Rebecca Protten was born in Antigua, sold as a child into slavery on St. Thomas, freed in her early teens, and by the 1730s was preaching to enslaved people on that Danish Caribbean island. Historian Jon Sensbach believes she was the first ordained woman of African descent in the Protestant tradition. He also argues that the congregation she helped build was the earliest Black Protestant congregation in the New World. If he is right, Black Protestant Christianity started earlier than the usual story says, in a different place, and with a woman at its center.
The usual story starts in North America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, with independent Black Baptist and Methodist churches and preachers whose names many readers already know. Protten’s life does not erase that story. It comes before it. And the documents that preserve her life show something the familiar version tends to blur: enslaved Africans were not simply handed a faith. They took hold of it, argued with it, and spread it themselves.
Where does the record of her life come from?
Sensbach is a professor of history at the University of Florida. He came across Protten’s story years before he had time to pursue it. When he did, he went to the Moravian Church Archive in Germany and worked through the records there, where he found many references to Rebecca and to the mission she led. His book, Rebecca’s Revival, grew out of that research.
That matters for how we read every claim that follows. Most of what survives about Protten was written down by the Moravian missionaries she worked with, plus colonial trial records and a handful of her own letters. The missionaries had their own assumptions and blind spots. Sensbach is open about this. When he turns to what enslaved converts thought, he admits that “the records are contradictory as well.” What we know is real, but it reaches us largely through other people’s pens.
How did a girl sold into slavery become a preacher?
According to Sensbach, the records say Rebecca was born in Antigua and sold as a young girl on St. Thomas. Her father appears to have been a white planter and her mother an enslaved African woman. On St. Thomas a Dutch family bought her. They taught her the basics of Christianity and taught her to read, and they seem to have freed her at around thirteen or fourteen.
The missionaries came from the Moravian Brotherhood in Germany. They arrived on St. Thomas in the 1730s, a sugar colony like many Caribbean islands, and began preaching among the enslaved. It did not go well. In Sensbach’s words, “They couldn’t gain any traction among the slaves.” They did not speak the language. They had trouble getting access. They did not understand the people they had come to reach.
Rebecca, literate and free, was the exception. The records say she was drawn to their evangelical message and joined them. The Moravians quickly named her an elder, a female missionary sent out to preach among the enslaved. Sensbach describes the relationship as mutual: “they eagerly reached out to Rebecca at the same time that she reached out to them.” She knew the language. She understood what the missionaries were trying to say, and she understood where the enslaved were coming from.
The result, as Sensbach reads the records, was the start of the very first Black Protestant congregation in the New World. This is his historical argument, and he frames it as what the evidence allows us to say, not as a fact beyond dispute.
Who actually built the church on St. Thomas?
The standard picture of a mission moves in one direction. Missionaries arrive, and local people receive. Sensbach’s research turns that around. His central claim is that “the missionaries could never have succeeded without the efforts of the Afro-Caribbean people themselves.” He goes further: “They were the ones that drove this ministry, this mission.”
Protten was not alone. Sensbach says dozens of others went onto the plantations to preach, including Afro-Caribbean men who did among enslaved men what she did among enslaved women. The white missionaries depended on them.
Women carried most of the weight. Sensbach reports that the congregational records put women at something like 60 to 70 percent of the members. Protten was placed over the female half of the mission and drew hundreds of enslaved African and Afro-Caribbean women into it. His summary is plain: “This was largely female driven movement.”
She was also known well beyond the women’s side of the work. Sensbach describes her as the go-between that both the enslaved population and the missionaries relied on. On a small island at that time, he says, she was famous. Today, by contrast, “her name has sort of been lost to history.”
Why would enslaved people accept the religion of the people enslaving them?
This is the hardest question in the story, and Sensbach calls it the central one. The Moravians preached spiritual equality and believed the gospel was for everyone, regardless of skin color. They also believed, like most white Christians of their day, that God had ordained slavery and social hierarchy. They knew planters and officials would expel them if they preached Christianity as a doctrine of liberation, so they held back on anything that sounded antislavery.
Over time the compromise got worse. The missionaries bought enslaved people and a sugar plantation. The same people who sat in the congregation as brothers and sisters also worked the mission’s sugar fields. Sensbach does not soften it: “the paradox was not resolved, let’s put it that way.”
The objection writes itself. If the missionaries made peace with slavery, wasn’t the faith they brought just a tool of control? Sensbach takes that seriously. He also points to evidence that enslaved converts saw something the arrangement could not contain.
Some of the appeal was practical. Many converts were recent forced migrants from Africa, some likely still holding their African religions, yet they were among the most committed. The mission taught people to read and write, and many left messages in their own hand. There was also a strategic gain that was harder to see. By joining the master’s religion, Sensbach says, “you give yourself a basis upon which to critique that master’s power.”
