The Story of the Black Church in America with Walter Strickland and Michael Horton

This transcript has been lightly edited from an automated transcription for clarity and readability. While we've worked to preserve each speaker's words faithfully, errors may remain.

1. 00:00

   Walter Strickland

   She goes, “how you doing?” And so I'm telling her all the stuff that is going on. And she's just kind of listening. We're walking, and I'm just going on and on about how the world was just crashing in on me. And it seems as if no matter what I said, she was gonna have the same answer. She said, you prayin’? You fastin’? Is your Bible torn up?

2. 00:20

   Michael Horton

   That's great.

3. 00:23

   Walter Strickland

   And then I looked at her, and I—and she just said that. She said it again, as if I didn't hear. “You prayin’? You fastin’? Is your Bible torn up?” By that time, I was just sobbing. She started crying too because she saw me crying, and she goes, “What did you expect? This is a fallen world that our Lord is redeeming. We're not in the kingdom yet.”

4. 00:43

   Michael Horton

   We don't want to live in the Village Green at the end of the day. We can all leave and return to our houses of worship, but our goal is to encourage conversational theology in the Village Green where we can rub shoulders with Christians from different traditions and expressions.

5. 01:08

   Michael Horton

   Well, it's fun being able to get together at the Evangelical Theological Society. We usually get together in our studio and do White Horse Inn together, and love having you as one of the four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. It's great to have you on, Walter. We're going to talk about your recently published two-volume work. The first is a history, Swing Low, a history of African American Christianity. And then the second is an anthology where you can actually read selections that you have drawn together. There have been other histories of African American Christianity and anthologies. Why is yours different?

6. 02:00

   Walter Strickland

   Well, first of all, it's good to be with you in this environment. Yeah, Swing Low is an explicitly theological telling of the story of African American Christianity. Several accounts have told the tales of denominational development. So you have the National Baptist Convention, which later became, you know, splintered off into the National Progressive National Baptist Convention. You'll have the development of the CME Church, the AME Church, and so on and so forth, which is a good story that we need to have told. You'll have other tellings of the story that are focusing on the public impact of the Black church, oftentimes centering around the 20th century manifestation of that in the civil rights movement and others, both the abolitionist movement going back into the antebellum period, and so on and so forth. You'll have others that are more mid-20th century to late 20th century that focus on Black radicalism, using Black radicalism to curate the story. Insofar as you're radical, you are Christian, which that's a story that's often told by Black liberationists. So while I thought especially the denominational development, the public impact sort of tellings were helpful, I thought that one needed to be written that has a theological anchor to it. And the first chapter of both books, there's five theological anchors that I've identified. And what I did is that I took the primary sources, I read as many of them as I could. And while these pastors and theologians, they weren't trying to establish these five anchors, I did basically an inductive study of them and found these consistencies, these themes, these doctrinal themes across all the primary sources. So what I do throughout the book is that I document how the development of these anchors, the way that they've been emphasized differently throughout time. But then especially for the liberationists, how I say that they have dramatically redefined some of them and reordered them in ways that are fairly inconsistent with what's happened in the first 250 years of African American Christianity. So that's the theological telling of the story is what is the major contribution. And the two-volume set is because, as you said, one's the theological narrative. The second one are the sermons, the oratory, the autobiography, the correspondence that drives that narrative. Because in the writing of the African American Christian narrative, because academics in the sort of mainline progressive sort of academy and church have told the story, they emphasize those and sort of retell those stories in a way that I think is disingenuous to the primary sources. So I said, you know what, I'm going to tell a story, and then I'm going to offer the world the receipts, so to speak. So then we don't have to take their interpretation of these primary sources, because these primary sources can now speak for themselves.

7. 05:02

   Michael Horton

   Okay, basically, make up your own mind. These are—you're not coming in with a heavy-handed—it all led to liberation theology and Protestant liberalism.

