A few years ago, my father came to me with some fascinating news. The Rev. Samuel Davies (November 3, 1723–February 4, 1761), a great evangelist of the Great Awakening and the fourth president of Princeton Seminary, was our blood relative.

When I heard that, my heart filled up with pride. Pride, because another Presbyterian minister belonged to our family history. Pride, because less than three hundred years later in the providence of God, I am walking in the same trajectory as my relative. I couldn’t have been more excited.

So, I started mining the sermons of my ancestor and reading as much as I could about him. With every word and insight I gleaned, I was proud to be linked to him not only by water baptism and theological tradition, but also by blood. I learned he was an apostle-missionary of sorts in Virginia, going where no one else would go to minister to the enslaved people of the British colonies. He preached to people of African descent, and would baptize and hand out Bibles and hymnals to them just as he would to any white people, no small act given the time period.

Well, not so fast.

[*To continue reading, please visit Fathom Magazine’s March 2019 issue over here where I originally published this article. Thanks for reading!]