David Hodges founded San Francisco’s Church of Ambrosia on the belief that psychedelic mushrooms are a sacrament that can reveal life’s true purpose. Inside America’s largest—and trippiest—megachurch.
By Will Yakowicz, Forbes Staff
When meeting the mushroom priest of San Francisco, one must first pass two armed guards wearing bulletproof vests and then clear a metal detector. “There was a stabbing right outside this door the other week,” says Pastor Dave Hodges, the 42-year-old founder and leader of the Church of Ambrosia, which he describes as a non-denominational religious organization founded on the belief that cannabis and psilocybin mushrooms are sacraments that can be used as spiritual tools.
Founded five years ago in Oakland, Hodges recently opened the church’s second location in San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood. “You see people smoking crack and shooting up, people overdosing,” Hodges says, explaining how his city is rife with crime and other street plagues. “You can see why we’re not the problem.”
Hodges, who is wearing a plaid shirt, black chinos and New Balance sneakers, looks more like an IT specialist than a religious leader who claims to have met God during his own magic mushroom-inspired burning bush moment in 2019.
“The ceremony ended with three bright, shining golden beings, who identified themselves as the oldest of the mushroom gods, sitting down with me and telling me why I went through everything in my life, and what they needed me for and what I'm supposed to do,” says Hodges in that certain California way where it’s hard to tell if he is crazy, enlightened, or a little bit of both. “And [they told me] what I need to do was make sure that people have access to these sacraments and spread the knowledge.”
Like other religious leaders, Hodges has been persecuted by the government—police raided the church’s Oakland location in 2020 and seized $200,000 worth of cannabis, mushrooms and cash, but did not arrest him. Yet unlike most other church founders, his members can obtain cannabis, hallucinogenic mushrooms and another psychedelic called DMT (the active ingredient in ayahuasca)— in exchange for a monetary contribution. In other words, his church possesses enough illegal drugs to put Hodges in prison for many years.
His ministry is also sitting on a small fortune. The Church of Ambrosia is the largest known megachurch in the United States: with 105,000 members, it has more congregants than Oklahoma’s Life Church, which has 85,000 members, and more than double Texas’ Lakewood Church, run by televangelist Joel Osteen. New members pay $10 to join the Church of Ambrosia while existing members give $5 to its coffers to enter if their month-long membership has expired.
Between membership fees and regular contributions for drugs, Hodges’ church rakes in more than $5 million a year, Forbes estimates. He refused to discuss finances, other than saying the money goes back to the church and that it pays $3 million a year in legal fees, rent and security. While walking through the psychedelic mural-painted halls of his location in Oakland, which is called Zide Door, Hodges said he never intended to run a church of this size. “We got way too big way too quick,” he says with a pained look on his face. “It’s crazy.”
The church does not have IRS tax-exempt status, nor is it a registered nonprofit. Yet, Pastor Hodges’ teachings, which he says are divined to him through “ancient ancestors” he meets on the “other side” while tripping, follow basic tenets of self-growth and self-determination. According to Hodges, mushrooms can “connect you with your soul” so you can find out “what you are supposed to be doing” in life.
Let Their Be Enlightening: Hodges believes magic mushrooms provided proto-humans with “instant knowledge” some 2.5 million years ago.
Courtesy: The Church of AmbrosiaIf the Church of Ambrosia sounds like a joke, Hodges admits that it did start out that way. In 2010, like every summer, he went to Burning Man, the week-long arts festival held in the Nevada desert that’s often fueled by psilocybin, LSD, MDMA (or ecstasy) and electronic dance music. Hodges wore an old Halloween costume he dubbed the “Church of More Pot” and walked around in a white shirt holding a black book in his arms. “It was a joke, but people took it very seriously,” he says while tenderly rolling a joint in a rented house in the Oakland Hills that the church uses for high-dose psilocybin ceremonies. “By the end of the week, people had written out the 13 commandments of the religion, the most important being: ‘Thou shall smoke more pot.’”
Then in 2019, Hodges—who had run two medical marijuana collectives in the early 2000s in San Jose before getting shut down by the city due to running afoul of zoning laws and unpaid taxes—decided to make the church official and opened Zide Door in Oakland. At first, he held weekly Sunday sermons at 4:20 p.m.—the magic hour for potheads. He would pass out joints and members would listen to Pastor Dave pontificate about weed and spirituality.
