Journey of Faith ©
By Neil Miller

Rev. William G. Sinkford Photo by Lane Turner

A winding road took William G. Sinkford from atheism through corporate hard knocks and personal anguish to his role as the first African-American president of the Unitarian Church.

When the Rev. William G. Sinkford was a teenager attending a Unitarian Universalist church in Cincinnati, it was doubt, not belief, that defined his religious identity. He considered himself a "stand-up atheist." Cincinnati's First Unitarian Church was a place where personal spiritual quest was welcome, he recalls. "I could bring all my concerns about religion - all my questions - and not be rejected."

That shouldn't be surprising. After all, Unitarian Universalism is a denomination virtually without a dogma or a creed save for a belief in "the inherent worth and dignity of every person" and a "respect for the interdependent web of all existence." UUs, as the adherents commonly call themselves, are supposed to address their prayers "to whom it may concern," or so the old joke goes. In late-1950s Cincinnati UU circles, the questioning young man fit right in.

It might be more surprising that, jut a few months after being elected president of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA) last summer, Sinkford is standing in front of a UU congregation in Leominster, Massachusetts, singing a spiritual called "Precious Lord" and telling the parishioners that "God is the only language that suits" the post-September 11 world. "We have a difficult time dealing with the reality of evil, but evil has pressed itself upon us. It is a spiritual challenge. Our faith is being tested."

Downstairs, in the church social hall after the service, Sinkford offers no apologies for his use of traditional religious language. "God is all I think about these days," he says.

The 55-year-old Newton resident has been engaged in a lifelong spiritual quest. It's a journey that has led him from atheist to believer, taken him out of his adopted home in the Unitarian Universalist church and back again. It has involved his own dark night of the soul.

All of this was far from the minds of the delegates to the UUA's General Assembly in late June in Cleveland when they overwhelmingly elected Sinkford to a four-year term as the first African-American to head a historically white US denomination. Sinkford had promised the liberal religious grouping that he would be a powerful public voice on political and social issues.

Most church members assumed that his public voice would focus primarily on issues like racism, globalization, and gay rights, issues about which UUs are comfortable and more or less of one mind. Certainly not the hard and potentially divisive issues like God and the nature of evil. But when terrorists attacked the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, things got complicated for the new UU leader - and unexpectedly personal.

Sinkford was near to the heart of the crisis right from the beginning. He was at the Rayburn House Office Building in Washington on September 11. The following day he paid a call on the offices of the American Muslim Council, making him the first non-Muslim religious leader to do so. In a statement two days later, he called on UUs to reach out to Muslims and Sikhs.

Since then he has been struggling to come up with a religious response to international events. The UUA isn't exactly a peace church, as Sinkford points out. There is no consensus on policy. But Sinkford knows there are a lot of people in the church opposed to any kind of US military action. He has reservations too.

But as he tries to find his public voice, there is a private voice that calls him. Sinkford's 20-year old son, Billy, is in the US Army, serving at Fort Bragg, North Carolina, in the 82nd Airborne Division, the elite Rangers. He doesn't want Billy to go off to fight, and, at the same time, he wants to be supportive of him. He loves his son for many reasons, not the least of which has been Billy's role in Sinkford's own spiritual journey. All of this makes any pronouncement on the moral and political issues all the more difficult. "I continue to ask questions rather than to provide answers," he says."

It has also turned what should have been an exhilarating time - his precedent-shattering election - into one of pause and contemplation. Suddenly, the introspective Bill Sinkford came to the fore once again.

In the UUA President's commodious office on the third floor of the denomination's Beacon Street headquarters, overlooking Boston Common, Sinkford is gradually settling into his new role. The order of the day is redecoration: One office wall is covered with paint splotches - burnt orange, steel blue, and teal green. Everyone who ventures into the office is polled as to which color he prefers. (Teal eventually wins out.) Sinkford is putting his stamp on the executive suite, but he'll do it in the "democratic" UU manner.

At his initial meetings with various groups - from the antiracism program staff team to the Youth Office representatives - the new president is the gentle facilitator: "Can you say a bit more about that?" or "Has this been a helpful conversation?" When a youth worker asks if she can drop by and visit him in his office, Sinkford nods affirmatively. "But I'll be listening more than preaching at you," he says.

