Empowerment Is Her Gospel Truth

FLINT, Mich. -- Paula McGee, svelte and with the right color thing going on in makeup and clothes, trendy eyeglasses sitting in just the right place on her nose, and the aplomb of Loretta Young in her walk and movements, is a preacher. A darn good-looking Baptist preacher.

Her mission, she says, is not just to save souls, but to help God empower them. Women’s souls.

“What I’ve found is this -- if you change the life of a woman, you change the life of her community, and if you change the life of her community, you change the world,” she says.

Known as Rev. McGee, lives in Nashville. She preaches in various churches and, as president of Paula McGee Ministries, conducts workshops and makes public speaking appearances, encouraging women with a message titled, “Accepting Your Greatness.” Her agent is shopping her book about that.

McGee, 40, has never married, but doesn’t rule it out. She has two master’s degrees, of divinity and arts in religion, and is applying to a doctorate program.

At a speaking engagement here last month, McGee seemed confident and calm as she delivered her message in a witty yet straightforward way.

Her message was serious. She wondered aloud why, on Sept. 10, 2001, there was little money available for breast cancer research, for battling domestic violence or to help single women with small children, yet two days later $40 million was pledged to fight terrorism.

“We have to define terror because there are women who are in terror every day,” McGee says. “The No. 1 killer for a lot of women is somebody that they know; it’s called domestic violence.”

Speaking before about 150 women, she seemed sure of herself, but that confidence wasn’t always there, she says. In college, she was often lonely. Her junior year at USC was extremely successful athletically, and seemingly otherwise. Her team had won the national championship and she was engaged to Darryl Strawberry, who was supposed to be baseball’s next Ted Williams.

The following summer, though, she failed to make the U.S. team for the Pan American Games. She was tired, she said, and wasn’t there mentally.

One weekend when she should have been training, she hung out with Michael Jordan. She turned to Strawberry to rescue her, but that relationship worsened. Then, in the loudness of the loneliness, she says, she heard God’s voice. McGee was called to be a minister.

“And what I want to talk with you about tonight is accepting your greatness,” she says to the women at the speaking engagement. “When it’s time for me to say goodbye, and I’m put in the box, I can promise you I will have a big smile on my face because I will have used all of my gifts, I will have exploited my gifts, there will be no woulda shoulda coulda, I wish I might have.... “