Shots of Deliverance: Mother Estella Boyd’s Healing Hands and Global Black Pentecostal Reach

Abstract

Abstract This article explores the religious labor of Mother Estella Boyd (1914–2003), an African American Pentecostal preacher, faith healer, and prophetess widely known in and beyond Black Pentecostal circles for her special practice of laying on of hands, which she referred to as “shots of deliverance.” Using the memoirs, interviews, and sermons of both Boyd and her spiritual children, this article uses a gendered analysis and argues that Boyd’s laying on of hands, and the healing and deliverance from “sexual sin” and substance abuse that took place as a result, helped shape the religious careers of prominent Black Pentecostal leaders such as Bishop Marvin Winans and Prophetess Juanita Bynum. As a result of Boyd’s imprint and legacy on their lives, I argue that even as Boyd never physically left the United States, her legacy transcended the U.S. nation-state, particularly through Bynum’s contemporary global Black Pentecostalism.