November 2020 — pg. 21
urfm You are the church
U. Milo and Helen Kaufmann are known in academia
for their intellect and scholarship. For decades within
the Free Methodist Church – USA, they’ve also been
known as leading advocates of multiethnic and urban
ministry.
For example, some historians state that evangelical
Christians failed to join the civil rights movement of
the 1960s, but that doesn’t apply to these longtime Free
Methodists.
“During the civil rights protests many years ago, I got
involved with NAACP, and we organized some clubs of
junior high age children who were bright and needed
to know what careers might be available to them, so we
worked with those clubs to help raise the sights of young
people,” Helen told LIGHT + LIFE during a phone
interview on a busy day for the couple. A few hours
later, Milo recorded a video interview with Greenville
University that presented him its 2020 Distinguished
Alumnus Award.
Also in the 1960s, Helen said, their home congregation
— the Urbana Free Methodist Church (now Mattis
Avenue FMC) — “had a relationship with a Black
church Mount Olive Missionary Baptist here in our
community, so that the young couples, which included
us in those days, would get together for parties and
events. When I look back at that and think what the
status of Black-White relationships was in those days, it
makes me realize that our church did have a conscience.”
Milo and Helen grew up in Free Methodist families
and met as students at Greenville where Milo was two
years ahead.
“I was editing the Papyrus student newspaper
about the same time that Helen was editing the alumni
newsletter so we had some confluence there,” Milo said.
Milo graduated in 1956, and the couple married a
few months later. Milo headed to graduate school at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and Helen
left Greenville to accompany him. They then moved
to New Haven, Connecticut, where Milo completed
his doctorate at Yale University, and Helen finished
her undergraduate studies at Southern Connecticut
State University. They then moved to Chicago for
Helen to complete her master’s degree in English at
the University of Chicago while Milo did postdoctoral
studies in religion and aesthetics and then taught for a
year at North Park University.
They returned to the Urbana-Champaign area in
1962. Milo became a professor of English and American
literature at the University of Illinois, and Helen became
an English instructor and the director of the study
abroad program at Parkland College.
Urban Fellowship
One of Helen’s Greenville classmates was Gene
Alston, who later became the first African American
graduate of Asbury Theological Seminary and then a
school administrator in southwestern Illinois near St.
Louis. The Kaufmanns hosted Alston in their home in
the early 1980s.
“We had 35 people in our house. Gene was expressing
something of his career and his concerns as a Black man
and a Free Methodist,” said Milo, who relayed Alston’s
concerns at the denomination’s next general conference.
“That was the founding of the Social Action Council.
... I headed that where we had conferences around the
country.”
The council conducted a survey of U.S. Free
Methodists. Milo said he became concerned when the
survey results showed that many people “had absolutely
no vision beyond their congregation, because what they
were really interested in was ministry to the shut-ins and
to their young people to make sure their young people
turned out all right. Those are very understandable,
but it was altogether ingrown, self-serving without
any vision for the cities, and, of course, the cities were
increasingly becoming magnets for the population.”
The Free Methodist Urban Fellowship (FMUF)
formed to help Free Methodists support and catch a
vision for ministry in urban areas. The couple spent
nearly a dozen years on FMUF’s coordinating council.
Milo served for part of that time as the vice president,
and Helen served for a decade as the communications
coordinator. She launched FMUF’s initial website and
oversaw its internship program.
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