Members of COGIC mourn Evangelist Louise D. Patterson

MEMPHIS, Tenn.– Members of the Church of God in Christ are mourning after Evangelist Louise Patterson, who was the wife of former Presiding Bishop G.E. Patterson, passed away Sunday night.

Video provided by Bountiful Blessings Ministry shows Evangelist Louise Patterson during the 2005 International Women’s Convention in Atlanta.

“I encourage you tonight to not get weary. There is a balm in Gilead. God is concerned with everything that concerns you,” Patterson said during the convention.

Longtime friends of Patterson say the Evangelis was more than a preacher. They describe the 84-year-old as classy and dynamic.

“She had the kind of charisma that drew people around her. She had it all. If somebody wanted to study how to be a bishop’s wife, just study the life of Louise Patterson,” said Reverend Bill Atkins with Greater Imani Church.

Reverend Atkins recalls Patterson speaking at his church in Raleigh in September, two months before she died, at the funeral service of a COGIC minister and sharing words about “living with God’s will even when it comes to death”

“She spoke under a great anointing and she blessed us all with her words and she was speaking even a part of her own eulogy that day,” Atkins said.

Bishop Brandon Porter says Patterson frequently attended teaching seminars at his church Greater Community Temple COGIC with messages that reached out to other minister’s wives.

“To show the women in the church how to be real persons, that we love god and so on, but we still have real-life issues that we have to work,” Bishop Porter said. “We will always remember her. We will never forget Louise Patterson.”

Porter says the Evangelists’ death is a great loss.

“But nothing is lost if you know where it is and we know that she’s safe in the arms of the lord,” he said.

Funeral services are incomplete.

Memphis Mayor Jim Strickland expressed his condolences in a statement Monday, saying:

“Evangelist Louise Patterson was always such a gracious woman of faith who impacted many lives in Memphis. Her leadership as the First Lady of the Church of God in Christ (COGIC) and as First Lady of Temple of Deliverance (COGIC), served as a model for women, which crossed denominational boundaries. In the absence of her late husband, Bishop G.E. Patterson, she continued her leadership by overseeing Bountiful Blessings making sure that his messages were heard around the world.“

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