8. 05:13

   Walter Strickland

   Yeah. And that's, I think, a misunderstanding of — because if you read the literature, it seems like, oh, the progressive sort of liberationist voice is the predominant theological voice in the African American tradition. I would say it's predominant because of its volume, but it's not predominant in the number of people who ascribe to that theology. So if you take these sort of four quadrants—you have African American liberalism, and a James Cone or a Gayraud Wilmore will be in that quadrant. But then you go down to a more Anglicized liberal, Bultmannian reality. Then you have the more evangelical, historic conservative bucket. You have a Mike Horton in there. You have a — I threw you in there with the greats. You're welcome. You have a Millard Erickson, names like that. But if you go back up to the other quadrant of historically orthodox African American sort of theologians, who goes in that bucket? There's a vacuum there. So what happened is that James Cone was seen as covering the entire—like, both of those quadrants, but he only covers one. But the vast majority of the African American Christians that have, you know, been in the faith tradition are in the bucket where there's not a written witness to this tradition that began as an oral tradition. So what we're trying to—what I'm trying to do is Swing Low. I'm trying to raise the voices. To tell the story, to offer the primary sources, to fill up that bucket and say, just because these people weren't in the academy, existing in a published or parish environment where they had to write books to keep their jobs, that doesn't mean it didn't exist. And moreover, that's the lion's share of the tradition that's been unaccounted for in large part in the written tradition.

9. 07:06

   Michael Horton

   And how much of it is people in that bucket couldn't get into evangelical seminaries for theological training?

10. 07:13

    Walter Strickland

    That's actually a significant aspect of this, because if we go back to the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, there were lots of Bible-believing—and so African Americans would oftentimes prefer Bible-believing as opposed to what would be the equivalent of evangelical or conservative or something like that, because of the other kind of that would come with that.

11. 07:32

    Michael Horton

    Cultural, yeah.

12. 07:34

    Walter Strickland

    So if you talk about Bible-believing Christians, because African Americans had not been in the secular academy, they were not in Princeton, you know, dealing with the same sort of fights that J. Gresham Machen were dealing with. They weren't, you know, dealing with all those German liberalism, higher critical thought, evolution. They were getting trained in their churches. So they weren't having to contend with all that. That was the thing that was going on in a place that they weren't invited. So now the fundamentalist-modernist controversy is really heating up. And they're saying, hey, we want to go to Bible college too, and we want to go to a Bible-believing school because that is nonsense. There was a full-throated denouncement of like, so you're saying the Bible is just a literary document? That's insane. Like, that doesn't make any sense, you know, because the Bible is authoritative. So all that to say, as African Americans started to desire to go to Bible college and then later seminary, there was a desire to do it in places that theologically aligned with their doctrinal assumptions. And those were evangelical institutions. But throughout that time period, they couldn't get into those schools. So what would happen is they weren't trained formally as academics. They were trained by a father in the ministry that they would intern, apprentice with. And then after, you know, years of sort of being under that leadership, they would then send them out to take their own church. And so there wasn't the credentialing. While there was still training, there wasn't the credentialing that we see that then leads to academic volumes and things like that. Where that was happening, however, was in the more mainline sort of progressive sort of theological spaces, because they were socially progressive. Unfortunately, that often came with theological progressivism. So then you have people who are historically orthodox Christians going into places where they could study, but their theological commitments weren't matching their own, but they just want to go study anyhow. And so, and that's a very interesting dynamic. And so that's really one of the reasons why Black evangelicalism, which is an actual—the National Black Evangelical Association and all those who are within it, it's a fairly undocumented phenomenon because they were primarily pastors and they weren't academics writing histories of their movement or even the theology of that movement as well.

13. 09:52

    Michael Horton

    What are the five anchors?

