Today’s guest post comes to us from Thomas Kidd for The GospelCoalition.org.

There has been a lot of discussion lately about race and evangelicals, some of it spawned by ERLC and TGC’s phenomenally successful and provocative MLK50 conference. Anyone wanting to foster understanding and Christian love between people of different ethnicities will also need to read in a multicultural way.

In that spirit, I wanted to offer a list of five great books on African American evangelical history.

1. 1. Albert Raboteau, Slave Religion: The ‘Invisible Institution’ in the Antebellum South (revised ed., 2004). This authoritative yet readable book is one of the classics of African American history generally. It remains a great starting point for anyone wanting to know about the development of the black church in the slave South.
   2. Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews, Doctrine and Race: African American Evangelicals and Fundamentalism Between the Wars (2017). In this much-needed book, Mathews explained how traditionalist African American pastors did not fit easily into modernist or fundamentalist camps in the early 20th century, but instead crafted their own kind of evangelicalism.
   3. Thabiti Anyabwile, May We Meet in the Heavenly World: The Piety of Lemuel Haynes (2009). If I had to pick one African American church leader I wish more Christians knew about, it would probably be Haynes. A Revolutionary War soldier, Haynes went on to become a pastor of a largely white church in New England, a critic of American slavery, and an advocate of the New Divinity theology of Jonathan Edwards’s successors.

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About Nelson Searcy

Nelson Searcy is an experienced church growth strategist, pastor, church planter and coach, consulting with churches around the world. As founder of Church Leader Insights and the Renegade Pastors Network, he has personally trained more than 3,500 church leaders in over 45 denominations through live events, seminars and monthly coaching. Nelson is also the Founding and Lead Pastor of The Journey Church, with locations across New York City and in Boca Raton, FL. Nelson and his church routinely appear on lists such as “The 50 Most Influential Churches” and “The 25 Most Innovative Leaders.” He is the author of over 100 church growth resources and 18+ books, including The Renegade Pastor: Abandoning Average in Your Life, Ministry and The Difference Maker: Using Your Everyday Life for Eternal Impact, and At the Cross with the People Who Were There. He and his wife, Kelley, have one son, Alexander.