Religion: Far-Out Mission

The phonograph played Beat Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem, Crucifixion, and a lithe girl danced an “interpretation” to the cool-cat words: “He was a kind of carpenter from a square-type place like Galilee . . . who said the cat who really laid it on us all was his Dad …” Another amateur actor played the role of Christ crucified: “I was framed . . . Maybe that lawyer Judas can swing it. Otherwise I’ve had it … The Roman fuzz bugged me all night. They didn’t like my sandals and beard.”

This kind of material, which jolted televiewers last week on San Francisco’s

Station KPIX, was not put on by the patients of a mental hospital or members of the Society to Stamp Out Christianity. It was a religious show, staged by a Congregationalist mission that is run by an ordained minister. The experiment is so far out that many a Congregationalist would question whether the Bread and Wine Mission of San Francisco’s North Beach district is in the church at all. But the Rev. Pierre Delattre has no doubt whatever about it.

Christian Coffee House. Blond, blue-eyed Pierre Delattre, 28, was graduated from the University of Pennsylvania (English major) and from the University of Chicago Divinity School. Four years ago he moved to Sausalito, just across the Golden Gate from San Francisco, where he wrote a novel (one of three, all unpublished), worked as a switchman on the Southern Pacific Railroad, and preached at a weekend church in Stinson Beach. After he was ordained a minister in the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A. (Northern), Delattre moved to Berkeley, where he helped develop a program on religion and contemporary culture at the University of California and formed some definite ideas about his ministry. “I began to ask why it was that the most exciting people in student life and the most dynamic I met elsewhere wouldn’t come near the church. Somehow they felt that the church smothered them and judged them too quickly. There are two aspects of the ministry—the ministry of proclamation and of response. The ministry of response is listening, knowing a person, receiving his gift.”

Presbyterian Delattre found “tremendous vitality” in certain San Francisco coffee houses and taverns, where “the conversations were creative and there was a kind of acceptance that made freedom possible,” and began to wonder if the church should not set up some taverns and coffee houses of its own. Then he heard that the Rev. Robert W. Spike, a general secretary of the Congregational Board of Home Missions, was interested in organizing the same kind of experiment. Delattre promptly applied for the job, landed it, and became a Congregationalist. “I’m not denominationally inclined,” he explains. “I don’t think of myself as a Protestant, but as a Christian in the primitive sense.”

“I’m Here.” With a green light from the Congregationalists, Delattre poked around North Beach—an Italian neighborhood with a heavy lacing of art galleries, sandal shoppes and beatnickery—and found a 30-by-40-ft. store at Greenwich Street and Grant Avenue. He moved his wife and two children into a flat upstairs, furnished the store with a hi-fi set, a coffee urn and 2,000 books of his own, and opened up a year ago.

He gave the place no name, merely put a sign on the door announcing the hours bread and wine would be served. Eventually it came to be called the Bread and Wine Mission—known informally as “The Mission” to the swingers, wailers and generally far-out, cats who began filling the place almost immediately.

Delattre holds weekly seminars in poetry and prose, stages original plays, has a psychiatrist from the San Francisco Veterans’ Administration give group therapy sessions. On Sundays Delattre invites a select half-dozen to his flat for an agape* of bread, wine and cheese.

In old trousers and a hooded sweatshirt with a large cross hanging from his neck, Pastor Delattre is a busy man—serving his bread and wine, bailing his flock out of jail, counseling pregnant girls, speaking to church groups, being pointed out to tourists (the mission is a regular stop for sightseeing buses). He never brings up the subject of religion. “If they ask, I reply. And, believe me, many people preach to me, and I’ve been transformed. Church people often ask me: ‘Have things been successful? How many have become Christians? Is this worth the investment?’ When I first came here, I was anxious to see practical results. Now I’ve learned that one must act according to one’s conviction in relation to others, and then let them go without standing around to see what the effect has been. If someone says, ‘What are you doing here?’ I would just say, ‘I’m here.’ ”

* The “love feast” or community religious meal, pra’cticed by the early Christians.