Abstract
Dr. C. Eric Lincoln in writing about the vision of The Congress of National Black Churches, an Institutional-Denominational coming together of the Seven Historic Black Churches of over 100,000 membership entitles the vision “The Search for Community in an On-going Tradition,” and writes:
“One of the peculiar legacies of the Black experience in religion in America has been the distinctive cultural patterning of the Black Christian churches. While Africa was one of the earliest and most fertile seedbeds of Christianity, the West African diaspora who came eventually to embrace the faith in America did so largely on the basis of their contact with the prevailing Anglo-Saxon culture here in the New World. In consequence, bath and baby came in the same catchment, and the African expatriates who had already been forced into a common secular mode by virtue of being Black and African, now found themselves bequeathed a religious faith as varigated in style and conformation as the roots of European sectarianism could make it. Hence, ‘conversion’ for the African diaspora meant considerably more than the voluntary assumption of the Cross. It meant also the involuntary assumption of the peculiar budens of Anglicanism, Lutheranism, Congregationalism, or one of several varieties of Presbyterianism, Baptism or Methodism.