Kelly Farrow has many jobs and a lot on her plate. She is an ordained minister, lecturer, businesswoman, and social justice advocate. She manages her apartment building on W. 145th St. in Harlem, which has been a Housing Development Fund Corporation (HFDC) for four decades, and serves as its president. When she is not attending to the building, Farrow’s work as a minister keeps her occupied. Liberation is at the center of her approach to ministry. Womanism, a theological discipline that centers Black women and is derived from Black Liberation Theology (a framework outlined by James Cone, who taught at Union Theological Seminary), is a core methodology she uses. She inherited her apartment from her grandmother, with whom she split her time while growing up with another grandmother in the Bronx. But the Bronx formed much of her identity and she likes to say she is authentically South Bronx, and that community has always inspired her life as well as her preaching style.
“Hip hop informs my theology…when I preach, my cadence of sounds,” said Farrow, 50. “My authenticity was birthed on the streets of the Bronx.” She brings that theology to her work as minister of discipleship at Double Love Experience Church in Brooklyn and associate minister of the Convent Avenue Baptist Church in Harlem, where her great-grandmother was a founding member and which she attended growing up.
“When I show up in a church, or in the pulpit…I’ve never left myself behind; I’ve always shown up as my full self,” Farrow said. “I’ve never shrank.” While attending City College, Farrow first realized she wanted to enter the ministry. While serving kids in youth ministry at Convent, she says she discovered that she needed to be herself in her approach. She received her master of divinity at Alliance Theological Seminary and was officially ordained in 2009. As her work is interdisciplinary with other areas, Farrow is able to get involved with social justice causes, like housing and education. In 2018, Farrow established the Kelly U. Farrow Institute for Black Preaching and Education, where she has built a sisterhood through a program, the Circle of SacredFire, which provides education and mentorship for women of color who want to get into ministry. Mental health and wellness are also a focus. More than 50 different circles have taken place across different cities like Chicago and Atlanta, with 15 at colleges, including Morehouse College and McAfee School of Theology.
“Circle of SacredFire teaches women the methodology, how to command presence in the pulpit, how to put a good, strong sermon together, but also how to sister another woman so we diminish competition and that ‘crabs in a barrel’ mentality, how to walk through womanist ethics and how to embody being a womanist, and what that means, and how to be a good servant leader,” Farrow said. “I’m teaching them that when you bring a seat to the table, you bring an extra empty chair, someone to come sit with you.” But Farrow is also committed to helping people with ownership in her HFDC building because she has been one herself from a young age. Her Harlem grandmother, Barbara Jean, served on the board of the apartment building until her passing in 2021. Farrow says Jean was intentional about passing it down and made her a shareholder when she was around 10 years old. She was also instilled with a passion for social justice from her grandmother, who had been active in the Civil Rights Movement, participated in the 1963 March on Washington, and was a member of the 1199 nurses union. “What granny taught me was that life insurance policies are the keys to getting Black people into generational wealth,” Farrow said. “When my grandmother passed away, she left us no debt. She left us a legacy of a building and money in the bank, and she had already paid for her own funeral.”
Under her leadership, the building has gained two new shareholders, after not adding any in 40 years.
“I’m in justice work, I’m in mission work,” Farrow said, “and that transcends areas for me, whether it’s in housing, whether it’s in the pulpit, whether it’s on the streets or the Bronx.”