Elizabeth Hewat was born in Prestwick, western Scotland, the youngest of four daughters of Kirkwood and Elizabeth Hewat. Kirkwood was a dedicated Presbyterian minister, a fine historian and an ebullient personality, and Elizabeth, his wife, had an infectious interest in home and overseas mission. Three of the daughters, including Elizabeth, became missionaries overseas. The fourth married a minister.
In her schooling, Elizabeth was indebted to Wellington School, Ayr, which had an academic reputation and was led by two women. Elizabeth was later named as one of two ‘notable pupils’ of her era. She spoke of the two Principals as ‘alive to new ideas in education’ and recalled a conversation when one of them spoke about ‘a wealthy cultured woman’ locally, ‘who went to prison rather than pay taxes when she had no vote’.

It was evident that University was the next step for Elizabeth. She matriculated in Edinburgh in 1915-1916, entering the Faculty of Arts. Fellow-students who had come from overseas included one from China and one from India, both countries where Elizabeth would live and work. In 1919, she was awarded the Kirkpatrick History Scholarship – £96, a significant sum at the time (probably about £5,000 now) – which recognised distinction in an area of history.

In the University Women’s Debating Society, Elizabeth was Secretary. She enjoyed discussion and was known for her sense of fun, friendliness, and outgoing delight in living. Another University Society in which Elizabeth was an office-bearer was the Women’s Christian Union. Its aim was ‘to unite women students in Christian fellowship’. Meetings were held ‘for Bible, Social, and Missionary study, and assistance given in Social Service Work’. Elizabeth’s later involvements in spirituality, teaching, missionary service and ecumenical work were foreshadowed here.

Having completed her MA, with first class honours in History, Elizabeth was recruited by the University of St Andrews as an Assistant Lecturer. Through connections in Edinburgh with international mission, the way subsequently opened for her to spend two years on the staff of the International Review of Missions, the first ecumenical mission journal of its kind in English. Elizabeth learned from the co-editor, Georgina Gollock, for example through assisting with her remarkable global surveys. Georgina was a role model for younger women leaders. Elizabeth’s own writing began to be published. She was involved in assisting Georgina in writing and editing An Introduction to Missionary Service, (OUP).

In 1922 Elizabeth was recruited as a lecturer at the Women’s Missionary College, Edinburgh, a community of about 50 women from parts of Africa, Asia and Europe. The building had a croquet lawn, tennis court, library/lecture room, dining room, common room, and bedrooms. The chapel was a vital space for prayer. Annie Small, the founding director, believed ‘unless prayer is at the heart of the life, nothing goes right’. Elizabeth followed this priority in her life as a lecturer. She would develop her thinking about spiritual experience in a book, Thine own Secret Stair.

During this time Elizabeth was a student at New College, Edinburgh, for a degree in theology, a Bachelor of Divinity. At the time of her graduation, in 1926, she was the first women to obtain a BD at New College. The United Free Church of Scotland, of which she was a member, debated women in ministry that year. The final main speech referred to ‘a young woman in the College who had beaten all the men in her class’. This was Elizabeth, although she was not mentioned. There was not sufficient call for change.
Elizabeth was soon on her way, as a missionary, to Manchuria, China. With the cold of Manchuria in mind, she was advised to line her coat with fur, but not to do so until she reached Manchuria, as the heavy lining would be cheaper to buy there. There was an arrangement with a boot-maker in Edinburgh, who gave discounts to missionaries, and he kept the shape of someone’s foot so that new boots – and shoes, although boots were more needed in Manchuria – could be made and sent overseas when required!
In July 1927 Elizabeth wrote that she was ‘enjoying every moment’, with the study of Chinese ‘giving great delight’. Through this, she quickly gained the ability to communicate, and began to travel round the district. She was particularly interested in work among women and was increasingly successful in organising local Bible Schools for them. Elizabeth warmly welcomed the fact that in the 1920s the Manchurian churches had ‘opened their doors’ (as she put it) to the leadership of women.
On her return from China, Elizabeth completed a PhD, in which she looked at the writings of Confucius and how they compared with Old Testament wisdom in the Book of Proverbs. She had been stimulated in varied ways by life in China, and through being the first women to gain a PhD at New College she was, again, a mould-breaker.

