Accents • Spring 2008 Volume 38, No. 1   [back]
BOOK REVIEW

Rebecca's Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World by Jon F. Sensbach
Harvard University Press, 2005. 978-0-674-02257-7

Rebecca was born in 1718 on the island of Antigua. Transported to St. Thomas and freed from slavery as a girl, she was drawn to the Savior in a dramatic conversion and became one of the first Afro-Caribbeans to join the young Moravian mission. As a person of color she had access to the slave communities in a way that the Europeans never would, and she became an itinerant evangelist, preaching a Gospel of spiritual—and, implicitly, physical—liberation to the slaves. Sensbach argues that it was she and other Black preachers who created “the earliest African Protestant congregation in the Americas.” Her life included persecution by the colonial and commercial authorities, trial for inciting the slaves, two marriages (one of them to the German missionary Matthew Freundlich), travel to Europe, a long sojourn in Herrnhaag and Herrnhut, and a second missionary career in West Africa. She may have been the first black woman ordained in western Christianity. For a time, her prominence in the Moravian world was second only to that of Zinzendorf.

Sensbach’s biography of Rebecca also serves as narrowly-focused history of the Moravian missionary movement of the 18th century. Among its many scholarly contributions, two of them stand out. It tells the story of the beginnings of Moravian mission, most often told heretofore with a Eurocentric bias, from the perspective of the Afro-Caribbeans who received and responded to it. And Sensbach presents a new interpretation of the Moravian attitude toward slavery. Previous scholars have emphasized the fact that, while the first Moravian missionaries did not challenge the institution of slavery, preferring instead to offer spiritual freedom in Jesus Christ, their very preaching to the slaves was subversive to the slave system. Sensbach points out, however, that by the 1770s, when the Moravian historian Christian Oldendorp wrote the first account of the origins of the Caribbean mission, he was defending it to the planters as a means to make their slaves more docile.

The chief virtue of Rebecca’s Revival is its readability and the sense of drama with which Sensbach writes. Dean Frank Crouch recently remarked that “this book could be made into a movie.” He is correct.

– Reviewed by Otto Dreydoppel, Jr.
Assistant Professor of Church History