Rebekka Protten's life is a marvelous story of a Caribbean woman that was a slave turned evangelist. She is credited with helping to inspire the rise of black Christianity in the Atlantic world. All but unknown today, Rebekka Protten left an enduring influence on African-American Christianity.
Born in 1718, Protten had a childhood conversion experience, gained her freedom from bondage, and joined a group Moravians.
She embarked on an itinerant mission, preaching to hundreds of the enslaved Africans of St. Thomas, a Danish sugar colony in the West Indies. Laboring in obscurity and weathering persecution from hostile planters, Protten and other black preachers created the earliest African Protestant congregation in the Americas.
Rebekka is a shinning example of the missionary spirit that was evidenced by the early Moravians. They were not in a quest to be a baptized version of the Peace Corps seen so often in the 20th and 21 centuries. No, the Moravians of the 18th and early 19th century were seeking to bring the astonishing good news of Jesus Christ to the lost with an eye to the conversion of the hearer. A part of that enterprise was doing service to those to whom they preached. May their tribe increase.
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