14. 09:53

    Walter Strickland

    They're all in the nomenclature of the African American tradition. So the first one is big God. And if we think about—and I'm gonna return back to the antebellum period several times because I start tracing these in the beginning and then I trace their development. So if you go back to when African Americans really began to become Christians in great number, which was during the Great Awakenings, there was a need for a God to be sovereign. There was a need for a God to be big and a God to be bigger than their captors. And not only that, the God of the Exodus in particular, is because God is the same yesterday, today, and forever. That God is the same God now. He has the same value system. He doesn't like when people are in bondage, just like he didn't like it then. He wants them to be free, and not just for freedom's sake, but so they can worship him. And that's why a lot of the abolitionists were doing their work, because it wasn't just freedom for freedom's sake. It was freedom to worship. And that's a point that's lost in the story. I documented all that in the second volume of the anthology. They were trusting that, okay, we know God hates slavery. And God is going to bring us out of this in his timing. So there had to be a trust in a God who was sovereign and able. And so, big God. The second one is Jesus. There was obviously the use of Christ as a—you know, understanding of Christology and so forth. But the nearness of Jesus is just a—was a treasure to African Americans throughout time. Some of the most unlovely aspects of slave life was the abuse and the beatings and the sort of degradation that would go on there. But Jesus came near to them. The Spirit was in them, obviously, for those who are in Christ. But we also know that Jesus was also one who faced suffering. So they have seen as slaves people who have been beaten, people who have been bruised, blood that was shed. But then what they saw with Christ is that that's not just blood shed, that's redeeming blood. And so the blood of Jesus is an emphasis within Christology, African American sort of Christology, that I emphasize there in that second anchor of Jesus. Because there's an identification with suffering, but he's not just someone who is like them. He's also the man who is God. And so he's a redeemer too.

15. 12:10

    Michael Horton

    He's the big God.

16. 12:12

    Walter Strickland

    Yeah. So that's the second one. The third one is two sides of the same coin being conversion and walking in the Spirit. So there's this definite sort of tethering of that in the tradition. There's a—I was converted and then filled with the Spirit. And so now this is how I walk in newness of life. So especially as you go farther back into the tradition, there's a large emphasis on the reality of conversion and the goodness of the power of conversion, which is the work of the Spirit and that power of being indwelt. The fourth one is the Good Book, Scripture. African Americans throughout half of the history in America have been legally illiterate. So legally, it's been the law of the land—well, it's been against the law, I should say—for African Americans to read, for half of, you know, the time that people have been in this country, on this land. So that the story was told orally, again, an oral tradition. There was a latching on to stories. Narratives were told, not only in the invisible institution, which is like a church service in the corners of slave plantations where there were worship services away from the master's gaze, but also as they're in the fields, they were telling the story of the Exodus, they're telling the story of Joseph, they're telling the story of how God was faithful to his people. They were saying, you know what? God is still working in the same way. Hey, remember this story of Ruth? There was this going on here. And so God is protecting, looking out for them. So that's how the Good Book, even though it was told orally, was being transmitted from generation to generation. But then after emancipation, there was a massive move towards literacy. And it wasn't literacy so we can go get jobs. It was literacy so we can read the Bible for ourselves, because there are so many potentially misinterpreted passages in the Bible given to African Americans to make them docile and make them sort of lean into their servitude. And they said, no, we want to read the Bible for ourselves now. And so you have this sort of surge of literacy that's unprecedented in the modern world of African Americans from 1865 to 1890. It's unbelievable. It's not documented anywhere else, but it was motivated by a desire to read the Bible.

17. 14:17

    Michael Horton

    Sounds like the Reformation.

18. 14:19

    Walter Strickland

    Yeah. Yeah, seriously. That's one of the only other times where I would say there is a massive movement towards literacy—

19. 14:24

    Michael Horton

    For that purpose.

20. 14:25

    Walter Strickland

    Yeah, for that very purpose. Yeah. So then we have the fifth one, which is deliverance. So God is delivering his people holistically, you know. Yes, spiritually, which is also sort of emphasized in that third anchor of conversion and walking in the Spirit, but also God does care about the world in which people live, and he wants them to flourish as a sign pointing towards the kingdom. I do mention that throughout the history of the church of African American tradition, there has been a historic sort of ethos of deliverance that they're seeing in the Scripture as a hermeneutical theme. But that has taken on new dynamics in the middle of the 20th century with Black liberation theology. And then that is primarily an economic, political, social reality. But the line—here, the tradition has [seen] it as a more holistic reality.

