Dr Mary Banks left it all for the service of the Lord

Dr Mary Banks was on the verge of being committed to a mental institution in Florida by family members as she had suddenly gone mad! Or so they thought.

Banks owned a number of very lucrative businesses in Florida, where she was born, which included three accounting firms, a restaurant, a contractors’ firm, and a maid service.

Then one day she went from company to company paying off all the workers and shutting them down. Before the end of the day, all the companies were no longer in operation.

It was this sudden drastic move that had her family members thinking she was crazy, and as time went by and she began to walk the streets ministering, they felt she was only fit for a mental institution. Even her husband walked away from her and their three children. He wanted nothing to do with this mad woman.

But Banks was simply following the commands of the Lord after having her own personal ‘Damascus road experience’ in which God revealed Himself to her and told her she should give it all up and work for him full time.

She simply obeyed.

“After shutting down the businesses, my family thought I was insane,” Banks told All Woman as she sat on her patio in her Red Hills home on Wednesday. Here she will reside for a year before heading back to her homeland.

“One of my brothers literally wanted to have me committed,” she said. “I had three children and their father thought I was insane. He departed as a result. But years later he came back to my church and got saved.”

After giving up her businesses, Banks said she and her children had nothing on which to survive.

“They thought I was having a nervous breakdown. And so I stayed out of their way because they wanted me committed.”

Now at 62, her accomplishments are many.

In 1985 she stated the Fort Lauderdale Bible Teachers International, originally Bible Talk, with 12 people in a hotel room.

Since then, Bible Teachers International has spread to 28 churches internationally with six locations in Jamaica. All intricately located in Half-Way-Tree, Trench Town, East Kingston, Bath in St Thomas, Browns Town and Ocho Rios in St Ann, the local ministry started in 1992.

“When I gave up my businesses it was very difficult,” she said. “But the Lord said go preach and that’s what I did. There were times when I said to the Lord, ‘I am not a lazy person, I know how to work, but he wouldn’t allow me. There were times when I wanted to take the children to their grandma, but the Lord said ‘no’. And so we all suffered together. We just had enough to eat.”

This is something she said she does not regret as they have learnt to be very appreciative and know what making sacrifices is like. They have learnt how to survive. All three of her children are now pastors in three of her overseas churches.

Banks was born in poverty in a farm worker town in Belgate, Florida. Her father was a contractor while her mother worked on a labour camp cooking and feeding the farm workers. She grew up with 12 siblings.

Despite her poverty, she was able to complete high school and college. But she said the bulk of her education came from divine revelation, with the title of ‘Doctor’ being an honorary title bestowed upon her.

“Knowledge of the Word came by revelation, not by education,” she pointed out.

It all started at age nine after being taken to church along with the other migrant children by a woman in the community.

This was the very first time she was entering a church and the first time that she would have heard a woman preach. On that very first visit, Banks said she was filled with the Holy Spirit.

“It was a phenomenal experience,” she recalled. “Even at that age I felt I was ordained to be a minister of the gospel.” Immediately following, she gather the little migrant kids together, sat them down and told them if they listened to her preach she would give them snacks that her mother had baked. These she stole from her mother’s kitchen.

“I didn’t know stealing was a sin at the time,” she laughed.

Banks was faithful to the gospel for a year. However, not having anyone around to teach her the bible, she backslid at age 10.

Fifteen years later God reclaimed her.

“I did nightclubs, etc, but I was different,” she recalled. “I knew there was something different about me. I had a fear of God and so there were things that I just could not do all this time. I would be at a club and hear a voice say ‘what are you doing here?’ I couldn’t enjoy drinking, drugs, etc. I guess God protected me. So those 15 years I was in the world, but there was an underlying presence of God in my life, and when He reclaimed me I knew that I was suppose to spend the rest of my life serving him. I knew that. Two weeks later I started preaching the gospel.”

It was at this point that Banks shut down all her businesses.

“I started (preaching) out of street corners,” she explained. “I would go in front of the clubs and sober up the drunks that would come out,” she smiled.

Then it was time for her to come to Jamaica, a place she had never been before and feared going.

“The lord told me to come to Jamaica. I was terrified!” she recalled. “I never knew where I was going. I didn’t know it was as modern as it is. I was so shocked when I arrived here. It was so beautiful!”

She said the Lord told her that Jamaica was to be the prototype to what was going to take place globally in turning the nation back to Christ.

“I believe it is very characteristic to Christ to come into a place like Jamaica and make a statement,” she said.

Today she has established churches in Florida, Canada, Bahamas, Trinidad, England, and Africa and more recently Pakistan.

Each church is equipped with an evangelistic school in an aim to train ministers of the gospel, not only in preaching, but also in expression through performing arts.

“People have taken to our academies,” she said. “The academy is an evangelistic school. A place they can be trained and influenced from an early age. So it will be more difficult for the enemy to capture them and lead them into things.”

Ages to the academy starts as low as three years old.

Marvin Weech, Caribbean Regional Bishop for Bible Teachers Association, and teacher at the academy in Britannia, Bahamas, described Banks as a very holy woman of God. Who, for the 18 years he has known her, lives an exemplary life.

“She is a pure example of what God should be in anybody’s life,” he told All Woman. “She treats everyone the same. She is an example of what every teacher/pastor should follow. She exemplifies Christ to the letter,” Weech said. “Everyone that she teaches or mentors is her child.”

Regional Bishop for Jamaica, Lorna Wesley said Banks has a revelation of God’s mind, heart and purpose for the body of Christ.

“If there is one thing that stands out is that she is a woman that walks with the demonstration of the love of God for his people,” Welsh said. “She leads by example.”