After some years of widowhood in Germany, during which her daughter also died, she was married to a mixed-race Moravian, Christian Protten. Together they resolved to take the gospel to the heart of slave trading communities in West Africa. Though the route into this ministry was complex and arduous, and their marriage put under great strain, the Prottens were determined to teach black Africans about Christ.

If you know anything about the history of the church, you might associate the eighteenth century with big figures like John Wesley and George Whitefield, or the ex-slave ship captain John Newton, or even the American pastor and scholar Jonathan Edwards. What probably doesn’t spring to mind is complex cross-cultural mission and the church’s engagement with the oppressed. Yet, Rebecca Protten, a once-enslaved mixed-race woman was a pioneer of just this type of ministry, and a fascinating link between the giants of church history and its multitudes of unsung labourers. Her story should open our eyes to the surprising ways in which God works and the unexpected means he uses to save and transform lives.

A Hidden Past

Rebecca’s story starts with her mother’s abduction in the early 1700s in what is now Ghana, West Africa. Along with thousands of others, Rebecca’s mother was imprisoned at the coast and then transported across the Atlantic via the brutal middle passage of the slave trade triangle. Her final destination was the small island of Antigua, where some years later Rebecca was born.

We know no more than this about Rebecca’s mother, and the only thing we know about her father is that he was white, which means, of course, that Rebecca was conceived through sexual exploitation. She was born enslaved, in a meagre compound, with a mother whose care was constrained by her long hours in the field. Even this harsh childhood was cut short when, around the age of six, Rebecca was herself abducted and taken from her small hut to St. Thomas, an island 220 miles away where she began her own forced labour.

Little Rebecca became the property of a Dutch family and never saw her mother again. She became a house servant rather than a field worker, probably because of her light skin. In this house, as she grew up, she not only learned housekeeping but also how to read. Her master was part of a Dutch reformed church which, while not condemning the wickedness of slavery, had an official policy of sharing the truths of the faith with ‘the poor and blind pagans’, and so somehow, Rebecca learned about Jesus and began to read the Bible. In later life, she recalled how the stories of Protestant martyrs gripped her heart and she made the decision in her teens to be baptised. Despite the association of this faith with her oppressors, she discovered that it was a message of rescue for the oppressed and persecuted.

The church had fulfilled its goal in Rebecca’s conversion but now there was a problem. If she was a child of God, a member of the body of Christ, how could she be a possession to be used? Her owners set her free, though she remained an employee in their household, now earning a little and having choice in where she went when not working. Rather than seeking to profit from her income, Rebecca left behind her new privilege. Unlike others who were liberated, she didn’t save to set herself up in business or look out for further advantage; rather, she gave herself to the enslaved.

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