21. 15:14

    Michael Horton

    Deliverance, starting with mainly deliverance from sin and death, and the bondage—

22. 15:25

    Walter Strickland

    Of sin. Yeah. The ravages of sin, as they manifest not only in them, around them, and then to them, are being mitigated in that last anchor.

23. 15:42

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24. 16:35

    Michael Horton

    There's an interesting contrast I'd love to get your feedback on. So, obviously different time periods here, but Frederick Douglass wrote: “What I have said respecting and against religion, I mean strictly to apply to the slaveholding religion of this land, and with no possible reference to Christianity proper.”

25. 17:02

    Walter Strickland

    Mm-hmm.

26. 17:03

    Michael Horton

    For between the Christianity of this land and the Christianity of Christ, I recognize the widest possible difference. Indeed, I can see no reason but the most deceitful one for calling the religion of this land”—and then you have Langston Hughes and others in the Harlem Renaissance feeling a deeper alienation—like, no, you can't separate Christianity from the religion of this land. “Listen, Christ, you did all right in your day, I reckon, but that day's gone now. They ghosted you up a swell story too called the Bible, but it's dead now. Don't be slow about moving. The world is mine from now on, and nobody's gonna sell me to a king or a general or a millionaire.” What happened?

27. 17:57

    Walter Strickland

    What do we do with that? So the quote you read is from Douglass. That's an appendix to one of his three autobiographies, which to write three autobiographies is a feat. If every, you know, if we all did—

28. 18:11

    Michael Horton

    Yeah!

29. 18:11

    Walter Strickland

    Much less his autobiography, but three of them. But anyway, so that's an appendix to one of them where he was really, I think, doing some helpful work of disassociating biblical faith with the expression of Christianity as it manifested in really unhelpful things for African Americans that I believe are ultimately unbiblical. So but then Hughes is saying, you know what, they're actually the same thing. You can't separate its expression from its essence. And so that was the tension there. So, and then if you move forward to like Black evangelicals, like a William H. Bentley, who was the third president of the National Black Evangelical Association, he would help us to continue to do the work that Frederick Douglass was doing and saying, you know what, just because the faith was misused, that doesn't mean that the faith is bankrupt. That's a misuse of something. So we can't judge that by its misuse. We have to go back to the primary sources, which primary source is the Scripture.

30. 19:07

    Michael Horton

    So ultimately, the Bible, the Good Book, can liberate us from our enslavers, from those who've misused the Bible.

31. 19:16

    Walter Strickland

    And misuse the—yeah, misuse the Bible and the misuse of the faith that they were using to enslave us. So, Derek Kissel would call this a reclamation faith. The same faith that was given to do ill is the faith that was purposed for deliverance. And so that dynamic is powerful. And so I'm struck by the image of—you have a large plantation, you have a master who's reading the Bible, reading the very words of God, but the misappropriation, misapplication of those words are just devastating, grieves the heart of God.

32. 19:53

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, it's like Howard Thurman tells the story, who was a mentor to Martin Luther King, right?

33. 19:59

    Walter Strickland

    Yeah, early on. Yeah.

34. 20:00

    Michael Horton

    He tells the story of his grandmother not being able to read anything of Paul's writings.

35. 20:08

    Walter Strickland

    Yeah.

36. 20:10

    Michael Horton

    Simply because, and not simply, but because he told Onesimus to go back to Philemon.

37. 20:20

    Walter Strickland

    And those passages were used — 1 Corinthians chapter seven, “remain as you are.”

38. 20:24

    Michael Horton

    Yeah.

39. 20:25

    Walter Strickland

    Okay, so now I'm supposed to be saved and remain as I am? That's a misapplication of that passage. But yeah, remain in your servitude. So yeah, with Onesimus and throughout Paul's writings, you know, those were really utilized against African Americans. But as that slave master was reading and misinterpreting these passages to slaves for his own economic benefit, these slaves were hearing the Word of God. And the Word is alive and active and sharper than any double-edged sword. Hebrews speaks very clearly about this.

