BALTIMORE — Apostle Christina Holtsclaw, founder of East Baltimore Deliverance Church, just turned 100. She's a picture of what a lifetime of faith, service and unshakable resilience looks like.
When asked how she feels about reaching this milestone birthday, she says, “Ahh, overwhelmed. It's hard to think that I’m a hundred. A hundred years old? That's old, you know.”
Born Christina Barnes, she grew up in East Baltimore to a family of devout Christians. She displayed that same devotion to church as a wife and mother of six.
That is, until her 10-year-old son died after a seizure.
She lost faith, becoming an atheist. Five years later, her 15-year-old daughter died from pneumonia.
“I just couldn't see how I could have so much misery in my life,” she says. “You know, loss of children, loss of this and loss of that. Too much. I didn't find anything there that was going to help me, you know. People get that way.”
One night, she was on her way to a club and found herself sitting in the back of a church. That's when everything changed.
“The Lord spoke to me and said to me ‘This is your night,’ and I said, ‘My night for what?’ And He said, ‘Give me your heart, I’ll make your life beautiful.’ Ever since, I've been traveling for the Lord.”
She became an evangelist, began teaching Sunday school on a street corner, and started the church here in 1969.
Yet, the journey hasn't been easy.
In a time when many didn't believe women should be in the pulpit, she wasn't accepted everywhere. Her daughter, Rev. Carolyn Seawell, recalls when her mother was not received at a funeral service.
“It's for men only, women can't preach,” Seawell says they told her mom. “So, she took her robe off and sat in the audience.”
And even in her own church, Holtsclaw wasn't protected from gender bias.
“Men would come into the church, and they wanted to take over the church,” Seawell says. “And they would get mad and pull people out the church.”
Yet, Holtsclaw stood firm in her calling.
She's preached in Europe, led revivals in the Caribbean and crusades in Africa. It's India, though, where she's left a legacy, the Christina Holtsclaw Educational Center.
“I believe firmly that God calls who He wants to call,” she says. “And it's up to that person that He calls whether they accept or not.”
Holtsclaw retired from the pastorate, handing it down first to her daughter and now her grandson, Quincy Phillips. Although she's retired, the centenarian still preaches occasionally.
