The Rev. Donald Cameron says “the people coming into our churches now are looking for religion.”

The Providence Journal / Frieda Squires

PROVIDENCE — The Rev. Donald Cameron, the man who is about to be installed Sunday as the 16th minister of the historic First Unitarian Church, admits that when it comes to believing in God, “I’m more of a sloppy mystic.”

“Do I have faith in God? Some days, yes. Sometimes, no. To me, God is the great mystery. And I see us as very very small and very little. The concept of God is, I think, a wonderful concept that keeps us in perspective….When people start putting God in a box or start telling me who God is, I get nervous because I don’t think we know.”

Mr. Cameron, whose installation at the church’s elegant 190-year-old Meeting House at Benefit and Benevolent streets is set for Sunday at 5 p.m., assumes the helm of a congregation with a rich history dating to when a group met in 1720 to form a new following “the congregational way.”

By the early 1800s, the congregation affiliated itself with the Unitarian movement, although it was not until 1953 that it officially adopted the name.

Mr. Cameron, whose own early experiences with church included being an acolyte in an Episcopal church in his native North Carolina, says that a generation or two ago you might have thought Unitarians were a rebellious lot.

Many of them were so upset with the religion of their childhood that they rejoiced at finding a church so nonjudgmental that many ministers were hesitant about even using the word God.

It was the time of the struggles over Vietnam and civil rights and religious doubt. “Many of the people who joined were into what, in my mind, was a theology of negation. They could tell you what they didn’t believe in, but had a hard time telling you what they did believe.”

Not so today, says the 52-year-old Cameron, whose own youthful experience included living through three years of racial fights and riots at his hometown high school, Hoggard High, in Wilmington, N.C.

“The people coming into our churches now are looking for religion. They are looking for a church that can provide them with classes or small-group experiences where they can grow spiritually. When they come to church, they expect to find a Sunday school for themselves, and a haven from the wild culture out there where they can experience spiritual growth for themselves.”

It would be no exaggeration to say that Mr. Cameron’s years growing up in the South were turbulent. His father, a podiatrist from Rochester, N.Y., was not quite “savvy” enough to know that when he opened an office in Wilmington, N.C., he was supposed to have separate waiting rooms for blacks and whites.

“We got a cross burned in our yard. That freaked him out.”

But nothing could compare with those days at Hoggard High, which became a central battleground in the conflict over integration in Wilmington.

“None of our classes went past noon because there were huge rumbles and fights every day, 2,000 people going at it with guns, knives and chains. The school was divided between black and white and it was very violent. My best friend [who was black and] had been elected student-body president, was stabbed and died in my arms in the bathroom.”

He credits an Episcopal priest, the Rev. Web Simons, for being there for him and becoming one of the reasons he’s a minister today.

“He helped me through a not-so-easy adolescence. And even when I went through stages of rejecting theology and the Christian thing, he didn’t get fazed all. I thought that was cool.”

But Mr. Cameron thought it wrong to become a priest if he didn’t believe, so he put thoughts of ministry on hold. Only after his graduation from Duke University — where he studied comparative religion and took part in a semester-long trek to northern India to study Muslims — that a girl he knew dragged him to a fellowship meeting of Unitarian-Universalists.

It was there, he said, that he realized that he could be a minister in “good conscience” because there was nothing that seemed to conflict with what he believed. “My problem was solved.”

Mr. Cameron arrived here two months ago after 14 years at Davies Memorial Unitarian Universalist Church in Camp Springs, Md., where he gained fame for helping to transform that church from one that was nearly all white to one that is now 40 percent black.

He says the turning point came about six or seven years ago when he ran into John T. Crestwell, a black Unitarian who was going to Wesley seminary in Washington and was looking for a church to belong to.

The two looked at other efforts at integration by the denomination to study why those efforts failed, and quickly figured out that if they were to succeed in transforming Davies Memorial, the congregation had to be serious about wanting to integrate; that white folks in the congregation had to be helped to understand that some things they take for granted are not the same for those who are black.

“For example, if I go into a store and start hanging around the shelves, people think I’m just spacing out or something. If a person of color does that, people think he’s looking to steal.”

The other key part of a successful integration is to have a person of color in a position of power. By agreement, the two ministers became co-pastors.

Mr. Cameron says it’s too early to say whether First Unitarian, which has become a spiritual home to a number of faculty and students from Brown University and elsewhere, as well as young families with children, will also transform itself into a more integrated church.

He adds that on first impression, Providence seems to be an extremely diverse city but also “a much more segregated society” than other places he’s been.

“It amazes me, where I live on Smith Street, one side of the street is retired white people and the other is black and Hispanic. There is an amazing juxtaposition of rich and poor, but the lines are very clear. My street is mostly working-class people, very Catholic. Then the next street over, it’s doctors and lawyers and such.”

Mr. Cameron says he believes he got the job as minister because the search committee was looking for someone who can get things done, and help the church double in size to a goal of 1,000 members.

Two weeks after Mr. Cameron arrived, the church was thrust into the spotlight by reports it was hosting the state’s first Pagan Pride Day. While the move was seen by the church’s critics as a sign of how the Unitarians had strayed from biblical religion, Mr. Cameron said he was more upset with suggestions that members of the church themselves thought the church should not be hosting such an event.

Mr. Cameron says he doesn’t want people to get the impression that Unitarians aren’t open to other beliefs. On the contrary, he says, “We are the church of all souls. We’re an inclusive religion. We want you to be your own theologians, and to be the final authority of what you believe. I have sometimes told people in sermons, ‘If you believe in everything I say, you are in the wrong church.’ We celebrate diversity and want to model that diversity without divisiveness.”

For more information about Sunday’s installation service, call Posey Kooris at the church office, (401) 421-7970.