A forgotten classic

REBECCA’S REVIVAL:
Creating Black Christianity in the
Atlantic World
By Jon F. Sensback
Harvard University Press. 320 pages. £16.45
ISBN 978 0 674 022 577

This extraordinary story deserves to be better known. It is the life of Rebecca, a ‘mulatto’ freed slave who, as a teenage evangelist, drew slaves to Christ in the plantation island of St Thomas.

This was in the 1730s, some 55 years before Carey gets going as ‘the father of modern missions’, and well before Wilberforce’s abolition of slavery movement! Rebecca travels the island barefoot, sharing Jesus and teaching and encouraging slaves to turn to Christ and follow Him.

The well-researched setting is the world of the slave trade, where plantation owners opposed, often violently, anyone evangelising their workers. Slaves who tried to escape had a foot amputated, people returning from a church meeting were beaten up, and owners set their slaves’ Bibles on fire, extinguishing them in their faces. Yet despite this, Rebecca faithfully kept visiting, and many were converted.

Interwoven with these two themes is the amazing devotion and sacrificial service of Moravian missionaries , prepared to suffer with the blacks (e.g. Rebecca and two missionaries spend three months in a horrible prison). Backed by continuous round-the-clock prayer, believers pioneered missions in many lands. Sensbach doesn’t flinch from sharing the eccentricities and excesses of this movement, yet God used them mightily.

Rebecca therefore lived between worlds: free/slave, Caribbean/Europe/Africa, and in one sense didn’t belong anywhere. Gifted in many languages, an excellent personal worker, she was a black woman leader in the Caribbean, in Germany, and later in West Africa, in a day when that was almost unique. Her work in St Thomas was an exemplar for the later growth of the black American church.

As a professor of history in Florida university, the author has meticulously combed documents in several languages to piece together a story full of personal and situational interest.