devotion is a group service that gets individuals ready for praise. Here is a recollected description from one of Charleston's most historic Churches.

The prayers coming from the women who are facing the alter, kneeling, are delivered, outloud, in multiple voices. These voices blend like music, with different timbres, some high, some low, some middle, each with distinctive colors. Each section o prayer follows the theme set by the leader. Sometimes it echoes  the main pint, sometimes, it affirms the point. At other times, the voices beseech the providence of God; at times, speaking as an interested witness.

To an untrained ear, these voices seem to follow many patterns and appear confusing. But careful listening to the spacing and timing of each voice reveals that the rhythms and melodies of prayer are obtained from the vast tradition of African drumming. The group of women praying offer chants, calls, and shouts. The changes in message and emotion, the phenomenal interpla, the mimicry that chases important themes, the very spontaneity of the prayer mirrors a tradition that offers a variety of simultaneous forms for estasy and rapture in hoped of a "blessed" state which brings the individual and community into surrendered submission to providence. The spontaneity of this prayerbrings to life the voicing of the drm choirs which set forth the sacred rhythms of a people who called upon God before they knew Christ.

Drumming was a sacred form, even when used in celebration. It survives so in Cuba, Haiti, and Brazil.

This laying of words in an order and position unfamilar to the European church or its members or its sacred traditions. Yet prayer was one of the most special of the devout forms adapted to Christianity by the Africans, who, in early colonial times, populated the earliest African-American congregations. by shared experiene, by the tradtion of emotive manners the women circled at Emmanuel in devotion are using the complex calls of rhthms arising from a memory of a land that taught them how to pray.

But unlike Brazil, Haiti, Cuba, or modern day Jamaica, the descendants of lowcountry slaves did not alter the content or meld Christian beliefs and practices into a blended religion of African gods and practices. 

The lowcountry slaves, in the city and in the sourrounding country city, keep their Jesus as their only Lord and Savior, worthy to be praised.