In this lively history and theology of the African American worship experience, Melva Wilson Costen documents how the African religious taproot, replanted in slavery and reshaped by the Christian Gospel, can now bear fruit in authentic and empowered worship. The bitter cultural soil of slavery seemed an unlikely landscape to nurture vital Christian worship, but as the author notes: The slaves' reception of the gospel message and their understanding of worship was not as the colonists presumed it would be. The liberating Word of God freed the slaves to respond in new and creative ways in the midst of their human bondage.