“Since I was a teenager,” Rev. Cyreta Oduniyi reflects, “I always…said I would love to be a youth pastor.” So it made sense that she earned an MDiv in pastoral care and counseling. While at United, Cyreta was excited to learn more about womanist and Black liberation theology from faculty who had learned from some of the pioneers in those fields. This connection, she asserts, “brought [theology] into a different light for me and brought it to life.”
Since earning her MDiv, Cyreta has held several positions at Liberty Community Church in North Minneapolis and founded a consulting business. Currently, she serves as the program director at Liberty’s Northside Healing Space and as an associate pastor for youth development at Liberty.
The Northside Healing Space program that Cyreta directs intends to reduce Minnesota’s disproportionately high rate of infant and maternal mortality within Black communities and its unhealthy relationship with health care. “We are caring and walking with families who are pregnant, in delivery, or postpartum,” she explains, and connecting families with “trusted providers”— doulas, midwives, other birth workers, lactation consultants, elders, and others—who use culturally sensitive “rituals and traditions that help wrap around the family.”
Since 2016, when she founded I Am Youthwork, Cyreta has also been offering extra support to “those who work with children and youth,” including youth pastors. “Youthwork, she shares, “is how to walk with children and families on their spiritual journey in today’s context.”
Recently, Cyreta re-enrolled at United to begin work on her DMin! Why come back? There are too few “women who represent what I look like, where I live, and the way my family looks” who are conducting meaningful research about her community, she admits. In addition, she couldn’t ignore all the nudges she received from United, Liberty, and God. With a laugh in her voice, Cyreta tells the story of all the ways she tried not to return to school. Still, she confesses, “God was like, ’Girl, shut up!’”
And she is happy to be back. For Cyreta, returning to United feels both like a homecoming and the start of a new adventure. We are truly excited to see what she will do next to support the common good.