Answering the Call

The Rev. Pamela Holmes ’89 provides spiritual guidance and support to NYC firefighters.

By Melissa Babcock Johnson

s a chaplain for the New York City Fire Department, the Rev. Pamela Holmes ’89 knew she’d be providing spiritual support to firefighters and first responders after they’d experienced tragedy or trauma in the field. But she was surprised to learn she’d be wanted on the scene, too.

“Probably my first week there, I asked one of the firefighters, ‘Why do you need us to go out to the fire? We’re not going in the building, right?’ And he said something that was very profound for me,” she recalls.

“He said, ‘Because we feel like God is with us.’”

In March of 2024, Holmes, a full-time associate pastor at Emmanuel Baptist Church in Brooklyn, was sworn in as the first Black woman (and second woman overall) to serve as an FDNY chaplain. She’s one of six chaplains who work part time to serve the department’s more than 11,000 firefighters and 4,500 EMTs, paramedics and EMS employees across New York’s five boroughsfive boroughs; FDNY is looking to hire more.

The chaplains are there for the department’s highs and lows—promotion ceremonies, graduations, family days, funerals, weddings and more. “Interestingly enough, the department wants spiritual representation at every event, so there’s an invocation and a benediction in every ceremony,” Holmes says.

They’re also there for the daily ups and downs. “We visit EMS stations and fire houses to check in, to see how things are going,” Holmes says. “Sometimes they’ve had a crazy day—a baby died, someone had a fatal heart attack or somebody was hit by a train and they had to slide under the train to get the body. And they’re dealing with the challenges of their own life on top of that. When you’re a single parent, or you’re in the midst of a divorce, or you’re taking care of elderly parents, and this is what you go into every day, it’s nice to be able to have a space to unload.”

It can be heavy work, Holmes admits. “You don’t have any idea, I think, in the beginning, of the magnitude of things that you’re going to be walking through with people, or the demands that people have on you,” she says. “That sort of pressure is immense and makes the job hard, but that’s also the good part, too. You get to be there for people in their greatest time of need.”

I have always been concerned about the community, concerned about the plight of people.

— The Rev. Pamela Holmes ’89

Holmes never planned—or even wanted—to be a pastor. She actively resisted the call for years. But, she says, God had other plans.

At Conn, the New York City native majored in government and minored in American history, intending to become a lawyer. After graduation, she worked as a paralegal for the Brooklyn District Attorney’s Office but decided it wasn’t for her. Neither was her next move, but she was on the right path.

“I had always been concerned about the community, concerned about the plight of people, and so I started working for some nonprofits doing community organizing and ended up getting a master’s degree in campaign management,” she explains. “I did some of that for a little while, and said, ‘That’s not it either.’ There was too much giving up of your soul to be connected to politics for me.”

Not to worry—Holmes’s soul would be just fine. Her mother’s relatives were tobacco farmers in North Carolina, and the young Holmes had gone south every summer to join her devout Christian family in the fields and in the pews. But life had distracted her for a few years. In her 20s, she reconnected with her spiritual roots and became a member of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Brooklyn.

She recalls, “I started going back to church again in the mid-1990s, and that began the tug between me and God, with God saying, ‘Come,’ and me saying, ‘No, I’m kind of enjoying myself out here. I’m loving my life going to bars on Friday night and having boyfriends and doing all this stuff,’ and God saying, ‘I don’t care, come.’”

Still, Holmes didn’t feel worthy of the role of pastor. “I was wrestling with it like, ‘I’m going to come to church and I’m going to sing in the choir, but that’s it.’ I thought the person in the pulpit needed to be perfect. Now I know better.”

She instead started working at Long Island University after partnering with the institution for some of her nonprofit work. Holmes spent several years in the early to mid-2000s in higher ed, running diversity programs and connecting Black and Latino students to various opportunities, first at LIU, then at SUNY Downstate and finally at Brooklyn College.

The Rev. Pamela Holmes ’89, far right, with two members of FDNY. Courtesy FDNY

But the call to the clergy only grew louder. In the early days of her return to church, Holmes remembers sitting in a pew next to two other young women. “African American church can be very participatory,” she says, “so the pastor tells us to form groups and pray for each other right in the middle of the service. I join the two ladies, and we’re like, ‘Well, who’s going to pray?’ and they were like, ‘You should pray.’ I pray, and one of them says to me immediately after, ‘You should be a preacher.’ They didn’t know my internal struggle, but I did.”

