At Houston megachurch, challenges for first female pastor
In her early morning Sunday sermon at New Light Church, Dr. I commands a sweeping stage carpeted in gold and flanked by video screens.
Her voice rises full and impassioned over the audience of nearly 5,000 worshippers. Her high heels flash as she strides from one side of the altar to the other. One hand flutters in the air as she burrows into a Bible verse and dissects the meaning, the other clasps a bright red wireless microphone.
“Can you give the Lord a shout of praise in this place?” she says, in a tone both righteous and relaxed, as if your best friend had launched into a sermon over a cup of coffee. “As you take your seats in the presence of our God, can you give the person standing next to you a hug, a high-five, a how-you-doing, how-you-feelin,’ a wassup, a dap, a something? At least make sure they experience the love of the Lord through you today.”
Irishea Hilliard exhorts and extols, inspires and invokes, petitions and prays with the cadence of an experienced preacher, with the confidence of someone who has been in training her entire life.
The 40-year-old Hilliard – known to many in the nondenominational congregation of 23,000 as the “heir apparent” – recently was installed to succeed her father, Bishop I.V. Hilliard, as senior pastor of New Light Christian Center Church, one of the largest megachurches in Texas.
It is, Hilliard says, “beyond a shadow of a doubt what I’m supposed to do.”
But it is also a position that comes with challenges. Hilliard will be one of a handful of female megachurch pastors, and part of a small group of African-American leaders.
She is taking over at a time of flux for megachurches – and a moment of restructuring for New Light, a prosperity gospel church that began in 1984 in a rickety clapboard building nicknamed “Termite City” and now encompasses three campuses in Houston and Beaumont, a youth campground and television ministry.
“There are many times God will call you to something that in your own strength you couldn’t handle,” she preaches on a recent Sunday. “In my own strength, in my own person – Irishea, Reeree, Reesh, the other name – I couldn’t handle this position, but because of the grace of God, the empowerment of God, the strength of God that says ‘when I’m weak, he is strong,’ you are watching the grace of God in manifestation before you.”