September 2020 — pg. 25
urfm You are the church
“As sort of a typical preacher’s kid, I really had a love-hate relationship with the
ministry and the church,” he said. “While I went to Roberts Wesleyan College,
I fought with God almost constantly over feeling called to the ministry until I
finally said yes in my senior year.”
He then attended Asbury Theological Seminary, and, Olver said, he “then
began to wrestle with God’s call to the city, and it was intense, and I have to say
that my call to urban ministry was as compelling and as clear as anybody’s call
to the mission field.”
Back to Brooklyn
Olver said he felt specifically “called to go back to Brooklyn, and so, 10 years
after I moved away, I came back as the pastor at age 24 — fresh out of seminary
in Wilmore, Kentucky. If I had not grown up there, if I had not had those six
years of living there, I would have never survived.”
Ministry in Brooklyn was challenging, and Olver said the church “building
was in absolutely disastrous condition.” After a year there, the church lost use
of the main sanctuary that was upstairs. Olver explained, “A windstorm came
up and literally blew the glass out of the windows. They were so rotten, and so
we just boarded up the windows, and, fortunately, there was a ground floor that
had what was called the Sunday school auditorium from back in the day when
Sunday school basically was taught to the whole group at once.”
A denominational executive visited New York and asked Olver, “Howard, how
long are you going to waste your life in a place like Brooklyn?” Olver didn’t reply
out loud with the response in his head: “Where do you go from here? There is
no greater mission field than New York, and you’re asking me why I am wasting
my life here.”
Unlike that executive, however, Olver learned from “a true prophet in the Free
Methodist Church” who “challenged the status quo” and understood the need
for urban ministry among people of different races and ethnicities.
“There was a department of interracial evangelism led by Gilbert James in
the late ’40s and into the early ’50s,” said Olver, who noted James’ efforts led
to a church and school primarily serving African Americans in Shreveport,
Louisiana. “Gilbert James had a huge impact on my life. He was the professor of
church and society at Asbury while I was there, and it was in a January interterm
class on community research techniques that he led in Minneapolis-St. Paul
that I made the decision to say yes to God about going to the city and going
back to Brooklyn, and he actually spent several interterms in Brooklyn bringing
students to be involved in ministries that we were involved in.”
The church eventually secured funding for a total rehab of the building, but in
the middle of the building work, Olver said, “the superintendent came to me and
said, ‘Howard, we want you to move to Passaic, New Jersey.’”
The church plant in Passaic faced difficulties. Olver had previously turned
down offers to go there, but the superintendent told him, “You can’t say no this
time. We are going to move you.”
Olver said that despite moving to New Jersey against his will, “it turned out
to be an amazing time. The church just really exploded. Almost immediately,
we began a second service in Spanish. Hector Fernandez, who is still the pastor
there, was my associate pastor.”
“My call to urban
ministry was
as compelling
and as clear as
anybody’s call to
the mission field.”
— Howard Olver
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