he climax of activities planned to mark the Brown Hill Wesleyan Holiness Church’s 50th anniversary will be an Anniversary Service scheduled to be held on March 12 at 3.30 p.m. at the church’s premises.
A deliverance crusade is scheduled to kick off on Sunday 10 am and 6:30 p.m. On Monday and Tuesday, the crusade services will begin at 7.30 p.m. The guest speaker will be Rev. Haynesley Griffith from Barbados. Another major highlight is the Awards Banquet that will be held on March 11 at 7.30 p.m.
Brown Hill Wesleyan Holiness Church has unique history. Initially the Wesleyan Holiness Church was called the Pilgrim Holiness Church. Although evangelistic work in Brown Hill had started in the 1920s through foreign missionaries, in 1956 two young people, Louisa Neale (Grant) and Henry, then residents of New Castle, took a step of faith and were installed as the pioneer pastors of the Brown Hill Church that was built in 1956.
According to a book titled The Discipline of The Wesleyan Holiness Church (2003 edition) missionary burden and activities of several movements and individuals gave rise to the work of the Pilgrim Holiness Church in the Caribbean. Earliest indirect but related beginnings involved two Caribbean ministers. In 1890, Samuel H. Bayley of Barbados and D.A. Ross of St.Kitts attended a holiness and missionary convention in New York. They urged the convention to extend such anointed evangelism to the West Indies.
Wilmoth Liburd, a lay leader at Brown Hill Wesleyan Holiness Church recalled the early days when the church was started. “The church was initially built on the ground where the current mission home is located,” he said in an interview. In the fifty years of the church’s existence, there have been eight pastors.
Liburd has kept a record of the pastors who have ministered to the congregation in Brown Hill Wesleyan Church.
He recalled Rodwell Buckley who served for a two-year period, Brother and Sister Griffin, Pastor Thomas and Eunice Griffin who became pastors on May 15, 1969, Milton and Maude Williams who served between June 1966 and April 1966 and Pastors John and Rojelia Esdaille. Hazel Harris from Barbuda served for the longest period, between 1971 and 2002 when Pastor Euclid Lawrence who is the current pastor succeeded her.
Harris is one of the honourees. In her 30 years’ service to God through the Brown Hill Wesleyan Holiness church, her ministry has produced outstanding Christian leaders among them Rev. Vernon Liburd. During her time in service, the manse (mission home) was built.
Pastor Lawrence said in an interview. “The church has been everything in the community. The building at one time provided school facilities, has been a food distribution point, and has been used as a hurricane shelter.
“Throughout the years, the Brown Hill Wesleyan Holiness Church’s congregation has experienced its lows and highs, losses and gains, failures and successes, been ridiculed but stayed resilient, pressured but preserved. Its light has continued to shine in a dark and dangerous world.
“It has brought health and healing, comfort to a hurting people, stability in stormy times. God has prospered His church, and as long as there are people, the church will continue to sow the seed of God’s word with the expectancy to bring one hundred per cent increase,” he ended.