The tall, mustachioed Sinkford is a good listener. By temperament, he's modest, unassuming, with a wry sense of humor. The pinstriped suits he prefers don't call attention to themselves.

He's a searcher: It wasn't until midlife that he switched gears, left the business world, and became a minister. He spent a week in silent retreat before he decided to run for the top UU post.

"He is so much the opposite of someone who tries to make a dramatic splash," says the Rev. John Buehrens, Sinkford's two-term predecessor and his undergraduate roommate at Harvard's Lowell House. "What you remember about him is just his steady, calm presence that helps you through all kinds of things."

That may be precisely the right touch for the president of the 1,050 fiercely independent congregations that make up the Unitarian Universalist Association.

Although small in number, the 220,000 UUs are an influential bunch, ranked number one in education and number two in income, according to denominational rankings in Barry Kosmin and Seymour P. Lachman's One Nation Under God (Harmony Books, 1993).

Unitarian Universalism is also a growing faith, gaining members every year for the last 19 years - notably in the Sun Belt - at a time when membership in many mainline Protestant denominations has stagnated or declined.

The Unitarian Universalist Association was founded in 1961, a merger of two liberal sects that had cut a wide swath across 19th-century America, particularly in New England. Unitarians rejected the notion of the Trinity, causing a split in hundreds of the original Massachusetts Congregational churches and attracting such luminaries as Emerson, Thoreau, and Longfellow.

Universalists preached the gospel that all souls would be saved and, in 1863, became the first denomination to ordain women.

By the beginning of the 20th century, both traditions were moving toward a position that individuals could be religious without a belief in a traditional God.

Until the late 1980s, humanism - which preached the ultimate authority in spiritual matters to be human experience, not the divine - was dominant in many Unitarian churches.

Sinkford's "stand-up atheism" was not so far from the norm in those days, and many UUs were refugees from childhoods spent in more traditional churches and synagogues. (A 1997 denomination study showed that only 10 percent of current members were raised in UU traditions.)

In the past two decades, however, there has been what Sinkford calls "a shift in the center of gravity," with God making a come-back in many congregations. "When Bill Sinkford was a kid, UUs came in three varieties: humanists, theists, and liberal Christians," says Buehrens, who puts himself in the third category. "Bill grew up as a humanist and has moved to more of a theistic position. This has been very common in our movement.

"There is less literalism. There is an understanding that our reference to God is not necessarily to the old guy in the sky with the long beard; there is less kicking over the traces of your Protestant or Catholic childhood. I am encouraged by an increasing spiritual maturity among UUs."

In fact, if anything defines Unitarian Universalist churches as Sinkford takes the helm, it is pluralism. In their spiritual approaches, UU congregations run the gamut from gentle agnosticism to liberal Christianity and from Zen Buddhism to "earth-centered spirituality."

One way of uniting disparate religious positions has been social activism. More than half of UU ministers are women, and the church ordains gays and lesbians and performs same-sex unions.

In various parts of the country, UU churches often find themselves among the leading progressive voices; outside large metropolitan areas, they are sometimes the only progressive voice. For example, in Augusta, Maine - home of the conservative Christian Civic League - the UU church draped its facade with the banner "Discrimination Free Zone" during the 1998 and 2000 state-wide gay rights referendums. The church's minister, the Rev. Calvin Dame, notes that his pews are one of the few places for miles around "where a lesbian couple of 20 years can sit arm in arm." When swastikas were painted on the wall of Maine's northernmost synagogue three years ago, the church joined a protest at the state Capitol.

Despite the UUA's progressive credentials, the denomination's membership remains 91 percent white. Whether Sinkford's election will make a difference in that respect remains to be seen; he insists that he has "no interest in our congregations trying to find a few more dark faces so the white persons sitting in the pews will feel better about themselves."

Nonetheless, Sinkford's elevation is of particular significance in a church that has been struggling with issues of race for many years. "It sends an amazing signal," says the Rev. Rosemary Bray McNatt, an African-American who is the pastor of the Fourth Universalist Society in New York and served as Sinkford's campaign manager during his run for the top post. "What a joy it is to see him up there and to remember the past: the obstructionist presidents and the people [of color] who wanted to be ministers and didn't survive. To know the history and to see Bill up there makes the hair on the back of your neck stand up."

