Michaela Copsey, PhD Researcher, School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh

On 30 August 1951, Rosemary Guillebaud called her mother, Margaret, to hear the final verses of Revelation read in Kirundi, marking the completion of the first full New Testament for the nation of Burundi. Following this extraordinary reading, the two women spent time in prayer, reflecting on a journey that had begun more than two decades earlier. In February 1930, Rosemary’s father, Harold, had called 15-year-old Rosemary, and Margaret, to hear the same verses read aloud, completing the Bible translation in Kinyarwanda, the language of Rwanda. Margaret later described that day as, “a moment worth all that it has ever cost us to be here.”

Margaret and Harold Guillebaud first sailed for Uganda in 1925, leaving behind their eldest son, Peter, and infant twin daughters, Veronica and Mary. They took their three middle daughters, including 10-year-old Rosemary, with them. Margaret later recalled the opposition they faced from friends at home, some of whom threatened to sever ties, and the acute pain of leaving their children. Despite these challenges, both Margaret and Harold felt an enduring conviction that God was calling them to East Africa, even after initially being rejected by the Church Missionary Society over health concerns. This sense of conviction and divine calling guided their decisions over the following decades.

In the face of opposition regarding their post in Uganda, Margaret and Harold spent several days in prayer on the Isle of Wight, concluding that they would “never find happiness again” if they turned back. The sense of happiness they describe was not one of personal comfort but rather to be in the centre of what they perceived as God’s will. Margaret describes her sense of calling in the midst of considerable sacrifice: “The outstanding memory of those dark days is the quiet certainty that this was God’s call, and that we had no choice save to obey and leave the responsibility with God.”

The Guillebaud family is widely recognised within twentieth-century missionary history in East Africa, with involvement spanning multiple generations. Historically, missionary women’s motivations have been overlooked or oversimplified, often casting them as representatives of empire, as missionary spouses with little agency, or as single women seeking escape from domestic life in Britain. Archival research, particularly letters and reflections, such as those of Margaret and Rosemary, reveals a more nuanced narrative, one of vocational clarity, theological conviction, and substantive contributions to missiology and the native churches in East Africa.

The lives of Margaret and Rosemary demonstrate how personal theological commitment and moments of disruption shaped their vocational identity and missiological direction. These women navigate personal sacrifice, opposition from family and friends, and personal and global crises to pursue what they describe as a sense of divine calling to the people of East Africa. Their work exemplifies how single and married women increasingly exercised agency in shaping mission initiatives, advancing Bible translation, while simultaneously collaborating with African Christians.

Missionary life was integral to Rosemary’s upbringing. She witnessed the joy of distributing newly translated Bibles across Rwanda and participated in family hymn-singing evenings where her father translated the children’s chosen songs into Kinyarwanda. These sessions led to the creation of a hymnbook created in collaboration with African Christians. Rosemary’s formative years immersed her in the transformative impact of scripture and worship in local languages.

In 1935, the Guillebaud family returned to England for the children’s schooling, settling in Cambridge. Rosemary studied languages at Newnham College, quietly hoping for eventual involvement in Bible translation work alongside her father. In 1939, the family returned to Africa amid personal and global upheaval, including the sudden death of Archbishop Pitt-Pitts, the outbreak of World War II, and ongoing tensions within the mission. Harold, who was appointed Archbishop of Burundi, died within a year, leaving a critical gap in translation work and an obvious blow to the tight-knit family.

Following Harold’s death, Dr. Stanley Smith, founder of the Rwanda mission, suggested to Rosemary at the graveside that she might continue her father’s translation work. Although untrained in Kirundi and grieving deeply, Rosemary accepted the challenge. “I felt like it was a call from God to tackle the impossible”, she recalls, “it seemed so strange to be asked such a thing, but God has been all along preparing me for it”. Her experience illustrates the emerging opportunities for women in roles historically reserved for men.

Rosemary’s early work involved collaborating with her father’s translation team, navigating wartime disruptions, suffering the loss of manuscripts at sea, and the need to form an all-female team to translate texts like the Song of Songs, which could not be handled by mixed-gender teams. Her efforts advanced both translation work and the participation of indigenous women in bible translation projects.

