While watching the newly released PBS documentary, “The Black Church: This Is Our Story, This Is Our Song,” I instantly thought about the Negro spirituals and hymns that I grew up hearing in church as a young girl in Athens, Georgia. The documentary, and the book which bears the same title, comprises the outstanding and vivid storytelling of Henry Louis Gates Jr., the director of the Hutchins Center for African and African American Research at Harvard University. An eminent scholar and filmmaker on the Black experience in the U.S., Gates begins his narration of “The Black Church” walking into Waldon United Methodist Church, the house of worship he attended in Piedmont, West Virginia.