40. 20:55

    Michael Horton

    Yeah. So even when being misused.

41. 20:58

    Walter Strickland

    Exactly. So because the word of God is so powerful that even when it was being misappropriated, they still heard the words of the Lord. And the Bible is alive and active. It was doing its work. And the Lord allowed that which is true and good and lovely to remain with them. And that's how their minds were edified and encouraged. And those are the stories from the Good Book that they passed down. Not the interpretation. And it's because of that faith reclaimed that actually drove the abolitionist movement. It drove a lot of people to say, you know what, let's get up out of here because we can worship God better in freedom than we can in bondage. So we can't go to corporate worship as we ought. We can't express our adoration to the Lord as we ought. We can't raise our children to fear and the admonition of the Lord. Why? Because they're being sold off to the plantation next door. And so it's like, if we want to raise our children as Deuteronomy is asking us to, we have to get up out of here. That's very technical, academic-y language.

42. 22:01

    Michael Horton

    I love it.

43. 22:03

    Walter Strickland

    So they would say, we have to get out of here so we can actually live according to God's Word. So the Scripture is just, I think, proving its power once again. And I think that's just a beautiful part of the story.

44. 22:15

    Michael Horton

    Hence the real power of the Black church.

45. 22:19

    Walter Strickland

    Yeah, I think that's at the root why it was a movement that was so powerful. Because there's a lot—if you listen to Black preaching, you're going to hear a lot of story and song, you know, the story of the Scripture. And then they're going to illustrate the story, some text in the New Testament with an Old Testament story. And it's just like, it's a very—it's a storytelling faith, you know, manifestation of the faith. And I think it's just very, very beautiful.

46. 22:45

    Michael Horton

    God is good all the time.

47. 22:46

    Walter Strickland

    And all the time God is good. You know, the oral tradition lives on.

48. 22:49

    Michael Horton

    That's wonderful.

49. 22:50

    Walter Strickland

    So it's — I think it's a tradition that we can continue to learn from, continue to be sharpened by. And I think we haven't had as much exposure to as we would be edified by. And so that's the reason for Swing Low.

50. 23:02

    Michael Horton

    So we're at the Evangelical Theological Society right now. And there has—you were just telling me there's never been a session on Black evangelicals in America at the Evangelical Theological Society.

51. 23:19

    Walter Strickland

    Yeah, as far as I know, this has not happened before.

52. 23:22

    Michael Horton

    So you're doing that today. When people talk about evangelicals and evangelicalism, you were even saying yourself that African Americans prefer to be called Bible-believing than evangelical. Talk about this strange disconnect here, when you have a body of Christians in America who agree for the most part on those five pillars. And yet, demographically, there's the Black church and white evangelicals. Almost always you hear the white evangelicals. Talk about that a little bit. What is it? What does it feel like for you being at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary, being in the evangelical world, having evangelical convictions, being at one with people who hold to those five pillars. And yet, there's this kind of just now sort of beginning to have, frankly, integration. In theological formulation and discussion.

53. 24:48

    Walter Strickland

    So you asked how it feels.

54. 24:49

    Michael Horton

    Yeah.

55. 24:51

    Walter Strickland

    Oh my. It's kind of hard to put into words, to be honest with you. It's felt homeless. I felt times where I'm drastically misunderstood and sometimes intentionally misunderstood. It's very interesting, as you said, even, you know, those anchors—I mean, you can trace those back to Christian orthodoxy. Even a definition that's widely accepted like Bebbington's Quadrilateral, all those are there.

56. 25:24

    Michael Horton

    It's all supernaturalism. God intervening—

57. 25:29

    Walter Strickland

    Exactly.

58. 25:30

    Michael Horton

    In this world.

