Noble Lecture Features Storytelling Team Behind ‘When We All Get to Heaven’ Podcast
The Rev. Jim Mitulski (second left), former pastor at the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco, speaks with the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts (far left) and podcast creators Siri Colom, Lynne Gerber, and Ariana Nedelman, at the Noble Lecture on April 16. Photo by Jeffrey Blackwell.
By Jeffrey Blackwell
Memorial Church Communications
In the 1980s, the Metropolitan Community Church of San Francisco was one of the few gay-affirming churches in the United States and became a focal point for the social and humanitarian horrors of the AIDS epidemic in the Bay Area and across the country.
A new 10-episode podcast series, “When We All Get to Heaven,” explores the extraordinary hardships and challenges—personal, congregational, and community-wide—that the church faced in the early years of the crisis, including the deaths of hundreds of its members.
The creators of the Peabody Award-winning podcast were the focus of this year’s William Belden Noble Lecture at the Memorial Church on April 16. Creators Lynne Gerber, Ariana Nedelman, and Siri Colom were joined by former MCC Pastor the Rev. Jim Mitulski for an evening discussion moderated by the Rev. Matthew Ichihashi Potts, Plummer Professor of Christian Morals in the Faculty of Divinity and Pusey Minister in the Memorial Church.
“I listened to this podcast late last year, and I was deeply moved by the story and the way it is told. It gives us not only a history of a prophetic church doing its work at a crucial time, but it also gives us a model of what it can mean for any church to be a church in a time of acute crisis,” said Potts. “These are lessons all of us need these days.”
Drawing on an archive of more than 1,200 cassette tapes—hidden beneath the church floorboards to save them from the trash and from being lost to history—the podcast offers a deep and vivid exploration of life within the MCC Church during the AIDS crisis, illuminating the lives of its clergy, members, and their wide, dynamic circle of friends and family.
The tapes were a recorded archive of nearly all services between 1987 and 2003, including powerful and personal sermons from the church clergy and visiting preachers, emotional memorial services for members who died, all accompanied by inspirational music, and words of humor, sorrow, hope, and empowerment.
Lynn Gerber is a scholar of American religion and a former Women’s Studies in Religion Visiting Scholar at the Harvard Divinity School, who lives in San Francisco. She was first introduced to the existence of the tapes in 2011, but it was not until 2015 that she, Nedelman, and Colom began listening to and cataloging the tapes.
They initially planned to write an academic book about a church in crisis, using the tapes as their primary source. However, Gerber said they soon realized the project demanded a different approach: a storytelling platform that could showcase the real voices of church members and clergy, captured in real time. The recordings conveyed the emotions, color, music, and sounds of MCC at a pivotal moment in its history.
The archive was narrowed to 325 tapes, representing holiday and memorial services, special programs featuring prominent guest speakers, and other significant events. Each tape was digitized and cataloged to enable efficient retrieval.
“It was just a ton of listening—listening, listening, listening—and making clips with no idea whether those clips would ever be used in a story,” Gerber said. “I listened for the sound, the speech, the words, and the music. I did one full pass just listening and picking out moments that were surprising, moving, meaningful, or striking in one way or another. Sometimes that was sermons, but a lot of the time it was announcements or somebody’s mother.”
The series also draws on interviews with church members and clergy, the families of deceased congregants, and other community members. Episode 5, “Healing Without a Cure,” focuses on the Rev. Ron Russell Coons, a prominent religious leader living with AIDS, who became a leading voice on the disease within more mainstream church communities.
Coons’ story is complex and deeply human. This episode explores, through his sermons at MCC and interviews with his brother, how he encountered God in new ways and grappled with a religiously conservative family as well as political and theological struggles before he died in 1990 at age 41.
From the pulpit, he preached about his experience with AIDS and even read letters he had written to his estranged sister. In the episode, Gerber explains that Ron understood a great deal about the complex relationship between religion and reality—the reality of being gay and living with AIDS—which ravaged his body and strained his relationship with his faith, his church, and his family.
“There have been times when I wanted to see my faith as wishing on a star,” Coons told the MCC congregation in 1989. “If I wish hard enough, it might happen. And I wish upon a star that my friends were not suffering with AIDS. And I wish upon a star that there was no such thing as HIV. I wish, and I wish, and maybe by wishing it will make it so. The reality is that we have AIDS.”
Scenes like these were commonplace in 1985, at the height of the AIDS crisis, when the Rev. Jim Mitulski began his 15-year tenure as pastor at MCC. During this time, he offered pastoral care and bereavement support, officiated thousands of funerals, and led several weekly services. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1995.
Mitulski, a former Merrill Fellow at Harvard Divinity School, collaborated with Gerber, Nedelman, and Colom for a decade on developing the podcast. He describes his experience at MCC as “life-defining.”
“For all of us who were there then, it was life-defining, sometimes life-warping, but more typically life-defining,” said Mitulski. “It was trauma mostly, and it was meaning, very high meaning. We were changing the world. We were making a difference in people's lives. It was tangible. It was visible. And the spiritual life also reflected that.”
The series brings new light to an AIDS crisis that many have forgotten, offering a detailed look into the lives of a community in turmoil as they rally together to care for one another and demand to be heard by an outside world that does not want to listen.
“Let me just say this because we could never have told that story. We were too busy living it,” said Mitulski. “And because of Lynne’s scholarship and her skill at editing, she has made a comprehensible chronicle of a time that would otherwise have been lost. These are grassroots people dealing with really critical issues. And I think that if people listen to it with an ear toward that, they can still find inspiration in it in the present.”
The story of the Metropolitan Community Church is gaining attention amid the current political and existential threats facing the nation—threats that reverberate in churches, temples, mosques, and other religious communities. The series recently won a Peabody Award and was recently awarded a Wilbur Award by the Religion Communicators Council.
Garber said there are lessons in Mitulski’s ability to step into tense moments and guide the congregation through his preaching, as well as in the congregation’s capacity to build community and inspire action.
“One of the things that matters a great deal to me is that we are living through a time not entirely unlike what MCC faced in that earlier period—an era of grave, existential threats and serious political dangers,” she said. “But I think part of what we need to do to get through this is to gather, speak the truth, stay rooted in that truth, imagine better possibilities together, and take action to make those possibilities feel genuinely real.”