Against The Cultural Tide -- Sanford Hampton: Episcopal Bishop In Olympia Takes Ministry To Those Shunned By Society

LIFE'S EXPERIENCES have taught Sanford Hampton much about what it means to be in the minority. As the new assistant bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia, he looks forward to reaching out to the homeless, minorities and people with AIDS.

Tall and gregarious Sanford Zangwill Kaye Hampton wanted to be an actor. Instead, he is assistant bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Olympia, which oversees the denomination's flock in Western Washington.

Hampton, 61, who started the job in October after holding a similar job in Minnesota, says he loves baseball, theater and politics - but, mostly, he loves people. One of his responsibilities is to visit a different church each Sunday, and friends say his wife sometimes has to drag him away from the visits.

Hampton says he is excited that a major part of his responsibility will have him swimming against the cultural tide as he ministers to groups many people have grown tired of - the homeless, minorities, people with AIDS.

Sprinkled throughout his life are experiences that make inclusiveness a priority for him.

Hampton grew up in Long Island, N.Y. His father was Jewish and his mother Episcopalian. His father owned a company that manufactured women's undergarments. To be more successful in business, live where he wanted and get into clubs to make contacts, his father changed his name from Kaye to McKay. Hampton came from his stepfather.

Hampton also remembers that kids in school would call Jews names, not knowing his father was Jewish. People were always calling other people names.

"I'd hear it in the family, too, and I'd wonder, `Why isn't this bothering them as much as it's bothering me?' "

As a seventh-grader on a family trip to Florida, Hampton was standing in line to see a movie. The man ahead of him was black, and when the man realized a white boy was behind him, he said excuse me and stepped back to allow Hampton to go ahead.

Hampton says it made him uncomfortable and it made him think.

Years later, he became the priest at a church in a Maryland suburb of Washington, D.C. He asked a black priest to assist him. The other priest said it was the South, and that he couldn't do that, but Hampton persisted.

Some in the congregation stopped giving money, some left. The two priests would stand by the door shaking hands after services. Hampton says it was obvious that many people avoided the black priest.

Experiences teach him about exclusion

Hampton says that serving churches in Utah for 10 years already had taught him firsthand how subtle exclusion can hurt. He says being in a minority religion in mostly Mormon Utah, and raising his children there taught him something of what racial minorities must feel.

He says he continues to learn about those feelings, too, through his family. He has a sister-in-law who is black, and two of his three grandchildren are Native American.

Hampton and his wife, Mari, who celebrated their 43rd anniversary last month, raised four children. Their oldest son is a director in Hollywood, whose current project is the television series "Silk Stalkings." Another works for Sears in Denver, and the third lives in the desert near Moab, Utah, where he collects and sells rocks and dinosaur bones. Their daughter lives in Minnesota.

Hampton didn't see much of his own parents because they sent him to prep school beginning with the second grade. "My parents loved me, but I never saw them," he said.

He made family of the people at the schools he attended, and he learned an appreciation for community, which carried over into his attachment for the church. He said, "I have been loved and forgiven and accepted by church people. . . ."

Mari Hampton says she met her husband on a blind date at Northwestern University and, six weeks later, they were married.

"He's a gentle man and loving," she says, and that is what attracted her.

Hampton had gradual call to ministry

After college, when he didn't see any opportunities in acting, Hampton joined a Chicago company that published yellow-pages phone directories. He spent eight years there, but entered the seminary in 1964 after what he says was a gradual call to the ministry.

He has ministered in Illinois, Utah, Oregon, Maryland and Minnesota.

Judy Shaw, a member of the St. Barnabas parish in Maryland where Hampton was rector from 1980 to 1989, says he is unusual in "his ability to make everybody feel special. It doesn't matter your class in life or your station - you are important."

Shaw says Hampton got her church involved in helping the poor.

Gary Gleason, canon to the ordinary in the Diocese of Minnesota where Hampton served as assistant bishop for the past 16 years, says Hampton was known for "dealing with people in a compassionate way and understanding complex issues. Some bishops are scholars, some are administrators. He was a pastor."

Before moving to Seattle, Hampton volunteered for years in a shelter for homeless people. At first, he says, many people enthusiastically embraced the cause and worked for it. But over time, he says, some people turned away and began seeing homeless people as dangerous drunks.

Most are not, Hampton says, though he acknowledges that some are and that dealing with them can be dispiriting.

Hampton says he even found himself passing people he would have stopped to help a few years ago. Now he carries a stack of fast-food coupons in his jacket so he can give a meal and not worry that the money will be used to buy liquor.

Mentioning recent news stories about business owners in Seattle's University District who are wary of teens hanging out in front of their stores, Hampton says he, too, is wary. But, he says, they are children with problems, and the debate ought not to be how to get rid of them but how to help them.

"If the church can't model that kind of inclusiveness and diversity, who can, who will?"

Hampton says he thought he was fully committed to embracing people infected with the AIDS virus, but that there was always some small part of him that wondered if the victim couldn't have done something different.

But he says he felt their pain acutely only when he got a call from one of his granddaughters two years ago saying she had AIDS.

She was on her way to the hospital and she asked, "Grandpa, am I going to go to heaven?" He says that call and her continuing struggle "moved the issue from the head to the heart."

It is Hampton's calling to encourage people to put the welfare of others in their hearts and, in that way, he is playing a larger role than the stage could ever have offered him.