Honorary Pride Grand Marshal
Dr. Don Sinclair
A
small-town East Texas Methodist minister builds one of
the leading AIDS-care ministries in the country
By
Ann Walton Sieber
 Bering’s
pastor from 1986 to 1996, Don Sinclair and his wife,
Kathy. “I went from being called a nigger lover
in the ’70s to a gay lover in the ’80s."
When
Dr. Don Sinclair came to Bering United Memorial Church
as their new pastor in June 1986, the house of worship
was in trouble.
One Saturday deep in August, the lay officials from
the troubled congregation gathered in Fellowship Hall.
They were $70,000 in the hole, and had been for quite
some time. The former church of mayors and many of Houston’s
founding German families, Bering had undertaken a new
ministry in the 1970s under the leadership of the Rev.
Ron Pogue, reaching out to the gay, hippy Montrose neighborhood
in which it was located. However, the ’80s were
a difficult time for Houston, and what money there was
was fleeing to the suburbs; Bering was so deep in debt
that for two years its members had been seriously studying
whether they should disband.
On that August Sunday, Sinclair remembers, one prominent
member of the community spoke up, a lesbian woman: “We
want to do things in the community, but when we spend
our money on outreach, the AC goes out.” With a
sense of timing that could only be chalked up to the
almighty, the AC in the Hall conked out at that exact
moment.
A crisis time indeed for the most progressive and inclusive
Methodist church in Houston. And there stood Bering’s
new pastor, Dr. Don Sinclair, a self-defined “dumb
cluck” about gay issues, whose East Texas boyhood
left him so ignorant about homosexuality that he had
once had to ask a fellow Air Force colleague to explain
what the word “faggot” meant. But that hot
August gathering had all the trappings of a moment of
truth; and while Sinclair may not have known much about
gays, he knew about moments of truth.
“I
asked what I knew was the key penetrating question,”
Sinclair said. He faced his new congregation as the
room started to get uncomfortable in the August heat.
“Does
the Lord of history need a congregation sitting on this
street corner?”
Bering’s diverse congregation—part prominent
gays and lesbians, part older “grandmother types,”
part a little bit of everybody—looked back at this
downhome man with the homely manner and the doctorate
in theology. And with the unanimity of a choral group,
the congregation answered: “Yes.”
“Next,”
their minister asked them, “the question is: Why?”
Again, like a choral group, they spoke with one voice:
“AIDS.”
Here, again, Sinclair knew what to do. In his pre-Bering
life, Sinclair had studied the black ghettos in order
to learn how to rebuild community. “I learned that
if you want something different done,” he says,
“you find you an inner city church with about 200
people—and one, preferably, that’s broke.”
He told his new fellowship: “I can lead you in
building a plan to do what you care about doing about
AIDS. I know nothing about it, but I do know how to
get something done. It must be practical, and you must
be dedicated to doing it.”
And dedicated the Bering congregation certainly proved
themselves to be. They put together what Dr. Sinclair
describes as “the most magnanimous plan” for
serving the unmet need of those with AIDS. Along with
the help of the City of Houston, they formed the Bering
Community Service Foundation. They started with a spiritual
support group (“we didn’t want to use the
word religious,” Sinclair says. “I said if
any of the members of this church tries to make any
of these patients Christian or Methodist, you’re
in trouble with the minister”); then a free counseling
center; and then a dental clinic, because AIDS patients
were being refused treatment by dentists all over Houston.
They were helped by “angels” as various as
Carolyn Farb, the Alley Theatre, Red Scare foe John
Henry Faulk, and a female ambulance driver from Alief
who appeared from out of the blue to comfort and take
to Ben Taub a badly dehydrated AIDS patient in Pasadena
who other ambulance drivers had refused to pick up.
Now, 14 years later, the clinic is one of the top facilities
in the country for low-income AIDS care, and has been
used as a model from China to Israel. Last year, it
joined with Episcopalian-supported Omega House to become
Bering Omega Community Services, and served more than
2,800 clients. With a staff of about 50, and more than
400 volunteers, Bering Omega has an operating budget
over $3 million.
