Ida B. Robinson
1891 — 1946 · Foundress and first presiding bishop of the Mount Sinai Holy Church of America; the first woman senior bishop of a major Pentecostal denomination
Ida Bell Robinson was born on the third of August 1891 in Hazlehurst, Georgia, the seventh of twelve children of Robert and Annie Bell. While she was still a child the family joined the northward and coastal migrations of the era, settling in Pensacola, Florida, where the young Ida experienced a profound religious conversion and was drawn into the Holiness-Pentecostal awakening then sweeping Black communities of the American South.
In 1909 she married Oliver Robinson, and in the years that followed she answered what she described as a divine call to preach. Affiliating with the United Holy Church of America and pastoring in Philadelphia after joining the Great Migration north, she found her gifts constrained by prohibitions on women in the pulpit. Convinced that God had commanded her to "loose the women," she resolved to build a spiritual home where women could be ordained and lead.
On the twentieth of May 1924, the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania granted a charter to the Mount Sinai Holy Church of America, the denomination she founded and over which she presided as its first senior bishop and president. In doing so she became the first Black woman to establish and lead a denomination in the United States, and among the first women to hold senior episcopal office in a major Pentecostal body.
Under her leadership the church grew to some eighty-four congregations from New England to Florida, sustained mission work abroad, and opened a school in Philadelphia. She ordained scores of ministers, most of them women, opening doors that had long been closed. She died on the twentieth of April 1946. Her legacy endures in every woman she raised to the pulpit, and in a house of faith that honored the fullness of her calling.
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