What is worship? For the Africana community, worship is the time or place where God "shows up and shows out," affirming that an active God embodies human lives through companionship and communion. This type of worship allows God to enter into worshipper's lives with an openness to respond with swaying of the body, tapping feet, weeping eyes, and heartfelt emotion. The Africana Worship Book responds to the call to unite African American communities with worship in their cultural style and to continue speaking to the present and coming generations of African American descendants. This volume is a collection of liturgies for congregational prayers, calls to worship, choral readings, prayers of confession, giving, and creedal statements, written by sixteen African American contributors. It also offers designer and writers of worship events a set of questions to consult which offers profound, grace-filled, godly worship. The Africana Worship Book is the resource for helping African American church people navigate their concerns and love toward God through worship.

Anniston, Alabama, is a small industrial city between Birmingham and Atlanta. In 1961, the city's potential for race-related violence was graphically revealed when the Ku Klux Klan firebombed a Freedom Riders bus. In response to that incident a few black and white leaders in Anniston took a progressive view that desegregation was inevitable and that it was better to unite the community than to divide it, and created a biracial Human Relations Council which set about to quietly dismantle Jim Crow segregation laws and customs. The Council did not prevent all disorder in Anniston, yet Anniston was spared much of the civil rights bitterness that raged in other places in the turbulent mid-sixties. Phil Noble, a Presbyterian Minister in Anniston and participant in the Council, offers his account of the events, carefully researched but told from a personal viewpoint. It shows once again that the civil rights movement was not monolithic either for those who were in it or those who were opposed to it.

Companion to Songs of Zion; discusses liturgical time, spirituals, gospel songs; includes Scripture/ lectionary index.