Congregational ministry opened up, but sadly, and painfully for Elizabeth, her work was brought into question in the press by those opposed to women in ministry. A continued sense of call to international ministry led in 1935 to a post as Professor of History in Bombay (Mumbai) at Wilson College, founded by a Presbyterian, John Wilson. She paid special attention to the women students: about 30% of the students out of the total of about 800 at this point. Her theology degrees also meant that she was given biblical and ethical subjects as well as history to teach.

Female students looked to Elizabeth and found their time full of ‘rich experiences in intellectual pursuit’, marked by ‘the delight, the excitement, the thrill, the exhilaration’ of learning. Elizabeth saw, as India moved to Independence, how the College won and retained ‘the loyalty and respect’ of students. She had specific pastoral responsibility as Warden of the College’s Pandita Ramabai Hostel, for female students, and she encouraged activities and a range of studies. She also involved herself in the life of the Ambroli Church, founded, like the College, by Wilson, where she became an elder.

As well as her local ministry in Bombay, Elizabeth was in demand as a leader at student conferences and retreats. Some authors from whom she drew were Brother Lawrence, Teresa of Avila, John Bunyan, Daniel Considine, a Jesuit author of Delight in the Lord: Notes of Spiritual Direction and Exhortation, and Evelyn Underhill, an Anglo-Catholic writer whose best-known work was Mysticism. Much as Elizabeth valued varied authors on spirituality, she immersed herself in scripture, and that deep engagement meant she could lead others to this source of life.

It was a great wrench for Elizabeth to leave India. On returning to Scotland, she would ‘tell the people that there were many things they had to learn from the people in India’. Elizabeth was approached to ask if she would speak and write. Her historical magnum opus was Vision and Achievement, charting missionary endeavour on the part of churches that formed the Church of Scotland. She became involved in mission in Scotland, in campaigning for nuclear disarmament, and in a vigorous way in the ongoing campaign for the ordination of women in the Church of Scotland. For young women she mentored, there was the achievement of this step. She herself was the first women to be awarded an honorary Doctorate in Divinity from Edinburgh University. Her life was filled with the outworking of her beliefs, and her commitment to mould-breaking mission was unwavering.

Speaker:
Dr Kate Tilson
University of Cambridge

Tuesday 27 May 2025, 4.00–5.30pm BST
Faculty of Divinity, West Road & Online

Abstract

In the London Missionary Society (LMS) library in Tahiti in 1834, bound volumes of evangelical periodicals were situated amongst the books. These included missionary periodicals, which catalogued and celebrated evangelising projects around the world, as well as children’s magazines and literary reviews.

Through exploring how missionaries interacted with periodical culture in the early nineteenth century, this paper works to disentangle missionary knowledge networks and to locate the formation of their intellectual worlds. A key concern here is how British periodicals reconfigured missionary conceptualisations of ‘home’ and ‘mission’ amidst complex and often difficult cross-cultural encounters on the ground. In turning away from the idea that evangelical periodicals were solely vehicles of propaganda, the paper opens up a space in which to discuss how these texts extended evangelical networks overseas and coalesced with other knowledge traditions.

The paper begins with a focus on London and the evangelical energy behind the emergence of world-spanning print channels from the late eighteenth century. The second half of the paper turns to the LMS mission station in Tahiti and the patched together character of evangelical periodicals, the mobile texts that constituted their pages and connected readers across the globe. The paper draws upon a vast missionary archive and argues for a combined-source approach for the study of periodicals. More widely, it asks questions about the study of religion, media and the materiality of knowledge, and it brings the evangelical knowledge industry into a more globalised context.