Then there was the round-robin prayer activity during a church retreat, after which someone said, “Pam, you should really be a preacher. You’ve got a preacher’s voice.” And then after she gave a sixth-grade graduation speech, “a mom comes to me at the end of the ceremony and says, ‘Are you a preacher? Where’s your church? I want to come to your church.’

“Those kinds of things confirmed what God had already placed in my spirit, and so at some point I surrendered and said, ‘Lord, I got it.’”

In 2011, she left her job and apartment in New York City and moved to New Jersey to enroll at Princeton Theological Seminary. “The first year was kind of crazy because I was 45 or 46; I hadn’t been in school in years and I’m living in a dorm with a bunch of 22- to 24-year-olds. It was quite a shock.”

She earned her Master of Divinity degree in 2014 and was fortunate to find a full-time job as an associate pastor at her home church of 27 years, Emmanuel Baptist, where she still works more than a decade later.

“What I love about being a reverend is the people factor,” she says. “That’s always been who I am and how God has wired me. At church, there’s a running joke where they call me Reverend Woo-Woo, because they’re like, ‘If you want a good hug, if you want to feel better, if you want to feel loved, go to Reverend Pam.’”

What I love about being a reverend is the people factor. That’s always been who I am and how God has wired me.

— The Rev. Pamela Holmes ’89

Building relationships is particularly important at FDNY, where Holmes supports first responders from a range of cultural and religious backgrounds.

On one firehouse visit, for example, she was chatting with a woman firefighter who said she was Muslim. “She was floored that I had read the Quran,” Holmes told The New York Times about the encounter last year. “She said, ‘Hey, chaplain, we don’t have an imam right now. Until they get one, if I need one, can I call you?’”

Holmes says growing up in Brooklyn and the Lower East Side prepared her for spaces like FDNY “because it really was a melting pot. When I was growing up, I had Jewish, Latino, Black and Asian friends. We were right on the edges of Chinatown and a big Jewish community. Everybody kind of lived in the same building and coexisted, and that was helpful for me.”

On the flip side, going to Conn was a bit of a culture shock for a young Black woman from densely populated and diverse Brooklyn, Holmes says. “Even though my high school in Manhattan was predominately white, it was different because I got to go home to my community. Now I didn’t get to go home. That was home.”

On campus, Holmes worked to address racism and inequity, and on May 1, 1986, she was one of 54 students who locked themselves into Fanning Hall in an ultimately successful attempt to move Conn leadership to agree to a timeline to bolster minority life on campus.

“There was a core group in my class who really just cared about people, and that was pretty amazing,” she recalls. “We shared a lot of experiences and had a lot of difficult conversations around gender, around race, around economics. I’m grateful that there was space then for those kinds of conversations to happen when we didn’t always agree, but we were able to have them.”

Photo courtesy FDNY.

If you want a good hug, if you want to feel better, if you want to feel loved, go to Reverend Pam.

— The Rev. Pamela Holmes ’89

Holmes’s future career was already starting to take shape, too, even if she didn’t realize it at the time. One Conn memory that always stays with her includes two of her Jewish friends and her best friend, a Black student from Philadelphia.

“One night, the four of us were sitting around just talking and drinking wine. We get on the subject of religion—Judaism, the Catholic Church. My friend and I started talking about Jesus and the Black church. We must have talked such a good game that these two Jewish boys were like, ‘We want to experience it! We want to go to a Black church!’”

The next morning, the two Christian women took their Jewish friends to Shiloh Baptist Church in New London. “At the end of Black Baptist church, we do something called the invitation where we invite you to walk down the aisle to give your life to Christ. The pastor begins his invitation, and he says, ‘If you want peace, come. If you want joy, come.’”

To the shock of the two women, one of their Jewish friends stepped into the aisle.

“Me and my best friend reach out and we snatch him back, like, ‘No, you would be giving your life to Christ! What are you doing? You’re Jewish!’ He was like, ‘Oh. The pastor said if you want joy, if you want peace, come.’ When I say we laughed, we all laughed the entire school year,” she recalls.

Years later, she learned that friend is now a Messianic Jew, and he told her the visit to Shiloh was the beginning of his journey. She also heard from the second friend; he reached out to her on Facebook about 20 years after graduation.

“We catch up and I tell him I’ve begun my journey as a minister. He wasn’t surprised.”