‘Swing Low’ fills a void in American church history by giving voice to hidden figures as it proves the value of black Christian witness.
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In my second year of seminary, I began the first of two semesters of church history. I quickly realized I was learning a story of God’s people, but not the entire story of God’s people. Writing history textbooks is hard because the authors have to survey a broad topic concisely. Yet it stuck out to me that accounts of nonmajority Western and global Christians were often absent. As an African American, my family’s story was missing.
I’m delighted to see a significant effort to fix that problem with a two-volume work on black Christianity. In one volume, Swing Low: A History of Black Christianity in the United States, Walter Strickland—assistant professor of systematic and contextual theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary—narrates a history often left in the margins. Then, in a companion volume, Swing Low: An Anthology of Black Christianity in the United States, he and a team of editors anthologize lesser-read saints from the past telling their stories.