59. 25:30

    Walter Strickland

    Doing what we cannot do for ourselves. So, but the way that the tradition has emerged, there has been different emphases in those because of the circumstances faced by the people who are carrying those convictions. And as those Christians and other Christians sort of get together, there's loss in translation. So I'll even go back further. When we go back to the fundamentalist-modernist controversy, there was Black fundamentalists. Mary Beth Swetnam Mathews' book, Doctrine and Race, marks this out beautifully. And she goes back to a lot of the primary sources—papers, the denominational papers, a lot of addresses from denominational leadership that were intentionally marking out this very rich sort of — we are going to hold to the fundamentals of the faith amongst Black Christians. But they were hesitant to take on the fundamentalist nomenclature and then later the evangelical nomenclature because it was associated with institutions that they couldn't even be a part of. So while their theological convictions were commensurate, the institution where those theological convictions were nurtured were—I mean, they're exclusionary. So, and then they had a lot of political assumptions that came along with those that were very difficult for African Americans to stomach. And so there's this—it was hard for African Americans to say, yeah, we're gonna be fundamentalists and then evangelicals, because you're then having to say, okay, theologically, evangelicals theologically fundamentalist, but all the social pieces that come with that. And that's only been intensified in recent years. All that to say, there wasn't a body of African American Christians that intentionally identified as evangelical until 1963. And at the time, it was called the National Negro Evangelical Association. And later it was called the National Black Evangelical Association. So what we're doing is we're actually talking about those initial generations, those first two or three decades of the National Black Evangelical Association—who are its founders? What were their ideas? Most of them were pastors. They had Bible college training, but the seminaries they couldn't get admitted to. So they didn't go to seminaries. They weren't academics par excellence, but they would end up shepherding the flock as opposed to writing books and things like that. So we don't have a great written witness to these folks. So if you want to find out what they're writing, you really have to go dig for it. And that took me a lot of time. In fact, the only reason why I even stumbled upon Black evangelicalism as an official sort of institutional national Black evangelicalism movement was that I contributed an essay to the T&T Clark Handbook on African American Theology. And so anybody who knows those books, they're $165. I mean, you had to be committed to buy one of those volumes. So I get the one I contributed to in the mail. It was during the pandemic. And so what are you doing during the pandemic? If you're a nerd, you read. And so I looked at the table of contents for something to do, and I said, Black evangelicalism, what? That's crazy. So then I started to read it. I was introduced to all these people I had never heard about. I had a bachelor's degree, I had an M.Div., I had a Th.M., and a Ph.D.—never heard of any of these people before. And so then I began this journey of trying to find out who they were, what they were about. But they were this sort of renegade group that really wanted to double down on their doctrinal confessions in a moment where there was a lot of liberalism that was sort of emerging and just sort of manifesting in the academy. And they wanted the Black church to really sort of double down on its theological convictions. Because if you look at the major denominations, they're African American, they all have creeds as their confessions of faith. And so they wanted them to double down on those things. And they said, well, you know, we already have those things in our confessions. So like, we'll just point back to those. Like, no, we have to actually state this stuff explicitly. So then you have Howard O. Jones, William H. Bentley, Columbus Salley, Carl F. Ellis—Tony Evans was in that group. And so then the list goes on of people who are saying, we need to be very explicit about these things. And there you have the emergence of the National Black Evangelical Association and its heritage that we'll explore for, I think, the first time today.

60. 29:56

    Michael Horton

    Fantastic. How many churches or members?

61. 30:01

    Walter Strickland

    So interestingly enough, at its heyday —

62. 30:05

    Michael Horton

    Is it mainly Missionary Baptists?

63. 30:06

    Walter Strickland

    So there's National Baptists, there's Progressive National Baptists—which Progressive National Baptists is not progressive theologically, it's progressive socially. And then you have Missionary Baptists, and then you have a lot of people who are Independent Fundamental Baptists. Which, not to be confused with their cousins who are of a kind of a different ilk.

64. 30:27

    Michael Horton

    Yeah, sort of.

65. 30:29

    Walter Strickland

    So that's all the thing there. But so they had several hundred churches on their rolls.

66. 30:35

    Michael Horton

    Including some National Baptists.

