Mount Sinai Holy Church of America
Mount Sinai Holy Church of America belongs to the Pentecostal (Trinitarian) family of churches.
Governance: episcopal.
Founded in Philadelphia in 1924 by Bishop Ida Bell Robinson, who left her prior body over limits on women's ministry — one of the earliest American denominations founded and led by a Black woman.
Congregation count not yet source-verified against RCMS 2020; NULL rather than estimated.
Founded in Philadelphia in 1924 by Bishop Ida Bell Robinson, so that women called to preach would have a church that would let them.
Heritage
Ida Bell Robinson, a pastor in the United Holy Church of America, grew convinced after a season of fasting and prayer that God had charged her to "loose the women" — to open every office of the church to women the existing bodies would license but not fully authorize. She founded the Mount Sinai Holy Church of America in Philadelphia in 1924 and led it as senior bishop until her death in 1946, ordaining women to every rank; women filled most of its senior offices in the early decades, a thing effectively without precedent at that scale. The church spread down the Eastern Seaboard and into mission fields abroad.
Theological family
Trinitarian holiness-Pentecostal in the historically Black tradition: new birth, sanctification, baptism in the Holy Spirit with tongues, divine healing, and disciplined holiness of life.
Who decides what
Episcopal: a senior bishop — an office held by women from the founding — with a board of presbyters, and congregations related through districts and an annual convocation.
What a first-time visitor would find
Black holiness-Pentecostal worship in full strength: congregational song and choirs, shouted praise, concerted prayer, testimony, and preaching — very often by women — that expects the altar to be used.
What it has always cared about
Women's ordination practiced, not debated, since 1924; Philadelphia as mother city; convocation; holiness discipline; and the memory of a founder who answered exclusion by building.
Its gift to the wider church
Standing proof, a century old, that Pentecostal power and women's full ordination are not at odds: while most of American Christianity was still explaining why women could not preach, Mount Sinai was consecrating them bishops.
Commonly confused with
With its own mother body, the United Holy Church of America, from which Robinson came; and with other historically Black holiness-Pentecostal bodies of similar era and wording.
Range of views inside it
A compact body with a clear identity; variety shows mainly in congregation size and locale along its East Coast spine.
A note from the mapmakers: We have not verified a congregation count for this body against RCMS 2020, so we publish none. Nothing here may be asserted of an individual congregation, including the gender of its pastor. Sentences drawn from this record hedge as "Mount Sinai congregations typically…" and yield to the church's own materials.
Sources: Black Fire: One Hundred Years of African American Pentecostalism (Estrelda Y. Alexander, IVP Academic) · Handbook of Denominations in the United States (Abingdon Press)
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