After a decade of dedicated work, the Kirundi New Testament and Psalms were printed in 1951. Rosemary and Margaret personally drove to collect the first copies from the postal service in torrential rain. They returned to the mission, blaring their car horn, where awaiting crowds erupted into celebrations of song and dance. The initial shipment sold out that evening, and people stayed up all night reading the scriptures by little tin lamps. Rosemary later reflected, “They were bleary-eyed the next morning, but full of joy. It was worth it to have the Bible in their own language.” This milestone came nearly twenty years after Rosemary first accompanied her parents to distribute the first Kinyarwanda testaments.

Despite personal crises, both Rosemary and Margaret remained steadfast in their sense of calling. While Harold’s linguistic contributions are often emphasised, Margaret’s development of a printing press, her teaching, hospitality, and tireless support enabled the translation to reach its intended audience, and her commitment to the people of East Africa carried on fifteen years following her husband’s death. Margaret returned to England in 1956 due to declining health and died in 1961. Rosemary’s career continued as a Bible Society translation advisor, overseeing eleven translation projects across East Africa. She continued travelling throughout Africa into the 1980s. Her reflections highlight the combination of linguistic, relational, and administrative skills required to achieve accurate, culturally appropriate translations. When asked how it felt to complete a bible translation, Rosemary responded, “I felt like a mother hen whose only daughter had just got married”.

The lives of Margaret and Rosemary Guillebaud demonstrate that female missionary motivation was deeply rooted in theological conviction. Their missiological contributions developed through lived experience, spiritual discernment, and engagement with both local communities and global crises. They demonstrate how women navigated unprecedented roles in mission, translation, and partnership, leaving a legacy of cross-cultural impact through Bible translation in East Africa.

Letters from Rosemary and her sister Philippa are housed in the CCCW Archives, and include one of the early manuscript copies of the Kirundi bible translation.

Bibliography

• GUI/3, Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide Archives [Accessed 2025]
• JEC/20, Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide Archives [Accessed 2025]
• CMS/ACC448, Church Missionary Society Archives, Cadbury Research Library, Birmingham [Accessed 2025]
• CMS/MAM/E8 Church Missionary Society Archives, Cadbury Research Library, Birmingham [Accessed 2025]
• Guillebaud, M. Rwanda: The Land God forgot. Monarch Books, 2002
• Guillebaud, L. A Grain of Mustard Seed: The Growth of the Rwanda Mission of CMS.1959
• St John, P. Breath of Life: History of the Rwanda Mission. London, Norfolk Press, 1971

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Evangelists, Mules, Horses, and Canoes: Missionary Travels and the Dynamics of the Evangelical Encounter in Central Brazil

Dr Pedro Feitoza, University of Edinburgh

Venue: Faculty of Divinity, West Road, Cambridge, and Online. The speaker will join us in person.

This presentation will explore how the modes of travels of missionaries associated with the Evangelical Union of South America (EUSA) in the backlands of Central Brazil shaped the way the missionary encounter unfolded in the twentieth century. EUSA missionaries moved about the vast and sparsely populated Brazilian hinterlands on horse and muleback to minister to far-off congregations and ventured down the Araguaia River in their attempts to reach out to indigenous populations. Itinerant evangelism shaped the relationships they developed with such rural communities: they relied on the expertise of local informants and indigenous guides, depended on the hospitality of the rural population for shelter and protection, and their experiences of physical and psychological exhaustion impacted their sense of vocation and how they imagined the missionary enterprise. The presentation will also explore how EUSA missionaries were drawn into popular narratives that stigmatised the Brazilian backlands as wild and inhospitable, and how their lived experiences on the ground reshaped such representations.

Dr Pedro Feitoza. Trained as a cultural and social historian, Pedro Feitoza is lecturer in Latin American Christianity at the School of Divinity, University of Edinburgh. His monograph Propagandists of the Book: Protestant Missions, Christian Literacy, and the Making of Brazilian Evangelicalism was published by Oxford University Press in 2024 and was joint winner of the Ecclesiastical History Society Book Prize 2025.

Muthuraj Swamy

Connecting Christianities: World Christianity and Mission in the 21st Century. Edited by Muthuraj Swamy and Jenny Leith, Theology and Mission in World Christianity (TMWC) Series, Brill, January 2026. https://brill.com/display/title/73554 (A discount code is available to purchase the book at a reduced price. Please email centre[at]cccw.cam.ac.uk)

We at the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide (formerly the Henry Martyn Centre) are delighted about the publication of Connecting Christianities. A key aspect of CCCW’s work is to resource the field of World Christianity and the study of mission, and we strongly hope this book will contribute to that goal.