Once the church began to offer mushrooms later that year, Hodges started reading the work of ethnobotanist and mystic Terence McKenna, who came up with the Stoned Ape Theory—which posits that some 100,000 years ago, early humans accidentally ate psilocybin mushrooms and the psychedelics worked as an “evolutionary catalyst” from which language and religion were born.
Hodges remixed the Stoned Ape theory to create what he calls the Doctrine of Religious Evolution, preaching that magic mushrooms provided proto-humans with “instant knowledge” starting 2.5 million years ago. “You get knowledge from the other side to help you exist in this world,” says Hodges.
Later that year, he took his first high-dose mushroom journey and began his conversion into a mushroom God-fearing pastor. During one spiritual moment, when he took 20 grams of mushrooms, a massive dose, Hodges says he was shuttled through heaven and hell and the cosmos outside of the space-time continuum and met God himself.
“I ended up in a place of pure light; I didn't exist, nothing existed, there was but this one consciousness, and that's what I call the consciousness that existed before all else,” Hodges says while smoking a finger-thick joint. “That's also what I call God.”
Some church members say they don’t take the religious part of Hodges’ evangelism seriously. “We are followers,” says the founder of one of California’s biggest cannabis companies, who asked to remain anonymous. “I think it’s a similar pathway cannabis took with medical collectives—it’s a way to give access to something that shouldn’t have been made illegal in the first place.”
But other members seem to be true believers. Dylan, a 35-year-old Bay Area man who has suffered from suicidal ideation, says that Pastor Dave saved his life after joining the church in 2022 and participating in a high-dose ceremony at the Oakland Hills rental the church calls The God Sitter’s House.
“It felt like I was in God’s hands,” says Dylan. “I know people hear that and think I got this from a ‘live, laugh, love’ poster, but He told me that I have a purpose in life, that my suffering matters and has a purpose in itself.”
Healing aside, the major issue for Hodges, of course, is that his sacrament is federally illegal. Members can obtain psilocybin mushrooms at both locations—the church offers about a dozen different strains with names like Loving Teacher, Sun Temple, Baby Blues, and Ghost Penis Envy—by giving monetary contributions (an 1/8 of an ounce of mushrooms cost between $20 to $40 while an ounce runs up to $260) or offering their time as a volunteer.
Sacrament Space: The church keeps its massive stash of cannabis and mushrooms in a safe—but offers them to congregants for a donation.
Will YakowiczHodges does not consider these transactions as sales because a central part of the agreement congregants sign includes language about how members own everything “that is the church,” which includes the sacrament. Hodges says this means—technically—there is no transfer of ownership. Yet, both Zide Door and the SoMa location look less like churches and more like 1990s-era head shops—members come in and meet with staff to peruse a menu, which offers cannabis flower, edibles, dried mushrooms, psilocybin chocolates and DMT vapes made by underground companies with names like Happy and Odyssey. Both places of worship no longer have pews, nor does Hodges hold regular services—except once a year on Easter Sunday. (This year, for instance, the church will hold its fourth annual Spirituality and Beyond conference, featuring some of the brightest minds in the psychedelic world, including UCSF professor Robin Carhart-Harris.) But there are multiple ATMs around the buildings so members can make an offering for their sacraments.
While San Francisco passed an ordinance in 2022 to keep the adult-use of entheogenic plants—like psilocybin—a low priority for law enforcement, it is not legally-binding, and the psychedelic is still illegal in California. Hodges says he would like to receive religious exemption from the Drug Enforcement Administration, as a few churches in the U.S. have successfully done, including the ayahuasca-based União do Vegetal. But he is also aware that trying to obtain that exemption is an “impossible piece of paper.” Either way, Hodges says he’s willing to go to prison defending his faith.
“This is the truest of all religions,” Pastor Hodges says of his magic mushroom church. “This is access to one’s soul.”
Psychedelic research pioneer Rick Doblin, who founded the Multidisciplinary Association of Psychedelic Studies in 1986, says he has great respect for Hodges, whom he believes is “courageously pushing the limits of our legal system” and sees the Church of Ambrosia as a form of “drug policy reform” and a way to “protect people’s freedom of religion.”
Back at The God Sitter’s House, Hodges looks out the window, the city of Oakland spreading out below. When asked what he says to critics who believe his church is just a front and that he’s actually running illegal drug dispensaries, Hodges turns the other cheek.
“They have to do the work and if they go deep enough, they will understand why I do it,” he says. “I don't want to go to federal prison, that's not my goal. And this isn't about money. This is about truly giving people access to their soul. And that's what I know, with every part of what I am, what I need to do.”
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