A Love Supreme as Liturgy

Worship at the Saint John Coltrane African Orthodox Church centers distinctively on John Coltrane's music, and above all on his 1965 album A Love Supreme, which the congregation treats as something closer to a sacred text or a sung psalm than as ordinary devotional background music, with musicians from the church performing the piece and related Coltrane recordings as a formal part of the liturgy itself rather than as an accompaniment to it. The congregation holds that Coltrane's own well-documented spiritual searching, and the explicitly devotional language he used about his own music, particularly around the composition of A Love Supreme, justify treating his recorded work as a genuine vehicle of praise and worship rather than simply borrowing a respected jazz musician's reputation for a separate religious purpose.

Alongside its distinctive musical liturgy, the church has maintained an active community service tradition, including a free hot meals program that served San Francisco's Fillmore and Western Addition neighborhoods for decades, along with free clothing distribution and music instruction, ministries the congregation describes as flowing directly from the same spiritual commitment expressed in its worship, even as rising San Francisco rents forced the free meals program to end after the church lost its long-time storefront location on Divisadero Street around 2000.