Cobalt - The Blue Zone: Becoming A Spiritual Baptist Pastor

By Ingrid Ryan Ruben

Cobalt: The Blue Zone takes you with me on my journey to becoming a Spiritual Baptist Mother and leader of The Margaret Ryan Spiritual Sanctuary. It explores my journey of becoming a Spiritual Baptist and traces the growth and development of the Spiritual Baptist Faith as a Faith Tradition established by ex-enslaved exposed to the doctrine of Jesus Christ.
The history of the Spiritual Baptist Faith and the source of its essence as a spiritual force in the Caribbean region is central to the narrative. The everyday workings of the faith, what is Spiritual Baptist spirituality, and importantly the struggles of these former enslaved Africans with defining a new Faith Tradition that marries their African spirituality with the doctrine of Jesus Christ also form part of the exposition.
As a Spiritual Baptist practitioner, I have not been blessed with what many practitioners call spirit/spiritual work experiences. What this means is that before the Holy Spirit began to reveal specific spiritual rituals to me, I had little experience witnessing spiritual workers at work: healing, removing curses, responding to spiritual wickedness or helping people with various issues in their lives through the application of spiritual responses.
Despite having the blessing of a mother who was a Spiritual Baptist healer and worker, as a practicing Spiritual Baptist myself, I was only interested in the Bible and its contents. For the more than 36 years of being baptized, I have loved and served God and tried to follow His guidance. During that time, I recognized that His gift to me was pastoring and dedicated my life to that calling. Over time, the Holy Spirit planted messages and ideas into my spirit but I only began writing them down when He gave me the direction to set up The Academy of Grace in 2006.
With this mandate from God, and unsure how this would become a reality, I began to work harder at my prayer life and discovered through my Mourning journeys that I needed to learn how to better hone my spiritual senses so that I could hear from God, how to recognize that He was speaking to me, and how to record and decipher His messages. That journey over the years led me to begin writing down my encounters with the Holy Spirit, especially those which were instructing me to take specific actions which involved spiritual rituals, since these were new to me.
The Holy Spirit was always communicating with me, but the flashes I received, I dismissed as my imagination. It is only when I began to work on my spiritual sense of smell, hearing, sight and taste that I was able to decipher the Holy Spirit in communication with me.
Out of these communications, I was guided to carry out several special rituals related to my experiences at the time, each being revealed as God prepared me for my role as leader of the Margaret Ryan Spiritual Sanctuary. This book is a result of the Holy Spirit's direction to write about my spiritual experiences. The title came from the Holiest of Holies. Cobalt: The Blue Zone.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Jul 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781098318468

Book preview

© 2020 Ingrid Ryan Ruben

All Rights Reserved

First Edition

No part of this book should be copied, reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted without the written permission of the author.

ISBN: 978-1-09831-845-1 eBook 978-1-09831-846-8

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

Chapter One

The Beginning

Chapter Two

Becoming a Spiritual Baptist

Chapter Three

The Spiritual Baptist Faith: What is it?

Chapter 4

State-sponsored persecution

Chapter 5

The Spiritual Baptist faith grows

Chapter 6

Spiritual Baptist Operations

Chapter 7

The Blue Zone: The Holy Spirit Realm

Chapter 8

My spiritual development journey

Chapter 9

St. Cecelia: Leading a Spiritual Baptist Church

Chapter 10

Crisis of Faith or Faith in crisis?

Chapter 11

The future of the Spiritual Baptist faith

Glossary

About the Author

Acknowledgements

In researching the history and development of the Spiritual Baptist faith in Trinidad and Tobago I have been guided by useful research from several sources including, Reverend Bury Taylor’s The Spiritual Baptist Faith , Dr Hazel-Ann Gibbs De Peza’s My Faith Spiritual Baptist Christian , Earl Lovelace’s The Wine of Astonishment , Edmonds and Gonzalez in their work on Afro Caribbean religion and the National Library Services of Trinidad and Tobago ((Nalis). To those scholars and research sources, I extend my heartfelt appreciation. Thanks also to my editor Dawad Philip whose advice and guidance helped me to peel back layers of my story and expose some of my inner workings. This work also would not have been possible without the support of my son and daughter M’Fede and Sarafina. I want to say a special thank you to my son who supported and encouraged me during that special writing trip that took me to Lake Rosseau in Muskoka, Canada and my friends Roxanne and Janice who cheered me on.

