepson Matthew Nelson of Alameda; stepdaughter Adrienne Brown of Kentfield; and four grandchildren.

Funeral Services will be at St. Mark’s Lutheran Church on Saturday September 24th at 10:30 AM. Memorial donations may be made to St. Francis Lutheran Church 152 Church Street, San Francisco, CA 94114.

Sam Whiting is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: swhiting@sfchronicle.com

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SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) – Janice Mirikitani – co-founder, activist, poet and wife of the Glide Memorial Church, Rev. Cecil Williams – died Thursday morning, according to a church announcement. She was 80 years old.

The post on the Glide website said Mirikitani died with family and friends by her side.

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Janice Mirikitani (Glide.org)

“Our hearts are full of sadness and the tremendous love that it embodied. Janice accompanied everything she did with wild courage and willpower, ”the statement said. “She told her truth and inspired others to accept and celebrate themselves, each other and all of our differences.”

Mirikitani was born on February 4, 1941 in Stockton, California, to a Japanese immigrant couple in the San Joaquin Valley. During World War II, she and her family were interned at the Rohwer War Relocation Center in Arkansas.

She studied English and creative writing, graduated with a Bachelor of Arts from UCLA and worked intermittently as a teacher in Contra Costa County before finding her calling at Glide Memorial Church in Tenderloin in the late 1960s.

Mirikitani went from being an administrative assistant in the church to being a program director, and through her work with the church she began a lifetime of activism and advocacy for marginalized people and communities.

“Janice helped shape so much of the early vision and roots of GLIDE’s impact,” the Church’s statement read. “Your work touched many areas, both in church and on the street in Tenderloin and in San Francisco.”

Mirikitani married the co-founder of Glide, Rev. Cecil Williams, in 1982, and became president of the Glide Foundation that same year. She also continued her work as a writer, poet, and editor, wrote a number of books, and became San Francisco’s second prize-winner in 2000.

Several San Francisco officials issued public statements after news of Mirikitani’s death became known.

“Jan Mirikitani was one of the real lights of our city. She was a visionary, a revolutionary artist and the embodiment of the compassionate spirit of San Francisco, ”read a statement from SF Mayor London Breed. “As a poet, also as Poet Laureate of this City from 2000 to 2002, she used the power of her words to advance the fight for equality and to call for a more just and peaceful world. Through her work at Glide Memorial Church, she and her husband, Reverend Cecil Williams, served our most vulnerable residents for decades and offered everyone a place of refuge and love. “

San Francisco State Senator Scott Wiener posted a memorial service on Twitter with the words: “I am heartbroken that our beloved Janice Mirikitani has passed away. Jan was one of the most extraordinary people I have ever met, he combined strength and love like no other. “

It breaks my heart that our beloved Janice Mirikitani has passed away. Jan was one of the most extraordinary people I have ever met and combined strength and love like no other.

My condolences to the love of their lives Cecil Williams, the entire @GLIDEsf community and all of San Francisco.

– Senator Scott Wiener (@Scott_Wiener) July 29, 2021

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San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin posted a short clip of Mirikitani reading a poem during a recent online summit on hate crimes and the safety of the AAPI community.

It’s heartbroken to hear about the death of Janice Mirikitani, SF Poet Prize Winner, Glide Co-Founder and a visionary, influential person.

She read a poem at our last summit on hate crime and the safety of the AAPI community and moved us all with the power of her words.

Rest in power. pic.twitter.com/YJNRE4tXzv

– Chesa Boudin 博彻思 (@chesabudin) July 29, 2021

SF overseer Matt Haney also posted on Twitter.

We lost a legend today, the First Lady of the Tenderloin, a poet, someone who loved people, all people and had endless compassion, grace and vision. Rest in power, Dr. Janice Mirikitani.

I grieve for the glide community and the countless people whose lives they have touched.

– Matt Haney (@MattHaneySF) July 29, 2021

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A monument to Mirikitani is arranged. No cause of death was disclosed.

The post Glide Church Co-Founder, Poet and San Francisco Activist Janice Mirikitani Dies at Age 80 – CBS San Francisco appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.

Greek Orthodox Metropolis of the Ministry of Music of the Church of San Francisco

Virtual Vitamin Open House

The Ministry of the Church Music Federation of the Greek Orthodox metropolis of San Francisco invites you to visit Virtual Vitamin Open House Saturday, April 10, 2021, 1:00 p.m. PST

Three wonderful and talented guests will bring joy and learning to Lent:

Presvytera Pat Tsagalakis, Holy Apostles, Coast, WA

Hymns from Home – Commitment and Growth in Our Faith

Be inspired by Presvytera Pat’s encouragement and helpful resources to help us grow and learn as we look forward to returning to our lofts and soleas.

Rev. Father James Retelas, Protopresbyter, Annunciation, Sacramento, CA.

The anaphora of Saint Basil the Great

Father James will share with us the profound meaning of this part of the divine liturgy which is at the heart of the great and sacred Lent.

John Michael Boyer, Metropolis Protopsaltis

Musical Lent of Lent: Two moments from Vespers of function on Sundays during Lent

John will help us discover treasures in the rich tapestries of Lent.

Guests of honor!

Young church musicians who want to share their experiences as the youngest recipients of the Frank and Xenia Anton Desby church music scholarships.

This event is FREE but you need to register in advance: https://forms.gle/2VrbViZkQ6xhU65W7

You can log in at 12:40 p.m.
For more information, please contact [email protected].

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The post Homeless-Support Volunteer Says San Jose Church Stabbing Will not Deter Him – CBS San Francisco appeared first on Los Gatos News And Events.