67. 30:38

    Walter Strickland

    Oh, certainly, certainly. Because the National Baptist Convention, while it's the largest Black Baptist convention in the world, it's still like the lion's share of it is orthodox. They don't hold their doctrinal convictions in such a way where if you don't toe this line, we're going to—out you go. It's a broad, it's a big tent. But if you surveyed them, their theological convictions would certainly be within the sort of Bebbington Quadrilateral, these anchors.

68. 31:05

    Michael Horton

    More than a mainline white Protestant denomination.

69. 31:09

    Walter Strickland

    For sure. So now, yeah, the influence of the National Black Evangelical Association has waned over the years. And I think it's primarily because they've had no written witness of what they've been trying to accomplish.

70. 31:21

    Michael Horton

    So you're trying to fill that?

71. 31:22

    Walter Strickland

    Exactly. That quadrant that I've said, there's a vacuum there. They needed a bellwether that was more than just an organization. They needed something that young pastors and scholars and thinkers, college students who are looking for a place to say, you know, this is where I am. I belong here. These are my people—historically orthodox Christians who are doing theology in such a way that it's actually very apparent to them how it impacts how they live out their lives on a daily basis. They didn't have that. And so I think they just sort of drifted. The book is called Swing Low because my grandfather loved that hymn. And he first heard it from his grandfather, who was a slave.

72. 32:06

    Michael Horton

    Wow. Let's close with your grandmother. You talk about her a lot when we're just taking breaks.

73. 32:16

    Walter Strickland

    Yeah. So if you're wondering who Belvia Jean Strickland is, I dedicated the book to her. Volume 1 is dedicated to her. She's 91 right now. She lives in the great city of Chicago, which is where I was born. Her impact and value to me, not her intrinsic value, obviously, but just the wisdom that she offers to me, that I think she's been offering my whole life. I was just too stupid to understand what she was offering me. I'm seeing it more and more as the years go by. And I was going through a tough moment of being very much misunderstood, as we talked about, in my own denominational life. And she flew down to North Carolina to come see me. And she goes, “baby, how you doing?” Everyone's baby to her because that's just how she rolls. So she goes, “how you doing?” And so I'm telling her all the stuff that is going on. And she's just kind of listening. We're walking, because she knows that if I actually want to be honest and get my heart out, I got to walk and talk. So we're out, we're walking, and I'm just going on and on about how my world was sort of crashing in on me. And it seems as if no matter what I said, she was going to have the same answer. She said, “You prayin’? You fastin’? Is your Bible torn up?”

74. 33:36

    Michael Horton

    That's great.

75. 33:37

    Walter Strickland

    And see, because—and then I looked at her and I—and she just said that. She said it again as if I didn't hear. “You prayin? You fastin? Is your Bible torn up?” And I ended up—by that time I was just sobbing. She started crying too because she saw me crying. And she goes, “what did you expect? The Lord is—this is a fallen world that our Lord is redeeming. We're not in the kingdom yet.”

76. 34:04

    Michael Horton

    Wow.

77. 34:05

    Walter Strickland

    If you're not praying, how are you going to hear from him? His voice is going to get lost in the voices of others who are not your Lord. If you're not fasting, that's what clears the channel for you to hear from him. If your Bible's not torn up, that's the most explicit word that he has for you. I think everyone needs a praying, godly grandmother.

78. 34:28

    Michael Horton

    Absolutely. I had one too. Big Mama. And she prayed for all of her twenty-five grandchildren every day.

79. 34:37

    Walter Strickland

    Yeah, I love it.

80. 34:38

    Michael Horton

    Yeah. Walter, I love you. You're a great friend. Thanks for being a part of this.

81. 34:44

    Walter Strickland

    Thanks for the invitation to be a part of the Sola Media family, the White Horse Inn family. And I honestly mean this—you're part of helping me feel like I had a home again.

82. 34:58

    Michael Horton

    It means a lot. Well, Swing Low is the book, and it's two volumes. First of all, the history, and then an anthology to back it up. And I can't wait to dig in.

83. 35:16

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