Dr. Kate Tilson is a Junior Research Fellow at Clare College, University of Cambridge. She is a historian of British missions in New Zealand and the wider South Pacific and is especially interested in histories of cross-cultural knowledge production, print culture, medicine and the environment. Her work has appeared in several academic journals, including Cultural and Social History, the Journal of Ecclesiastical History and the Social History of Medicine. She is writing her first book on missionary print culture in the South Pacific and she has started a new project on missions, childhood and children’s literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

For a Zoom link, please email centre[at]cccw.cam.ac.uk

Join us for our latest Seminar!

Tuesday 6 May 2025, 3.30–5pm BST
Faculty of Divinity, West Road, Cambridge,
and online

Speaker:
Professor Uta Balbier, University of Oxford

Abstract
In 1960, American evangelist Billy Graham toured nine African countries preaching the Gospel to
around 600,000 people during a revival tour nicknamed ‘Safari for Souls’. Aiming at local Christian
churches and forging strong alliances with missionaries on the ground, the revival tour stood
firmly in the tradition of the US missionary enterprise of the 19th century.

However, Billy Graham’s “Safari for Souls” was much more than just a traditional evangelistic campaign: it reflected postcolonial realities, demonstrated US geopolitical interests, and was shaped by increasing global campaigns and conversations about racial justice. Closely monitored by the US State Department,
underpinned by a strong anti-Communism, and powerfully displaying Western modernity, the
‘Safari for Souls’ was a manifestation of America’s Spiritual Cold War abroad.

Professor Uta Balbier is Professor of Modern History at the University of Oxford and a Fellow of
St. Anne’s College. Her most recent book is ‘Altar Call in Europe: Billy Graham, Mass Evangelism,
and the Cold-War West’ (Oxford, 2022).

For a Zoom link, please email: centre[at]cccw.cam.ac.uk

Why is Paula White and Charismatic Christianity attractive to Trump? How has Pentecostalism in
America come to be aligned with MAGA and supported by a common vision of America?

Make America Great Again is not only about a golden age of prosperity. It is also about the rejection
of a secular and plural nation, supported by the myth of America as a Christian country when it
was founded. Under Trump, and through the directorship of independent Charismatic preacher,
Paula White, the White House Faith Initiative is an instrument to root out anti-Christian bias and
to promote the dual goals of the political and the religious, to “Make America a Great Christian
Country Again.”

“All things are Possible” is a subcultural narrative that generates support for the role of Charismatic
Christianity in the US and a new Christian nationalism. This presentation will discuss the shifting
contours of religion and politics since Trump’s first presidency, Christian nationalism, the role of
spiritual warfare and prophecy, claims of a stolen election, the assassination attempt, and the role
of Charismatic Christianity in a world that appears to be out of control.

Come and hear this Seminar paper by Professor Michael Wilkinson, Trinity Western University, British Columbia, Canada.

See the poster below for more details, if you would like to attend in person or online.

11 March 2025, 16:00–17:30 GMT

Lightfoot Room, Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge

Followed by refreshments

Title: World Christianity in Indo-Myanmar: Culture, Conflict and Christ

Foregrounded on events and practices observed in the church and society among the Indigenous communities inhabiting the Indo-Myanmar mountains in the eastern borders of India, the presentation will spotlight a case of World Christianity. Inhabited by Indigenous communities, the region can be described as the Christian belt of the Indo-Myanmar border. Christianised during the missionary movement of the nineteenth century, the region has firmly established Christian communities. The shadows of the ancestors and their shamanic outlook to living linger in the lived Christianity of the Indigenous communities in the region. Identifying some practices and events that exhibit the imprint of the ancestors’ shadows, the presentation hopes to generate reflections on the process of transition and transformation that Indigenous communities are presumed to undergo with the espousal of Christianity.

