“No single document is more essential to a living, historical understanding of the genesis and growth of the Covenant Church, both in Sweden and in America, than My Father’s Testament. Published privately in America by David Nyvall, and subsequently in Sweden as well, the book was a careful – and at the same time, highly personal – examination of the people and the events whose coming together created the most important Swedish church reform since the Reformation, and, carried by waves of immigration, a new American church. Karl Johan Nyvall, whose Testament this was, stood at the very center of the development in Sweden, spanning in his own lifetime the first cells and the national organization. He was unquestionably influential among the Swedes in America as well. His son David, who here interprets Karl Johan’s Testament to us, was the dominating figure in Covenant education in America, the Covenant’s leading intellectual, and one of the early band of leaders who have come to be identified as authentic Covenant fathers. Father and son, their careers bridge a century, from the Rosenian world of the 1850s to the Second World War.”

Zenos E. Hawkinson