And as for the bankrupt church? “If you do something
significant, your church will prosper,” Sinclair
says, which is borne out by the fact that Bering just
completed a $2.5 million facelift. Although Sinclair
retired four years ago this June, and moved with his
wife, Kathy, 75 miles north to Cold Spring, his impact
is by no means forgotten: he was selected by the community
he served to be this year’s honorary Grand Marshal
in the Pride Parade.
At first and even fifteenth
glance, Don Sinclair may have seemed an odd man for
the job of rescuing Bering.
Sinclair came from the small East Texas town of Minden,
raised in a church that only claimed 21 members. His
mother was so provincial that she was terrified when
he married a “big city girl” from Houston.
Set on becoming a Methodist minister from his teenage
years, Sinclair followed a predictable route: served
in the Air Force; attended various theological institutions;
worked for the Methodist Annual Conference staff in
the early ’60s; pastored so many different churches
before coming to Bering, he’s lost track of the
number.
But although Sinclair came from straight arrow stock,
he learned early on to think for himself.
“I’ve
always found strength in the willingness of things to
be what they are. I just don’t understand people
who don’t lust for true things,” Dr. Sinclair
says, with the kind of quiet steadfastness with which
one states a core belief.
When Don was a boy, he asked his mother about Adam and
Eve. “‘Oh yes, that’s true,’ she
said. ‘That’s why men have one less rib.’”
Sinclair looks at me mildly. “I accepted that without
any question whatsoever, my mother had told me.”
A few years later in school, his class was discussing
a body that had been found by local officials in a shallow
grave; the sheriff had not yet been able to determine
if it had been a man or a woman. “Why don’t
you just count the ribs?” the young Don asked.
“I
became the joke of the year,” remembers Sinclair,
without laughing very much. “It wasn’t that
I cared about being the joke of the year. What really
bothered me was that my mother had taught me that as
the gospel truth ... and she was dead wrong.
“After
that, I knew I was on my own with every subject,”
he concluded. “I have been deathly afraid of things
that aren’t true my whole life.”
Sinclair brought this “lust for true things”
to his consideration of homosexuality. “I had already
learned that the Bible didn’t have enough to say
about this to build a case,” he says.
“...Through
the years when homosexuality was mentioned, the fangs
come out. It made people instantly fearful, made them
hate other people. And so I asked, What is it? I couldn’t
understand what could generate that kind of hate.”
When Sinclair came to Bering, he did have cause to think
about gay issues once before. In 1979, his youngest
son, Stanley, only age 19, was stabbed in the heart
by two men who the police think were hired killers.
The assailants were never caught, nor did police determine
a motive. In the aftermath of the murder, somebody came
to Sinclair and asked gently, “Did you know your
son was gay?”
Confused and grief-stricken, Sinclair didn’t find
any support within the Methodist church in his questioning
about homosexuality. “There was nobody to go to,”
he says. “You certainly didn’t run to your
bishop.”
During his tenure at Bering, Sinclair not only oversaw
the development of the Bering Community Service Foundation,
he also became a visible advocate to the wider Methodist
orthodoxy for inclusion and respect for gays. In 1972,
the delegates to the Methodists’ nationwide body,
the General Assembly, which meets once every four years,
had approved a resolution that homosexual practice is
“incompatible with Christian teaching.” At
the local meeting of the Methodist body, Sinclair advocated
strenuously for the repeal of the homophobic resolution.
“I
would get up and say, ‘What you are doing is not
just immoral, it’s evil.’ I kept at it, much
to the chagrin of the General Conference.”
In 1990, Bering, under Sinclair’s leadership, became
the first “reconciling congregation” in Texas,
a movement within the Methodists of churches that openly
proclaim their full inclusion of lesbians and gays.
Unfortunately, Sinclair’s capacity to think for
himself was not in widespread supply (“ministers
are as dumb as posts,” he says), because the antigay
resolution was upheld yet again in the General Assembly
just this past mid-May.
When Sinclair was appointed to Bering, which clearly
was going to be a tough assignment, he asked his district
superintendent: Why me?
He says they told him it was because, “You have always
been clear that the task of the church lies in the community
where it sits. And ... you are a very hard man to discourage.”
“I
took that as a compliment,” he says, smiling ruefully.
Houston’s gay community can count ourselves lucky
that Dr. Don Sinclair brought his stubbornness to our
cause—and that he’s not a man to accept the
gospel version of how many ribs he has without counting
them himself.
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