How Donnie McClurkin Overcame Rape, Sexual Abuse And Leukemia Scare To Become A Gospel Music Star

Glenn Jeffers

Tell me, what do you give When you've given your all and Seems like you can't make it through? You just stand When there's nothing left to do.(*)

AT 8, Donnie McClurkin was raped by a relative. At 13, he was raped by another relative. At 31, he was diagnosed with leukemia.

But at 36, with church, music and an unyielding faith, McClurkin hit gold with his self-tiffed debut gospel album and changed his life.

And now, after triumphing over traumatic events that would have destroyed a lesser man, McClurkin has decided to tell the true story of how he overcame sexual abuse, family drug addiction, alcoholism, and a life-threatening disease, and found peace and salvation as a gospel singer and minister.

McClurkin had been telling this story for years to the congregation at Perfecting Church in Detroit. And each time he related how he had been abused and how God had delivered him, he watched people's eyes light up with hope. Finally, after a number of people asked him to share his story with a larger audience, McClurkin went back home to Amityville, N.Y., to ask his mother for permission to write a book, knowing it would mean exposing the frailties of a church-going, God-loving family. But Frances McClurkin, a former preacher herself, agreed, and McClurkin spent the next 18 months writing the newbook, Eternal Victim, Eternal Victor.

No longer a victim, in full control of his life, the 41-year-old gospel singer/songwriter/minister says he decided to tell the truth about his life not to air his family's dirty laundry, but because he is a teacher, and "a teacher has to lend' himself to the message" because "other people need to find it and realize that they're not alone in what they've gone through."

The story of how Donnie McClurkin realized that he was not alone started in Amityville, in Long Island, New York, where he was born on November 9, 1959, to Frances and Donald Sr. As a child, McClurkin would lead his nine other siblings in their nightly rendition of their original arrangement, "Good Night, Good Night To You ..."

No one knew then that the 8-year-old was trying to understand a shocking event in his life. Unknown to his siblings, he had been sexually molested by a male relative and was trying to understand why. "An eight-year-old mind can't handle such levels of perversion," McClurkin says.

McClurkin found an answer of sorts a year later on Sunday, July 14, 1969, at Amityville Gospel Tabernacle, when the minister told the congregation that Christ died "because he loves us." The idea was one that was intriguing to young McClurkin, who had heard about God from his mother. Could God help him?

The answer was yes, for after he answered the call and gave his life to Jesus, his world changed. The church, he writes in his book, became "my world, a place where I felt at peace and felt like I belonged."

If church helped McClurkin find peace, meeting renowned gospel singer Andrae Crouch changed his musical horizons. After the gospel singer appeared at Bethel Tabernacle in Jamaica, N.Y., he befriended the young man and urged him to develop his musical talents. In the days and weeks that followed, McClurkin fell in love with music, with the way it filled him with joy and replaced the pain. "What I couldn't verbalize," he says, "I could express musically. It was an escape. When you sang, you left everything. You entered a place that was literally divine."

But, unhappily, there was still a lot of the non-divine in McClurkin's world, as he discovered when he was sexually violated by another male relative. A pattern was developing, but the young man struggled against it, prayed over it and refused to accept it or resign himself to it.

His home life, he says, didn't help. By this time, his family was experiencing severe drug- and alcohol-abuse problems. Overwhelmed temporarily, McClurkin became shy and reclusive and avoided people, pouring all his energy, all his hurt into church and music.

By this time, he had mastered the piano and was playing for the youth choir and forming musical groups, including the McClurkin Singers and a choir which rented a PA system and sang on street corners in the worst section of town.

In 1983, while working with the choir, McClurkin met the Rev. Marvin L. Winans. Impressed by McClurkin's performance at a gospel workshop seminar, Winans invited McClurkin to Detroit to help start a ministry. Six years later, in 1989, McClurkin moved to Detroit, became an associate minister at Perfecting Church and began touring and singing at different churches across the country.

Life once again slowed to normal, and then suddenly, in 1991, a sharp pain and swelling, followed by internal bleeding, led, he says, to a diagnosis of leukemia. The doctor suggested immediate treatment, but McClurkin, who was then 31, decided to take another path. Looking back now, McClurkin concedes that he was afraid but says that he had to take his own advice. "I tell people to believe that God will save you," he says, "[and] I had to turn around and practice the very thing that I preached."

According to McClurkin, what occurred next was a miracle. Rev. Winans prayed and McClurkin prayed, and when he returned to his doctor a month later, he was, he says, better. The symptoms, he says, lasted another month, but the disease, he says, was no longer detectable. "God healed me without any chemotherapy," McClurkin says. "Whenever something like that happens, it's amazing." (While not commenting on McClurkin's case, medical experts urge patients to follow the advice of their doctors.)

But this was not, by any means, the end of McClurkin's ordeal. For after his long apprenticeship and his time of trials, the pendulum swung to the other end with a major contract, appearances across the country, and a promising relationship with a good-looking woman. But it was too much too soon, and one night on a plane ride from Los Angeles to Detroit, McClurkin broke down. The traveling. The touring. The relationships that fell apart because he was so consumed with ministry. It was too much, and McClurkin asked God, once again, "Why me? Why did you choose me for this?"

"And God asked me," McClurkin recalls, "`What do you do when you've done everything? How do you handle the past and that guiltiness, preaching to everyone else but still remembering what you've done? How you do deal with the shame?'"

Twenty-five minutes later, McClurkin finished the lyrics to "Stand." The song became a gospel hit, propelling his first album to gold status and a Grammy Award nomination.

The debut album also led to two more gold albums, The McClurkin Project, which reunited McClurkin with his first group of childhood singers, and Live From London and More, a live-concert album recorded in September 1999 in England. McClurkin was surprised. "Stand" was, he said, "my own personal story; I didn't think everybody would gravitate to it."

Hundreds of thousands have gravitated to his story, and the newly ordained minister says he will tour for 18 months and then devote himself full-time to his own ministry, Perfecting Faith, which he recently started in New York. Whatever the medium, he will continue, he says, to spread the message. The reason for his commitment was evident a few months ago when McClurkin gave his testimony at a Chicago youth rally with more than 2,000 children in attendance.

After he finished his testimony, a woman brought her Il-year-old son to the stage and said publicly that she had been brutally raped only a week before by an older male. "And the reason she felt free to bring it up was because I opened it up and exposed myself as being a rape victim," McClurkin says. "That's why we do this, so people know that others can understand and don't have to live in secrecy. There is healing. There is help."

   We fall down
   But we get up
   We fall down
   But we get up
   For a saint is just a
   sinner who fell down ...
   And got up (**)

(*) "Stand" by Donnie McClurkin. Used by permission.

(**) "We Fall Down." Lyrics by Kyle Matthews. Used By permission.

COPYRIGHT 2001 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2001 Gale Group