Adventist power couple: Pastor’s wife joins him at the bar

Five years after Seventh-Day Adventist (SDA) Pastor Omar Oliphant was called to the bar, his wife, Sharette (nee Kirby), has followed in his footsteps, overcoming pandemic hurdles to form a husband-and-wife lawyer couple.

“The truth is, it really does bring excitement; I feel very good, I feel more proud of her being called to the bar than I felt for myself,” Omar told The Gleaner, five years after he himself was featured in the newspaper as the first SDA pastor to become a lawyer.

“I think it’s wonderful in the context of our relationship where we share goals together and grow together as a couple and for me seeing her reach her goal to become an attorney, I’m over the moon.”

For Sharette, who grew up mostly in Old England, Manchester (Jamaica) and attended Bishop Gibson High School in Mandeville, it was the fulfilment of a lifelong goal.

“It’s a surreal feeling, it’s a dream realised,” Sharette said. “I’ve always wanted to be an attorney, I knew this from before high school. If you look in my school yearbook and all of that, my ambition was to be an attorney.”

Growing up in a single-parent home, Sharette’s ambition was shaped by what she saw happening to her mother, and from an early age she vowed to help change the course of events for others experiencing similar challenges.

“I chose to study law because I saw the challenges my mom went through and I had an absent father,” she explained.

“I used to listen Miss Haughton (on RJR) a lot and I used to hear how she used her standing at the time to help families and I always used to say that when I grow older, I want to be an attorney so that I can help families in that regard.

“So, it has always been a dream but the finances were never there. It’s a dream in your heart but the option wasn’t there in reality to pursue law as a 17-year-old leaving high school.”

Putting law on the back burner, she pursued psychology at Northern Caribbean University, with a minor in political science and pre-law.

On the verge of finishing her first degree in psychology, she got the opportunity to do her master’s and grabbed it.

“I got the opportunity to do my master’s in counselling psychology based on a paper I wrote which had to do with law and political science and why people vote the way they do. I did it for a psychological testing class and that professor offered me the graduate assistantship to continue in the master’s programme.”

Armed with her bachelor’s and master’s in psychology, her teaching qualifications from HEART VDTI, and employed as a career development officer at HEART NSTA, Sharette’s childhood dream of studying law nevertheless still blazed within her, remaining unquenchable. She yielded.

“Once he (Omar) was finished and I saw that this could be a reality for me at this time, I jumped at the opportunity,” she relayed.

Using the direct entry programme, she completed her law studies at the UWI in two years, finishing in 2020 and got called to the bar on December 15, 2022: mission completed.

The couple, with three children, relocated from St Ann to Kingston in 2018, where Omar is senior pastor at Andrews Memorial SDA Church. Sharette serves as president of the East Jamaica Conference’s Shepherdess Chapter, leading a cadre of pastoral wives towards empowerment and self-actualisation. She is also senior youth leader of the Central Jamaica Conference.

So, she was asked, should Jamaica expect a wife and husband team of lawyers to join forces on cases, or even establish a law firm together, such as Oliphant and Oliphant, or Oliphant and Wife (or husband), or simply the Oliphants?

“I plead the fifth on that,” she laughed.