August 2020 — pg. 25
urfm You are the church
“I was at Greenville during that Asbury revival, and it spilled over
into the campus of Greenville and affected all of our lives,” Saylor
said. “The Lord had specifically and powerfully and clearly called me
to be an inner-city missionary during that time, and I didn’t know
what that meant.”
Her calling came even though the phrase “urban ministry” was
uncommon in the early 1970s. While writing for Greenville’s student
newspaper, she interviewed a visiting Black pastor who encouraged
her to follow God’s call to serve across racial lines. She worked in East
St. Louis during the summers to gain urban experience.
“I knew I had to make complete changes in my own life,” she said.
“I knew I had to repent of my prejudices. I said, ‘God, I know I’m
prejudiced. I was raised in an all-White sundown town. I have heard
all kinds of racist remarks all my childhood.’”
Saylor became especially comfortable with Black and Hispanic
people who seemed to be drawn to her as well.
“I left Greenville after graduating in 1972 and went directly to
work, teach and minister in Newark, New Jersey. I was in an all-Black
school and involved with Dwight Gregory in a Free Methodist church
plant there at the same time in Passaic,” Saylor said.
She then attended graduate school in Ohio at the University of
Akron and earned a master’s degree in education with a focus on
working as a reading specialist.
CUE Connections
While a graduate student, she attended the denomination’s first
Continental Urban Exchange in 1974 at the International Friendship
House in Winona Lake, Indiana, where the denomination had its
headquarters at the time.
“Basically the first CUE was just a bunch of people that really
cared about the city or were in the city and had experience,” she said.
“Bishop Robert Andrews had invited me to come because I had
proposed to the Mission Board that we consider New York City as a
mission field.”
Saylor said the Board of Bishops had “a pretty intense” meeting
with CUE participants who delivered the message, “The people of the
United States were in the cities, and we needed as a church to be in
the cities to minister to the people who were there, and we needed to
be more diverse. We needed to have multicultural leadership.”
The first gathering led to Saylor’s decades of involvement with CUE
that eventually resulted in the formation of the Free Methodist Urban
Fellowship. CUE and FMUF challenged the time period’s evangelical
preference of homogeneous ministry in which people were believed
to be drawn to churches if the members were similar to them.
“A lot of us felt very passionately and very clearly that this diversity
is what God wanted and that we were to be together — every kindred,
every tribe, every nation praising God and worshipping together,”
said Saylor, who added that CUE attracted women in ministry along
“I knew I had to
make complete changes
in my own life”
— Donna Saylor
/www.lightandlifemagazine.com
/sundowntowns.php