The Reverend Neichelle Guidry’s primary goal while she’s on island this weekend is to remind people of the faithfulness of God.

She was a teenager when a youth pastor encouraged her to consider full-time ministry.

Last year she was one of 12 people highlighted by Time magazine as a new face in black leadership. The 31-year-old made Ebony’s Power 100 list as well.

What got her noticed was the work she’s doing on Chicago’s South Side with Trinity United Church of Christ and shepreaches, the magazine Rev Guidry founded to give a voice to African-American millennial women who minister.

“Over the last three or four years I have had public triumphs, but also personal challenges and struggles that have really shaken my ministry — mostly because I learnt through them just how faithful God is,” she said. “When God promised he would never leave or forsake us that’s a promise he keeps to me every day.

“There were moments I felt like I was alone, but even in the little things He consistently reminds me He is there and making the way clear for me. He is faithful to me and on my side and comforting me and providing for me.”

Ms Guidry will be the guest preacher at Mt Zion AME’s 10am service tomorrow. She will then speak at a lecture organised by the charity Scars, at Ruth Seaton James Centre for the Performing Arts.

“In both the sermon and the lecture I’m really driving home the idea of a woman’s agency and her ability to decide for herself [that] I don’t want to be hurt or sick anymore, I don’t want to be sidelined or victimised anymore and how we are all one critical decision away from a better life, a different way of living and showing up,” she said.

“I will be reminding people that Jesus makes this all possible and we are also given the agency to choose. [We can decide that] today I’m going to take this journey of healing and trusting in God and do the work that’s necessary to come out of what I’ve been through.”

Ms Guidry’s grandfather was a Baptist pastor. Both her parents were active in the church — but in different denominations.

“My mother was involved in the Baptist church and my father was active in the Catholic church,” she said. “I like to call myself bapto-catho-costal because I grew up being exposed to both the Baptist and Catholic traditions, but the Pentecostal church is where I personally came to Christ when I was 13 or 14 years old.”

She was then attending New Creation Christian Fellowship in San Antonio, Texas. The church was led by Michael Copeland and his wife Claudette Anderson Copeland.

“Until coming to that church I had never seen a woman as leader of a ministry,” Ms Guidry said. “I was curious and awestruck and a little bit of a fan girl. I don’t currently attend there, but I still call them my pastors and consider them to be my spiritual parents to this day.

“Seeing [Dr Copeland] speak — she was amazing and very powerful and had so much spiritual authority and on top of all that she was uncompromisingly strong in her femininity.

“And I guess being raised in a Catholic church where the narrative was very patriarchal, this was very different to that. Even in the Baptist church I saw women doing domestic roles in the church, but this was the first time of seeing a woman with a clear sense of her power and with a position where she could make an impact in people’s lives.”

Ms Guidry was hooked.

A youth pastor noticed her spark when she was 16, and encouraged her to consider full-time ministry.

“That was very powerful for me to have someone be able to articulate God is moving and doing something in your life but who is thinking about that at 16? I was getting my driver’s licence and on the dance team at school. It wasn’t until I was 21 and in my junior year of college that I finally followed my call to ministry.”

She got her bachelor’s degree at Clark Atlanta University and a master’s in divinity from Yale University.

She then had the opportunity to preach and live in urban neighbourhoods and saw the impact of poverty on those communities.

“Being a follower of Christ compels me to do something when I see such injustice right in front of me in the US and abroad,” she said. “My belief about ministry is it needs to be both connected to the community and people and also needs to address social issues.

“Those years at divinity school were crucial for me and helped me get clear on my purpose. I gained even more clarity as to what I may have been put on this earth to do and for me that was intrinsically tied to my walk with Christ, love for my community and deep desires for justice and equity in this nation and the world.”

Tickets for Ms Guidry’s Scars talk are $20 at the door. Admission is free for the audience of For My Good, a play about healing after sexual abuse.

• For more information e-mail info@scars.bm