Bill Sinkford remembers that history well. Back in 1970, he left the UU church in anger and frustration. He didn't return until 10 years later. The issue was black empowerment. In 1968, Sinkford says, the UUA pledged to contribute $1 million to promote African-American economic development. But after strong criticism that the decision went against its emphasis on integration, the association changed its mind. The controversy split the movement - including families. Sinkford's mother was a member of the Black and White Action group, an integration-oriented UU caucus that opposed the idea. Her son strongly favored it. When the UUA retreated, Sinkford lit out for the spiritual wilderness.

Sinkford had first become involved in the Unitarian church at 14, when he and his mother moved to Cincinnati after his father's death. Like many UU congregations at the time, Cincinnati's First Unitarian Church was active in the civil rights movement and had many black congregants. "It was a place where it was comfortable to be black and also to be black in the company of whites," says Sinkford.

Sinkford soon became president of the national UU youth movement. At Harvard, from which he graduated in 1968, he considered becoming a UU minister and, along with some friends, was instrumental in converting Buehrens, who had grown up Roman Catholic, to UUism.

But if Buehrens eventually went on to become a Unitarian Universalist minister after graduation, a disillusioned Sinkford took another path. He turned away from all organized religion, spending the next decade working in corporate marketing for companies such as Gillette, Johnson Products, and Revlon. But he suffered more disappointment. Revlon fired him, along with every other African-American in middle management save one. (The fired employees then filed a class-action suit against Revlon, which was eventually settled.) Says Buehrens, "The story of Bill's life in no small part is the story of the blandishments of American business to a bright African-American Harvard graduate."

At that point, Sinkford quit the corporate world. He bought a few brownstones in the Fort Greene section of Brooklyn and started a business as a housing developer, working, he says, to stabilize marginal neighborhoods by encouraging an economic mix.

In the early '80s, Sinkford moved his business to Cincinnati to be closer to his mother. He was married by then, and his first child, Billy, had just been born. Soon after, his mother was killed in an auto accident.

Shortly after the funeral, an old friend showed up on Sinkford's doorstep "with a really bad casserole" and fond remembrances of his mother. She invited him back to the UU church of his youth. He went. "It was one of those absolutely ordinary but extraordinary occurrences that allowed me to reclaim my faith," he says.

He soon became active as a lay leader in the congregation. At an NAACP dinner, the church's interim minister, Marilyn Sewell, now the pastor of the First Unitarian Church in Portland, Oregon, asked him if he had any plans for what he might do next. Sinkford muttered something about perhaps teaching at a community college. Sewell asked him if he had ever considered the ministry.

"It was as if a light bulb went off in his head," recalls Sewell.

A few years later, in 1992, in his mid-40s, Sinkford went off to the UUA's Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, California. There, he cut an impressive figure. Buehrens recalls one of Sinkford's teachers, the esteemed clergyman William Sloane Coffin, asking him, "Have you ever heard of someone named Bill Sinkford? He is probably the best preacher I've ever heard in a student setting."

Although he was ordained in 1995, Sinkford never got a chance to try out his preaching skills on a congregation of his own. Shortly before graduation, he got a call from Buehrens, who had ascended by then to the UU presidency. Would Sinkford consider coming to Boston and becoming the UUA's vice president for field services? The seminarian agreed.

Buehrens felt that a background in marketing was a perfect credential for a person whose job was to promote the growth and expansion of Unitarian Universalism. And so Sinkford found his way to Beacon Street.

Six years later, after that week of meditation and prayer, Sinkford decided to run to succeed Buehrens as UU president. His opponent was the Rev. Diane Miller, head of the UUA's ministerial department. (She is currently interim minister of the Carlisle, Massachusetts, church.) It was a grueling 18-month campaign of speeches at churches, district meetings, and small gatherings.

Sinkford's job at the UUA had involved consulting with hundreds of congregations around the country; those travels offered him a variety of contacts that were helpful in the campaign. But it was his personal qualities, as much as anything, that gave him the edge. "He would win over people," says McNatt. "When he'd get up and talk, that would be it!" In the end, he garnered twice as many votes as Miller for an easy victory.

Rev. William G. Sinkford with daughter Danielle Photo by Nancy Pierce/UUA

A month after his Leominster sermon Bill Sinkford is having an early dinner at a Persian restaurant in Newton with his daughter, Danielle, a senior at Newton North High School. Sinkford and his wife are separated, and since the summer, Danielle has been living with her father.

