Supermodel and brand icon Kathy Ireland shared with ChurchLeaders the powerful story of how her Christian faith began while she was modeling in Paris at 18 years old. Although she grew up believing in God, Ireland said her family did not truly know God until her mother became a Christian when Ireland was a teenager.
Appearing on the covers of Vogue, Teen, Forbes and Cosmopolitan, among others—including multiple Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Issue covers—Ireland founded kathy ireland Worldwide, a brand licensing company, in 1993. The brand would go on to be ranked No. 15 in the world.
In 1988, Ireland married her husband, Dr. Greg Olsen. The couple have three children.
Kathy Ireland: ‘I Knew That [the Bible] in My Hands Was the Truth’
Ireland recalled a lonely night in Paris in 1981.
“It’s 1981, and it’s the middle of the night, and I’ve got jet lag and I’m bored and lonely,” Ireland told ChurchLeaders. “My mom stuck a Bible in my suitcase, and we never had a Bible in our house. I didn’t know how to read a Bible.”
“So I open up, and I open to the book of Matthew,” she said, “and I started reading. And as I was reading, I knew that what I had in my hands was the truth.”
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“There was nobody in the room with me saying, like, be this denomination or that denomination. It was just, like, I want to follow Jesus,” she said. “And Jesus was nothing like the sound bites I had heard like, ‘Oh, it’s not good for women and all of this.’” Instead, Ireland realized, “Oh my goodness, he loves women. He’s revolutionary. He honors women.”
“So I got saved right then and there in that apartment,” she said.
Ireland continued, “That relationship gave me the confidence to walk away if something wasn’t right. If he’s with us, who can be against us? And I didn’t care—it’s like, no, I’m not going to your party. I didn’t care what people thought.”
At 44, Kathy Ireland Got Serious About Her Relationship With God
Ireland acknowledged that while she became a Christian in that moment, she lacked discipleship early in her faith and spent years “picking and choosing” which parts of Scripture to follow. She said that didn’t change until age 44, when a moment of conviction during a women’s retreat led her to begin reading the Bible daily from Genesis to Revelation and prioritize time with God each morning.
“My big regret is that as I continued to read, there were verses I loved, and I’d read those over and over. And there were other verses that I was sure were a issue of translation or culture or a typo, but it didn’t pertain to me,” she said. “I wasn’t discipled and I picked and chose, and so I was trying to mold God into what I wanted him to be rather than surrendering and letting him mold me into the person he made me.”
“It wasn’t until I was 44 years old that I finally read from Genesis to Revelation,” Ireland shared. “Some friends asked me to come to a women’s retreat. I had every excuse in the world not to go, and I went.”
“And it was during a really quiet time of worship of just a woman strumming the guitar, and we were all praying on our own,” she said. “And I was sitting there praying.”
