Rosmery Peña was born in the Dominican Republic, the Spanish-speaking country that shares the island of Hispaniola with Haiti. She emigrated with her family to the United States quite early in her childhood but holds her time in the Dominican Republic very dear and formative.
She came of age in Perth Amboy, New Jersey in a close-knit, bigger-than-life, and very Catholic family. Though small, the town had a diverse culture, in which Rosmery’s Dominican heritage was celebrated and thrived. The fact that the majority of her father’s family had also emigrated there helped.
Rosmery proved to be a leader from her early adolescence. At 12, she taught catechism in the Catholic Church despite not fully understanding the text or philosophy. She served in varied roles in the church including usher and musician. But the personal relationship with a very personal God which she now enjoys was absent.
Religion cannot fill the “God-shaped void” in the human soul and so her search continued. Perhaps it only truly began when she decided at 18 to, despite her strong sense of vocation, resign from her church secretary and youth leader positions and walk away.
Rosmery was an inquisitive child with many questions that needed logical answers. She and her father shared a love of music; both sang and played musical instruments as part of the church’s music ministry. Intense connection does not negate differing opinions, and her father, a typical Caribbean “authoritarian” didn’t feel the need to explain himself or the rationale behind his directives. “You couldn’t just tell me what to do; you had to explain why you were asking and what you were asking” Pastor Rosmery explains.
The new chapter began at 18, with the break from Catholicism. Her conversion shortly thereafter became a platform and a refuge for her inquisition as she yielded to her soul’s cry for the deeper things, the things that truly satisfy. God was to be her pilot; her thesis advisor; her patient protector and her passionate pursuer.
Rosmery determined that regardless of a good job and the perks of a comfortable life, the innate thirst for significance, connection, and fulfillment could not be quenched in her current life. She definitely didn’t need more religion, but the concept of The Sinner’s prayer and accepting Jesus into your heart was foreign to her. Eventually, it would be a desperate song sung to God in the midnight hour alone in a basement room that held the key not only to her salvation but to her freedom to pursue the God of her vocation.
God quickly confirmed their relationship through an answered prayer not to return to the religion of her past. Upon the invitation of a friend’s younger brother, Rosmery began her sojourn at an African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church.
“At first, it was all strange and a little confusing. But it was a beautiful journey of God showing himself and helping me understand the person I was called to be. I’m sure He still speaks to us today. Before I preached in stadiums to thousands of people, I had visions of it, and whenever I spoke, I said things that I hadn’t yet learned or studied. This inspired me to pursue knowledge of His Word more deeply.”
This new journey though solitary due to the uncommon nature of her spiritual encounters with Jesus, outside of church, (her peers were not having the same experiences) grounded Rosmery as she turned voraciously to biblical research and study for context. She went on to Bible College in Florida, and allowing her steps to be ordered by the Lord, ended up in Nassau, Bahamas where she currently serves as the Apostle and Senior Pastor at Legacy Church. We sat down to have a candid interview about her ministry, the perception of strength, and the role of mothers in our society.
When you felt the calling on your life, did you get the immediate revelation of full-time ministry? Or was it as a result of getting to know God better through His word that it became evident?
If God revealed from the beginning that I would be a pastor, I would have said absolutely not. I knew without a shadow of a doubt that I was called to preach, so I studied His Word and delved deeply into understanding the spiritual gifts. I would see people already in ministry and begin to paint a picture of what it could look like for me. The person who most reflected how I felt was Juanita Bynum; my thought became—that I would preach at conferences all over the globe. Being responsible for people on a day-to-day basis was far from my ideal.
I remember watching one of your sermons, and you mentioned that we have been conditioned not to express grief but to deal with it. I want to insert disappointment too. As black women are labeled strong women, what can you tell a black woman to be instead of strong?
When you get to the core of the gospel, it is summed up in what Jesus said in Matthew 22:35-40: “All the Law and the Prophets hang on these two commandments, you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your mind. This is the most significant and first commandment: Love God above all else. And the second is like it: you shall love your neighbor as yourself.”
I believe trouble comes when we depend on our personal strength. True strength cannot be mustered up. It’s not real; it is a façade that will carry you momentarily. Most of us who lean on that trope of a strong woman, break, and when we do, we do so in our mental health, which then affects the total woman, our decisions, and our behaviors. We begin to make mistakes and do things that are opposite to the core of who we are and get misaligned with our values and beliefs because it is all driven from the outside. When we understand that a relationship is about a personal connection, we realize that God has a rule for our vulnerability that requires us to find our strength in our weaknesses. That weakness is recognizing that, yes, I am disappointed and that I must feel what I feel.
Another lesson is in the story of Lazarus, Jesus’ friend. Jesus was told that Lazarus was sick, and He replied, his sickness is not unto death. Yet, when they told him Lazarus was dead, Jesus wept. Now, why did He cry, knowing that Lazarus would live? Jesus wept because tears are a gift that cleanse you and your body and provide a reset. Jesus—God in the flesh, showed us that; even knowing the outcome, he leaned into his humanity at that moment. We have a whole misunderstanding of how faith looks. We have been taught that faith is denial—deny reality and lean into a different possibility. I believe faith is facing our reality and seeing what is really there while feeling the emotion and yielding to vulnerability. Faith is believing that beyond what we see, there is another possibility. That means that women must find and believe in something, even if it is not immediately present. Women must exist in spaces that will not force them to “get it together and be stronger than the mountain they face.” We need those safe relationships where we can say I’m disappointed; I am allowed to break down and be vulnerable; I am allowed to be weak. We have been taught to suck it up because “you are a strong woman.” That narrative needs to shift to, “Okay, feel what you feel while believing in a turnaround.” That is the required paradigm shift.
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