Despite all of the traveling Sinkford's job entails, Danielle has been getting to see him more frequently than she has for a long time. Danielle is poised, articulate, and seemingly more mature than her 17 years, so it can be a little surprising when she starts talking about college applications or her latest synchronized swimming competition.

"I'm glad he's happy with what he's doing, " she says of her father's new position. She is particularly proud of his stance of "embracing Muslims." Her father returns the compliment.

She is a "natural-born campaigner," he says. At the denomination's General Assembly in June, people referred to Danielle as "the first lady of the UUA."

The shadow of war and terrorism hangs over the evening, however. It is the darkest hour of the Afghan campaign - Northern Alliance soldiers haven't marched into Kabul yet. Sinkford has just returned from a trip to the West Coast, where he preached before a thousand people at his old friend Marilyn Sewell's church in Portland, Oregon; UU churches around the country have been filled to overflowing. He is carrying around a recently released book titled Poems to Live by in Uncertain Times, published by the UUA-owned Beacon Press. "Our first instant book, " he jokes.

Although there is still no consensus among Unitarian Universalists over the US military action overseas, Sinkford seems to be evolving his own position. "We need a better conversation nationally about the war and the bombing," he says. "Nationalism and flag-waving mask the destiny of one world, of a global relationship and getting in the right relationship with it. Everyone should get in confessional mode - not just us but other countries, too. We need to start it. We need to recognize that we've made mistakes."

With the Sinkfords - father and daughter - any conversation about world events can't remain too abstract, however. Sinkford's son, Billy, has just returned to Fort Bragg from California, where he had been training in desert warfare. That's an indication he could be sent to Central Asia or the Middle East. Danielle is frustrated that most other students at Newton North seem oblivious to the international situation; she is the only one with a brother who might go into combat. "I worry about Billy all the time," she says.

Her father worries, too. For him, though, the troubling questions raised by the war and his concerns about his son are buttressed by the faith he spoke about in that Leominster sermon the previous month.

And that faith is deeply connected to Billy, specifically to the night seven years earlier when Billy -
barely 13 at the time - overdosed on drugs, and his father stayed at his bedside until the dawn broke. On that occasion, Sinkford's own life was transformed.

He had been at a luncheon meeting when a co-worker informed him of the news, and Sinkford rushed to a Boston hospital. His wife and daughter were there, too. Like many parents in that kind of situation, he was going over in his mind, "If only I had ..."

It wasn't clear if Billy would live. But soon fear and self-blame evolved into something far more profound. Sinkford had what he calls "an experience of the holy"; he felt the presence of God. "I don't consider myself a Christian," he says, as he recalls that night. "I have no systematic theology. But I believe there is a spirit of life, a presence. That night, I had the experience of being held by God. I had the sense that we don't have to walk this path alone, that there is a love that has never broken faith with us."

It's a story that Sinkford has told before, even preached about in sermons - a crucial moment in what he refers to as his "path of spiritual development, change, and seeking." Since then, he says, his spiritual life has shifted. "I am spending more time being thankful, being grateful," he says. "My personal pattern had been to worry about what I was entitled to, rather than what I had been given."

Now, as the war on terrorism threatens to spread, Billy's role as citizen and soldier is giving his father another opportunity to deepen his faith, to grapple with God and evil, to confront the hard questions. As Sinkford noted in his Leominster sermon, "The task of the Unitarian side of our faith is to find our own relationship to the divine, to God. The task of our Universalist side is to view that God as a loving God."

And so, on a bitter evening, in an uneasy time, the new UU president goes home, arm in arm with his daughter, Danielle, to resume his own private dialogue with God.

© Neil Miller, 2002

About the Author
Neil Miller teaches journalism at Tufts University. His book Sex-Crime Panic: A Journey to the Paranoic Heart of the 1950's is a work of investigative journalism that tells the story of an anti-gay witch-hunt in Iowa during the 1950s when 20 gay men were incarcerated in a state mental institution.(Alsyon Books) It was published earlier this year and can be purchased on the web at Amazon.com. He has also written Out of the Past : Gay and Lesbian History from 1869 to the Present, a groundbreaking overview of gay and lesbian history over the past 130 years.

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