May 10, 2008
Denomination President to Speak at Installation Ceremony
Rev. William G. Sinkford, President of the Unitarian Universalist Association (UUA), will speak in Las Vegas May 10th. Rev. Sinkford will attend the Installation Ceremony of Rev. Gail Collins Ranadive as Minister of the only Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Las Vegas (UUCLV).
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 UUA, a mostly white denomination of more than 250,000 members in over 1,000 congregations.
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 Unitarian Universalist (UU) post.
Although small in number, UUs are an influential denomination, 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.
Unitarian Universalism is also a growing faith, gaining members every year for the last 25 years - notably in the Sun Belt - at a time when membership in many mainline Protestant denominations has stagnated or declined.
UU churches often find themselves among the leading progressive voices; sometimes the only progressive voice. For example, in Augusta, Maine, the UU church draped its façade with the banner “Discrimination Free Zone” during the 1998 and 2000 statewide gay rights referendums. The church’s minister, 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 five years ago, the church joined a protest at the state Capitol.
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.
Upon graduation from Harvard, Sinkford worked in corporate marketing for companies like Gillette, Johnson Products and Revlon. He suffered disappointment when Revlon fired him along with every other African-American in middle management save one. The fired employees filed a class-action suit against Revlon, which was eventually settled. Sinkford quit the corporate world, at that point.
He bought a few brownstones in Brooklyn and started a business as a housing developer, working, he says, to stabilize marginal neighborhoods by encouraging an economic mix.
After moving back to Cincinnati and the sudden death of his mother in an auto accident, he became active as a lay leader in his UU congregation. At an NAACP dinner, the church’s interim minister, Marilyn Sewell who is now the pastor of the First Unitarian Church in Portland, Oregon, asked him if he had ever considered the ministry. “It was as if a light bulb went off in his head,” recalls Sewell.
In 1992, in his mid-40s, Sinkford went off to the UUA’s Starr King School for the Ministry in Berkeley, California. One of his fellow seminarians was Gail Collins-Ranadive, recently called to be the settled minister of UUCLV.
Although he was ordained in 1995, Sinkford never got a chance to try out his preaching skills on a congregation of his own. He went directly to the headquarters at Beacon Street in Boston to become the UUA’s vice president for field services. His background in marketing was a perfect credential for promoting the growth and expansion of Unitarian Universalism.
Six years later, after that week of meditation and prayer, Sinkford decided to run for UUA president. Rev. Sinkford says, “Unitarian Universalism is an open-hearted faith. You can bring all of your hopes and all of your hurts, and you don’t need to check your intellect at the door. Ours is a faith that respects the individual spiritual journey and we welcome spirits who want to share and be supported in their search for truth and meaning.”
He is looking forward to celebrating the installation of Rev. Gail Collins-Ranadive as settled minister of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Las Vegas, “an oasis in a desert.”