Rev. Henry J. Olsen

My great-grandfather on my mother’s side, Henry J. Olsen, was a pastor in the Pilgrim Holiness Church. I have a little booklet that he wrote entitled, Christ and Christian Experience in the Tabernacle. In the preface of that booklet, it says that the went to God’s Bible School in Cincinnati, Ohio, and that while there he received “entire sanctification.” This is interesting to me because I just recently finished a class on the History and Theology of the Charasmatic Movement. Historic Pentecostalism developed out of the National Holiness Movement. At any rate, I recently had occasion to look at that booklet again and decided to do an Internet search to see if there was anything out there regarding my great-grandfather. He served as an editor of the Pilgrim Holiness Advocate and I thought I might be able to find some interesting stuff. I didn’t find much but what I did find was fascinating, at least to me and I suspect to some of my family members. I found two historical pictures, one was from around 1905 when he was in college at God’s Bible School and the other, taken somewhere between 1913 and 1918, is a picture of him as a member of The Holiness Singers, a group that sang for a Pilgrim Holiness church in Maryland. Here they are:

Henry Olsen (far left) as a student at God's Bible School

Henry Olsen (#14) as a member of The Holiness Singers

GBC Easter Cantata 2009

This past Sunday our church put on a special Easter Cantata that included our regular adult choir, children's choir, and orchestra (including a few extras who came down from BJU for the occasion).

This was the first time our church has done anything from the Messiah. I thought the Hallelujah Chorus went quite well. I would love to see us do more of that type of thing.

The combined choirs and orchestra also sang Chris Anderson's My Jesus, Fair. The orchestration for this piece was written by our pastor's daughter, Kaytlynn Wood.

Here are videos from three of the numbers.