UPC Woman Pastor: MS Matriarch for 30 years

[SDG]

'This is my family ... My life'

Holland, who started preaching as a child, remains one of the few women to lead a Pentecostal church in Miss.

Jean Gordon
jmgordon@clarionledger.com
With a check tucked neatly between her fingers, the Rev. Jean Holland sat with her hands folded on her lap at Jesus Name Tabernacle.

As congregants walked to the front of the church to deposit their tithes and offerings, Holland joined the crowd, dropping her money into the offering pan.

"We need a new church," she later said. "But at my age I didn't want to put them in debt."

For 30 years, Holland, 72, has led the flock at this Pentecostal church on U.S. 49 where the facade resembles a two-story brick lighthouse. Single with no children, she's become a matriarch to churchgoers who treat her more like a mother or grandmother than a pastor.
"This is my family," she said. "This is my life."

Holland grew up in Bude, a town of some 1,000 people in southwest Mississippi, where in high school she earned the distinction "Miss Bude High."

The daughter of a Pentecostal minister, she always knew she wanted to follow in her father's footsteps.

By the age of 10, Holland started preaching under an overhang on the side of a small building where her mother washed the family's clothes.

"She and my dad closed that in for me to have a little church," she said. "I'd get all the kids in the neighborhood and I'd preach."

The Rev. James Nations, the district secretary of the Mississippi District of the United Pentecostal Church International, has known Holland since they were both teens.
"She was dedicated from the first time I met her," he said. "I knew there was something different about her from the very beginning."

Pentecostals
Though most Pentecostal organizations have been ordaining women since the movement started more than a century ago, few women take the lead role in pastoring a Pentecostal church.

Holland is one of two women in Mississippi who serves as a senior pastor of a United Pentecostal Church International-associated congregation, Nations said.
There are other ordained women, but Nations said they typically serve a "complimentary role" to their preacher husbands.

The term Pentecostal encompasses a range of religious groups and denominations that believe God acts through the Holy Spirit to play a direct role in everyday life.
In addition to a water baptism, Pentecostals undergo a second baptism of the Holy Spirit, which often is accompanied by ecstatic, unintelligible language called speaking in tongues.

Local Pentecostals whose churches are associated with the Mississippi District of the United Pentecostal Church International will attend their annual camp meeting Sunday through Friday in Raymond.

Some 6,000 are expected to turn out for the gathering that packs in six days of spirited worship.

More of article here: http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pb...807050313/1023

[RandyWayne]

Good for her!!

[Sister Alvear]

Love that Sister Holland...She preached one of the best sermons I have ever heard on forgivness...
Great lady...loved and respected by the Raul Alvear Family.

[seguidordejesus]

I dated a girl from that church once.

[Cindy]

Praise the Lord for women like her!