Speaker: Prof Atola Longkumer

Prof. Atola Longkumer, a Baptist from Nagaland, is a faculty member in the department of religion at the United Theological College, Bengaluru, India. She is the secretary of the Program for Theology and Cultures in Asia (PTCA). She is a member of the World Council of Churches Indigenous Peoples Network Reference Group, and of the International Association for Mission Studies (IAMS). She has served as the book review editor for the Journal of Missions Studies. Dr. Longkumer has written on Christianity and Indigenous Cultures, Christian Mission and Women, and theological education among others.

11 February, 16:00-17:30 GMT

Lightfoot Room, Faculty of Divinity, Cambridge

Followed by refreshments

Title: When World Christianity Meets Global Microhistory: Two Lives between Egypt, India, China, the United Kingdom, and the United State

Two people often cited as “success stories” in the history of the American Presbyterian mission to Egypt in the late nineteenth century are Bamba Müller (1848-1877) and Ahmed Fahmy (1861 wirwww1933). Bamba was the daughter of a German merchant father and enslaved Ethiopian mother whom the missionaries introduced to Duleep Singh, exiled maharaja of the Sikh Empire in India. Married at sixteen, she settled with her husband in England and entered the social circle of Queen Victoria. Ahmed Fahmy was the scion of an educated Muslim Arabic-speaking family who fled to the United Kingdom after embracing Christianity. He earned a medical degree in Edinburgh and then joined the London Missionary Society in China, where he founded a hospital in Changchow (Zhangzhou) and spent the next thirty years training the healthcare workers who succeeded him. In this talk, I will discuss Bamba and Ahmed Fahmy as they feature in a book that I am writing about global microhistory in the Nile Valley. Global microhistory uses local, small-scale, or “micro” sources and topics to see bigger or “macro” connections and trends in world history. While we can look to Bamba and Ahmed Fahmy as products and exemplars of World Christianity in the mid-to-late nineteenth century era, we can also follow them to trace global networks of exchange that linked the countries they were connected with. Their life stories can help us to understand changing patterns of migration and mobility; ideas and practices about marriage, family, and gender roles; and relations between Christians on the one hand and Muslims and Sikhs on the other.

Speaker: Prof Heather J. Sharkey

Heather J. Sharkey is a Professor in the Department of Middle Eastern Languages and Cultures at the University of Pennsylvania. During the 2024-25 year, she is the Oliver Smithies Fellow at Balliol College of Oxford University in the UK and a senior fellow in the Faculty of Arts at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands.

Her books include Living with Colonialism: Nationalism and Culture in the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan (University of California Press 2003); American Evangelicals in Egypt: Missionary Encounters in an Age of Empire (Princeton University Press 2008); and A History of Muslims, Christians, and Jews in the Middle East (Cambridge University Press 2017). With Jeffrey Edward Green, she edited The Changing Terrain of Religious Freedom (University of Pennsylvania Press 2021).

She is currently writing a book about global microhistory in the Nile Valley.

Our library has an exciting new book that you will not want to miss!

Legare Street Press recently published a facsimile reprint of the book: ‘Twenty sermons’ by Henry Martyn. Originally published in 1822, we now have a lovely quality paperback edition of this book, two hundred and two years later! We have the original in our archives but you no longer have to worry about damaging a fragile book as you open the cover and turn the pages or get dusty reading this beautiful copy.

The twenty sermons were published posthumously. Henry Martyn (1781-1812) devoted his life to bringing the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ to India and Persia and he accomplished a huge amount in his short lifespan, including quality translations of the New Testament, Psalms and Book of Common Prayer. The twenty sermons in this book capture the heart of the gospel message that he brought to the people.

They were all preached in India, the first ten in the Old Church in Calcutta in the latter half of 1810. They were selected from a parcel of manuscript sermons kept by his friends. Only the last sermon of this collection was intended for publication and printed during his lifetime, but after his death the desire to understand more about his preaching and his devotion to the work of mission gained momentum, and this sermon collection was published.