Introduction

Cobalt: The Blue Zone takes you with me on my journey to becoming a Spiritual Baptist Mother and leader of The Margaret Ryan Spiritual Sanctuary. It explores my journey of becoming a Spiritual Baptist and traces the growth and development of the Spiritual Baptist Faith as a Faith Tradition established by ex-enslaved exposed to the doctrine of Jesus Christ.

The history of the Spiritual Baptist Faith and the source of its essence as a spiritual force in the Caribbean region is central to the narrative. The everyday workings of the faith, what is Spiritual Baptist spirituality, and importantly the struggles of these former enslaved Africans with defining a new Faith Tradition that marries their African spirituality with the doctrine of Jesus Christ also form part of the exposition.

As a Spiritual Baptist practitioner, I have not been blessed with what many practitioners call spirit/spiritual work experiences. What this means is that before the Holy Spirit began to reveal specific spiritual rituals to me, I had little experience witnessing spiritual workers at work: healing, removing curses, responding to spiritual wickedness or helping people with various issues in their lives through the application of spiritual responses.

Despite having the blessing of a mother who was a Spiritual Baptist healer and worker, as a practicing Spiritual Baptist myself, I was only interested in the Bible and its contents. For the more than 36 years of being baptized, I have loved and served God and tried to follow His guidance. During that time, I recognized that His gift to me was pastoring and dedicated my life to that calling. Over time, the Holy Spirit planted messages and ideas into my spirit but I only began writing them down when He gave me the direction to set up The Academy of Grace in 2006.

With this mandate from God, and unsure how this would become a reality, I began to work harder at my prayer life and discovered through my Mourning journeys that I needed to learn how to better hone my spiritual senses so that I could hear from God, how to recognize that He was speaking to me, and how to record and decipher His messages. That journey over the years led me to begin writing down my encounters with the Holy Spirit, especially those which were instructing me to take specific actions which involved spiritual rituals, since these were new to me.

The Holy Spirit was always communicating with me, but the flashes I received, I dismissed as my imagination. It is only when I began to work on my spiritual sense of smell, hearing, sight and taste that I was able to decipher the Holy Spirit in communication with me.

Out of these communications, I was guided to carry out several special rituals related to my experiences at the time, each being revealed as God prepared me for my role as leader of the Margaret Ryan Spiritual Sanctuary. This book is a result of the Holy Spirit’s direction to write about my spiritual experiences. The title came from the Holiest of Holies. Cobalt: The Blue Zone.

Pastor Ingrid Ryan Ruben

For My Mother Margaret Ryan

Chapter One

The Beginning

My earliest memory of the Spiritual Baptists experience was at a thanksgiving feast held at Mammy Joe, who lived in Mortel Trace, Fyzabad in south Trinidad. Mammy Joe was the ‘Senior Mother’ in charge of Mount Pisgah Spiritual Baptist Church in Fyzabad. She and her husband, whom everyone called Pappy, the leader of the church, were responsible for many persons in the Fyzabad environs converting to the faith, bringing them to a closer relationship with God.

It was sometime in the early 1970s, and I can still see the crowd of youths gathered outside the wooden house chatting among themselves, the younger ones running and playing in the street just outside, and some of us older ones in exasperation, asking, When dey go finish? Dem Baptist eh bet dey could pray, nah. The aroma of black-eyed peas, stew chicken, provision and callaloo filled the air and our stomachs growled hungrily. We had been there for several hours and by the evidence of the heightened activity in the ongoing service, we still had longer to wait. We could hear the devotees in their fervent prayer, bells ringing and persons shouting in the spirit as the faithful became engulfed in the throes of praise and worship. The women cooking by the fires outside would suddenly be caught in the rapture of the praise and had to be taken inside until the Holy Spirit arrest subsided. Even teenagers got swept up in the spirit and had to be taken inside and their heads