BOOK REVIEW : Poor Writing Mars an Important Book : NO HIDING PLACE: Empowerment and Recovery for Our Troubled Communities <i> by Cecil Williams with Rebecca Laird</i> ; HarperSanFrancisco; $18; 228 pages

Here’s a religious man’s book that could bear the subtitle, “When Bad Writing Happens to Good People.” For 30 years, Cecil Williams has been pastor of Glide Memorial Church in San Francisco’s Tenderloin, a district invariably described as “raunchy.”

The church, on the edge of the block with the highest crime rate in the city, feeds thousands of people a day and provides support groups for people who want to get off crack. But these valuable achievements do not mean that Cecil Williams must, or can, write a book.

Glide is officially a Methodist church, but Williams took down the cross, which seemed like a symbol of death to him, and hoisted bright banners. One of his famous supporters, poet Maya Angelou, says, “I haven’t seen a church like this. I haven’t seen a church that is really racially mixed and where the white folks can sing.”

The publicity that came with “No Hiding Place” promised “a blueprint for recovery for America’s troubled inner cities.” The title, which comes from the spiritual that begins, “There’s no hidin’ place down here,” makes the prospective reader think the book will be about the Los Angeles riots, during which time the concept of “no hiding place” was on a lot of minds. Instead Williams’ book is about Glide’s programs for recovery from addiction. Into the Glide narrative, Williams weaves the stories of a dozen or so people who have been through his programs.

“To get clean,” Williams writes about the addicts who came to him, ‘they needed one-to-one counseling, support groups, social service advocacy, drug education, self-esteem workshops and a clean and sober place to belong during the day.”

Phrases like self-esteem workshops and social service advocacy give the reader pause. Support, esteem, advocacy: These are undeniably good things, but leaning on the jargon of compassion is not good writing. Williams may be a compassionate person, but he is not, from the evidence here, someone who can make a reader feel sorrow for the suffering of others.

“Writing this book has been a communal act of mutuality,” he says at the beginning. That’s a closed circle of a sentence, and the writing that follows is not likely to pull a reader in. The word empowerment in the subtitle is a clue to what follows. Empowerment is on practically every page. What the word describes is an interesting and complex process, but the word itself is bureaucratic; it drags down every sentence in its vicinity.

The same goes for dealing with recovery issues and asserting one’s personhood and committing to dealing with the pain and affirming others dealing with the pain while avoiding becoming a co-dependent. No one is going to read these phrases a hundred years from now and say, “I know exactly how those people felt.”

Williams has some interesting ideas fighting to get out. One is that the Alcoholics Anonymous’ famous 12-step program won’t work for African-Americans. Their identity, he explains, comes from an extended family, they don’t want to be anonymous and they don’t need to be reminded that they’re powerless. And he obviously does a good sermon. Some are printed here, including a treatise on Magic Johnson, with an elegant play on the word assist.

Williams grew up in San Angelo, Tex., in the 1930s and ‘40s. The childhood abuse from which he is trying to recover is historic as well as personal--the humiliation of segregation. Williams, at 10, had what a doctor called a nervous breakdown after his grandfather’s death. He describes the breakdown as being characterized by visitations by “aliens,” a vision not everyone will be able to get behind.

Williams works to be honest about his own celebrity and the allure of having stars come to Glide. He does not fail to give a long list of stars, including Shirley MacLaine, Leonard Bernstein and Bill Cosby. “Along the way the fame got to me,” he admits. “I completely lost my priorities.”

One of the voices in the book is Williams’ wife, Japanese-American poet Janice Mirikitani, “one of the most empowered persons at Glide.” As a child during World War II, she was interned with her family in a camp in Arkansas; later, after moving to California, she was sexually abused by male relatives. “There was a tremendous amount of denial,” she writes, in a sentence that flattens out her poignant material.

After college she started an Asian-American literary magazine, where, she says, “we supported one another on the journey of self-definition, empowerment and liberation.” On the same page, “I could see my life more clearly as a journey toward empowerment.”

When the recovering crack addicts have their turn to speak, the reader comes into some rough language and finally some writing with verve. One congregation member says, “When I came here, I was shot to the curb,” using the telling phrase means you’ve lost everything to crack.

Another recovery program graduate writes, “The other day someone on the street said to me, ‘I got a gun.’ The first thing I thought of was, ‘Let’s go rob someone and get some rock.’ But then I thought of my friends at Glide. I want to change my attitude. I want to be able to hear people say they have some money without trying to figure out how I can get it from them.’ That gets your attention.

So does the testimony of Jamal, a long-time dealer who writes, “When you get the type of power that comes with drugs and big money, you don’t care about the white man anymore. You don’t care because you can buy him. Or you can get his sons and daughters on the stuff.”

Janean, a former crack addict who has been beaten up by men all her life, writes with brightness and irony. She describes an incident at Glide around the time of the Anita Hill/Clarence Thomas hearings:

“I was walking up the stairs and this guy acted like he’d never seen a woman climb stairs before. He described my every move.

“When I got to the top of the stairs, I turned around and said, ‘I understand your sexual affirmation of me, but today I would also like to be affirmed for my keen thinking and mental attributes.” This woman has learned the force of language; that’s empowerment.