The Moravian documents show that critique being used. Sensbach describes records of enslaved Black Christians “going up to white slaveholders and accusing them of being un-Christian” and telling them, in effect, that they themselves were bound for heaven and the slaveholders were not. He calls it a courageous act. He sums up the conviction underneath it this way: “Christianity is a religion for me, not in spite of my being enslaved and damned and forgotten, but because I’m enslaved and damned and forgotten, it’s my Christianity, it’s gonna set me free.”
That is a sharp reversal. The planters and the missionaries treated hierarchy as God’s order. The enslaved converts read the same faith as saying that the forgotten were the ones God had chosen, and that people who held others in bondage stood condemned. The missionaries could keep antislavery language out of their sermons. They could not keep their converts from drawing conclusions.
Sensbach then makes a claim about what came next. He argues that this message of “redemptive equality” took shape on St. Thomas in the 1730s and 1740s and later became influential for Black theological thought among Methodists, Baptists, and others. That is his reading of how ideas traveled, and readers should hold it as an argument. If it holds, a theology usually traced to North American Black churches had an earlier Caribbean form.
The conviction those converts grasped is not foreign to the New Testament. Paul writes in Galatians 3:28, “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” In context, Paul is teaching that all who believe stand on equal footing as heirs of God’s promise. The records do not tell us which texts Protten preached, so we should not put this verse in her mouth. But the equality she and her hearers insisted on was not an invention laid over the faith. It was something the missionaries had preached and then declined to follow all the way.
What happened when the colony put her on trial?
Protten’s own life tested how far that equality could be pushed. She married one of the white missionaries. To the planter class, Sensbach says, the interracial marriage was a direct affront. The couple were arrested and charged with sedition, accused of spreading a dangerous doctrine of equality to the enslaved and threatening the whole slave society.
The trial records survive, and Sensbach treats them as a key source. Rebecca was made to testify. She was told she would be jailed unless she renounced her marriage and admitted spreading an incendiary message. She refused. Sensbach likens her to Martin Luther, who refused to recant before the authorities of his day and rested his stand on his faith; Protten likewise would not trade her conviction for her safety. She was jailed, “she stayed in jail for nine months,” and the authorities intended to sell her back into slavery. The leader of the church arrived unannounced from Europe and got her released.
Sensbach says the ordeal pushed both Rebecca and the missionaries to pull back further on their message.
How did her life end up in West Africa?
After St. Thomas, Protten lived for twenty years in a Moravian community in central Germany. Her first husband died. She then married Christian Protten, who was born on Africa’s Gold Coast to an African mother and a Danish father, spent his first ten years in Africa, and was educated in Denmark. In the 1760s the two went to Accra, in what is now Ghana, as missionaries.
The setting was grim. They were based at a Danish castle whose main purpose was to hold enslaved Africans and load them onto ships. There they ran a school for mixed-race children of Danish fathers and African mothers. Sensbach is careful about how much we can say. He notes that “the records are much more vague for that part of their mission” and says her success there did not match what happened in the West Indies. He mentions that some Ghanaian historians argue the school later became a foundation for Ghanaian education under British rule. That is their argument, which he considers worth weighing, not a settled finding.
Protten died in Accra in the 1780s, still preaching. Sensbach calls it “this incredible sort of reverse transatlantic life.” Millions of Africans were carried by force to the Americas. She traveled the other way, by choice, as a missionary.
She also left her own words. Several of her letters survive, which Sensbach notes is very rare for a woman of African descent in the eighteenth century. They show that she saw her life as a test God had set before her, and believed “that God had chosen her for some special mission in life, and that mission was to preach.” That is her own explanation of why she did what she did, and it is the closest we can get to her view of her life.
What does this change, and what does it not?
It is worth being exact about what Protten’s story corrects. Sensbach’s claim is about Black Protestant congregations in the New World. It does not settle when Black people first became Christians. What it moves is the start of organized Black Protestant church life in the Atlantic world: earlier than the usual North American starting point, into the Caribbean, and into the hands of a formerly enslaved woman.
It also changes who we picture as the builders. The records do not describe Africans passively absorbing a white religion. They describe missionaries who could not do the work, Black men and women who did it, and converts who used the faith to judge the people who claimed it while enslaving them.
And the story is not only in the past. Sensbach visited the congregation on St. Thomas several years ago and saw its original building from the 1730s. “The congregation is still there, still very active.” Most of its members and most of its leaders, including its ministers, were women. Sensbach describes a direct congregational line of close to 300 years running from Rebecca Protten to the present. A movement that began with a freed girl who could read, and with enslaved women who refused to accept that God had sided with their masters, is still meeting.