2 Corinthians 5:14, 15 is quoted in the preface by the original editors to illustrate the principles with which he was inspired in his missionary labours: “For the love of Christ compels us, because we judge thus: that if One died for all, then all died; and He died for all, that those who live should live no longer for themselves, but for Him who died for them and rose again.” NKJV

— Ruth MacLean, Librarian

CCCW Day Lecture 2025: 22 January 2025, 1600-1730 GTM

Room 7, Faculty of Divinity, 25 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP,
Followed by refreshments

Title: What Does World Christianity Mean for Mission Studies? Explorations in Christianity Worldwide

‘World Christianity’ is a relatively new field, whose origins are closely related to the Henry Martyn Centre, now the CCCW. It is represented at several universities in the UK and in the US, and it is gaining ground in seminaries as well. World Christianity could be regarded as the saviour of mission studies in academia, in that it allows for the continued study of mission in contexts where ‘mission’ in association with Christianity is a toxic term. However, its use is resisted by others because it appears to focus exclusively on Christianity. Drawing on the recently published Oxford Handbook of Mission Studies and current discourse on world Christianity in the US particularly, this lecture asks whether there is still a role for mission studies, and what that might look like in the era of world Christianity.   

Speaker: Prof Kirsteen Kim, Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California

Prof Kirsteen Kim is Paul E. Pierson Chair in World Christianity and Associate Dean for the Center for Missiological Research at the Fuller Theological Seminary, Pasadena, California. Prior to moving to Fuller, she worked in several institutions in the UK – Leeds Trinity University, the Selly Oak Colleges, and the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide. She was a member of the Lausanne Theology Working Group and vice moderator of the World Council of Churches Commission on World Mission and Evangelism. A research coordinator for the Edinburgh 2010 project, she drafted its Common Call, and co-edited the Regnum Edinburgh Centenary Series that emerged from it.

Prof Kim is the author of more than 150 publications including five monographs and eight edited/ co-edited volumes. Her most recent publications include The Oxford Handbook of Mission Studies (2022), Migration, Transnationalism, and Faith in Missiological Perspective (2022), and Power, Agency, and Women in the Mission of God (2024). She was the editor of the journal Mission Studies and now co-edits the book series Theology and Mission in World Christianity, both published by Brill (Leiden).

CCCW Talk: 17 November 2024 1600-1730 GTM

Room 7, Faculty of Divinity, 25 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP
Followed by refreshments

Title: The World Council of Churches Assembly in New Delhi 1961 and Processes of De-Westernisation:  Approaches, Negotiations and Transloyalties in the German Democratic Republic, India and Nigeria

The 1961 Assembly in New Delhi was significant in the process of “de-Westernisation” of the World Council of Churches (WCC). This lecture highlights first the endeavour of the secretariat for ecclesial affairs in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) to emphasize the “joint struggle” of the “progressive forces” in the WCC. This perspective is also reflected in some of the more recent academic literature – albeit with a reversed assessment. However, the power shift away from “the West” was characterized by different trajectories. The contribution therefore argues, second, that the interests of the “progressive forces” were diverse and the alliances fragile. While African, Asian and Latin American representatives sometimes shared the suspicion and criticism of “the West” by Eastern representatives, they were also involved in their own negotiation processes and dynamics. As will be highlighted by some case studies, processes of de-Westernisation of the WCC were embedded in a complex setting of loyalties, transloyalties and negotiation processes.

Speaker: Prof Frieder Ludwig, VID Specialised University

Frieder Ludwig, Dr. phil., Dr. theol., is Professor of Global Studies and Religion at VID Specialised University since 2019. His research relates to the intersection of history and theology, with a focus on the intercultural history of Christianity. He taught in Germany, Nigeria, the USA and Norway. In summer 2023, he was Scandinavian guest professor at the University of Kiel in Germany. His more recent publications include Reformation in the Context of World Christianity (co-editor; Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2019) and The First World War as a Turning Point (Berlin: LIT, 2020).