Pentecost 26, November 18, 2018

The most significant American contribution to the church’s hymnody and song is the African American spiritual.  These are songs from an earlier time in American history that came out of the experience of a people oppressed and enslaved.  These songs have no specific composers.  They just rose to heaven from the fields where God’s children, who had been ripped from their homeland and brought to work on the plantations of the south, lived and labored and suffered and died. They are spirituals because they make reference to biblical stories and experiences that mirror their own.  They used these images and stories to talk about their sorrows and to voice their hopes for redemption.

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