Below is an excerpt from chapter eight of the yet-unpublished book by Dr. Moody, The Great Amen: Launching and Leading the Academy of Preachers. It is posted here in honor of Black History Month, in February of 2025.
Highland Park Church in Dallas, I was told, is the wealthiest United Methodist congregation in the country. Beautiful buildings adjacent to Perkins School of Theology, both on the campus of Southern Methodist University, make this assertion believable. The presidential library of church member George Bush is a short walk away, just across the highway from the hotel that provided housing for the sixth National Festival of Young Preachers in 2015. Our official event hosts were the congregation and the seminary.
The Dallas festival was memorable for many reasons other than the class and hospitality of our two institutional hosts, including the 24-hour charter bus ride from Lexington to Dallas, with stops in Louisville, Nashville, Memphis, and Little Rock to pick up young preachers, and the “Tell Me a Story” theme, suggested by Perkins professor and AoP friend Alyce McKenzie and voiced by the inimitable preacher from Waco, Joel Gregory.
But the Sunday morning worship service offered to me (and perhaps to others) one of the most compelling episodes in the eight-year history of the Academy of Preachers. As I recounted in chapter four, the dates of the National Festival of Young Preachers remain constant: January 2-5 each year. This means the festival rotates through the week, beginning and ending on different days of the week, and sometimes overlapping the weekend. This happened in Dallas, and we adjusted our festival schedule to allow all of our Young Preachers to attend one of the four very different worship services at the Highland Park Church.
I (and most of the Young Preachers) attended the traditional service in the main sanctuary. It was a very traditional Methodist service: prayers, hymns, sermon, and communion; but two of these elements remain fixed in my memory. First, the pastor of the church was sick that day and a guest preacher, a former pastor I think, was given the assignment.[1] His sermon was entitled something like “Lessons from the Cotton Bowl” reflecting the annual football event the city of Dallas hosts every year the very week of our festival. However, even prior to the musical episode I am about to recount, my mind wandered from the football frenzy that the Cotton Bowl invokes to the economic strategies that made cotton king in Texas for the better part of two centuries: namely, slavery. I sat there listening to football stories wondering what the cotton-picking legacy of Texas was doing to the imagination of the many young African American preachers sitting around me.
Since that year, 2015, I have traveled several times to another part of Texas, to Galveston, and there learned of the legacy of the Moody family: Moody Mansion, Moody Museum, Moody Foundation, Moody Gardens, and the Moody Memorial United Methodist Church. The records demonstrate that for the better part of a century the Moodys of Galveston, Texas have been one of the wealthiest families in the state, having made their money in the cotton industry: not planting and picking but financing and transporting. How many times over the course of my life have I been asked of my relations to the famous (but poor) Moody of Northfield, Massachusetts, and Chicago, Illinois—Dwight L. Moody (1837-1899)!! Not once have I been asked of my possible relations to the rich Moody’s of Galveston, Texas! I have fresh motivation for a thorough genealogical investigation!
I did not know all that, though, when the presiding minister at Highland Park United Methodist Church announced Holy Communion, but even then, my vocabulary was not sufficient to describe the emotional dissonance that enveloped my soul. Communion at Highland Park Church is served to people who kneel at the rails that form three sides of a rectangle below and in front of the elevated pulpit. At the invitation of the presiding minister, the people started to come: all white, all appropriately and warmly dressed on this cold winter day, not a few with fur coats. As they knelt to receive the bread and the cup, Nathaniel E. Thompson climbed the stairs into the pulpit to sing the communion musical meditation.
Nathaniel is a member of the American Spiritual Ensemble, the world-renown choral group under the leadership of Everett McCorvey, director of the opera program at the University of Kentucky and music director of the National Festival of Young Preachers. Nathaniel, and the rest of the 12-voice ensemble that accompanied us to Dallas that year, is a classically trained voice professional raised in Kentucky, educated and trained in Ohio, and now located as a professional vocalist in New York City. With coal black hair in dreadlocks down his back and feet encased in shoes without socks, Nathaniel’s very appearance created an instant contrast to the folk kneeling all around him. But when his deep base voice eased into the slow, mournful lyrics of the old Negro spiritual, I was transfixed, and then troubled.
No more auction block for me
No more, no more
No more auction block for me
Many thousands gone
No more driver’s lash for me
No more, no more
No more driver’s lash for me
Many thousands gone
No more whip lash for me
No more, no more
No more pint of salt for me
Many thousands gone
No more auction block for me
No more, no more
No more auction block for me
Many thousands gone
I had never heard the song, though it had been recorded by the Fisk Jubilee Singers, Paul Robeson, and even Bob Dylan. But I was immediately and deeply moved by its lyrics and also by the context into which it was being sung. I nudged my daughter Kate, sitting next to me, and said, “Do you hear what he is singing?” I looked around to see if others were as arrested by the singing as I was. I whispered to Kate, “Dallas is a city built on cotton. The preacher talked about football. But Nathaniel is singing about slaves picking cotton.”
Not everyone experiences things the same way, and this episode at the Highland Park Church is no exception. To this day, I have felt alone in my emotional response to the singing of this song. Every time I see Nathaniel, I make it a topic of conversation, and at the National Festival of Young Preachers in Atlanta in January of 2018 I told again the whole story to those sitting at my dinner table. The occasion was my “retirement” luncheon at the Atlanta Hilton Hotel, and unbeknownst to me, Everett McCorvey arranged for Nathaniel (both sitting at my table) to sing it again. They slipped away and joined Tedrin Blair Lindsey at the grand piano. Everett introduced it; Nathaniel sang it; and AoP’12 preacher Joseph Howard recorded it (and later posted it to Facebook). I loved it once again and remembered again that first time I heard in the sanctuary in Dallas.
Between the first time and this second time of hearing that song, something important happened to me: I met (and came under the influence of) Kevin Cosby, pastor of St. Stephen Baptist Church and president of Simmons College of Kentucky, both in Louisville. My intellectual and emotional engagement with this song and the entire world it represented was heightened when, in the fall of 2016 I read the book The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, by Edward E. Baptist. The opening narrative of that book—describing the marching of chained slaves from the east coast across the mountains to the newly-rich cotton states where slaves were in high demand—shook me more than the solo that Sunday morning in Dallas.[2]
This episode with the American Spiritual Ensemble in Dallas highlights their role in the success of the National Festival of Young Preachers. How our partnership came to be is, in and of itself, an inspirational story. It began with PREACHAPALOOZA, 2012……
[1] The pastor was Paul Rassmusen, who had been so warm and hospitable to the AoP and its mission. In fact, he said to me he hoped Highland Park Church might become a center for calling and training ministers, with pastoral residency programs much like a hospital and its medical residency programs; which made it odd that not a single preacher associated with the Academy of Preachers, whose annual festival the church was hosting, was incorporated into the morning worship service: not to read or testify, certainly not to preach.
[2] The Baptist book was published by Basic Books in 2014. See my book Getting Things Done for more about my encounter with Cosby.