Connecting Christianities was originally envisioned during the Silver Jubilee of CCCW in 2021 and is dedicated to all who have worked at CCCW throughout its history and to the Henry Martyn Trust which runs the Centre. Twenty-five scholars from diverse backgrounds across the world have contributed to the volume including a Foreword by Rt Revd Dr Guli Franci-Dahqani, Bishop of Chelmsford. The book focuses on questions such as: “How should World Christianity and mission be understood and practised in the twenty-first century?”; “What does World Christianity mean to an ordinary Christian in their everyday life?”; and “In what ways do Christians belong to a global Christian community?”

In a context where World Christianity is often understood either as an effort to make the whole world Christian or as the Christianity of the Global South, this book emphasises the importance of global connections within Christianity. This way of thinking about World Christianity not only opens up new horizons in scholarship but also has implications for the practice of everyday Christian mission in the contemporary context: through building connections with fellow Christians from different denominational and geographical backgrounds (ecumenism), with people of other religions and traditions (interreligious peacemaking and reconciliation), and with wider society (Christian public engagement).

The book was launched during the annual CCCW Day Lecture on 17 February 2026 at the Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge, when we together with CCCW friends had gathered to celebrate the 30^th anniversary of CCCW. The Lecture was delivered by Professor Dana L. Robert of Boston University. Professor Robert serves on the editorial board of the TMWC series, so it was both apt and an honour for CCCW and the book’s authors that she launched the book. Professor David Fergusson, Regius Professor of Divinity at the University of Cambridge and an ex officio Trustee of the Henry Martyn Trust, which runs CCCW, received the first copy.

There will be an expanded launch and discussion of Connecting Christianities at a symposium on Friday, 17 April 2026, from 11.00 to 15.00, together with two other recent books: Types of Christian Mission: An Introduction by Stephen Spencer (SCM Press, November 2025) and Lived Mission in 21st Century Britain: Ecumenical and Postcolonial Perspectives, edited by Benjamin Aldous, Harvey Kwiyani, Peniel Rajkumar, and Victoria Turner (SCM Press, October 2024). The symposium will take place in the Healey Room, Westminster College, Cambridge, and online. Everyone is welcome to attend. Please register via Eventbrite using this link: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1981313250267?aff=oddtdtcreator. A Zoom link will be emailed to those joining online. More information about this event is here: https://www.cccw.cam.ac.uk/events/other-events/

CCCW exists in memory of Henry Martyn (1781–1812), a Cambridge student and later Fellow of St John’s College, who dedicated his life to mission, evangelism, and Bible translation in India and Persia. As we approach the 250th anniversary of his birth in 2031, we plan to use this occasion to continue to reflect on key themes and issues in the study of mission and World Christianity. In preparation for 2031, we are also organising a series of events and publications, and Connecting Christianities marks the beginning of this endeavour.

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Refreshments and lunch provided
Register via Eventbrite: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/1981313250267?aff=oddtdtcreator

Connecting Christianities: World Christianity and Mission in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Muthuraj Swamy and Jenny Leith, Brill (January 2026) https://brill.com/display/title/73554

Types of Christian Mission: An Introduction by Stephen Spencer, SCM Press (November 2025) https://scmpress.hymnsam.co.uk/books/9780334064039/types-of-christian-mission

Lived Mission in 21st Century Britain: Ecumenical and Postcolonial Perspectives, edited by Benjamin Aldous, Harvey Kwiyani, Peniel Rajkumar, and Victoria Turner, SCM Press (October 2024) https://scmpress.hymnsam.co.uk/books/9780334065531/lived-mission-in-21st-century-britain

With presentations from:
Prof Eugene Baron, University of Johannesburg
Dr Nuam Hatzaw, University of Edinburgh and Church Mission Society
Dr Laura Popa, University of Cambridge

This is a free event, but donations are welcome to cover the costs.
To find out more about this event, please contact centre[at]cccw.cam.ac.uk

“Intricate Entanglements: A Missionary Collection of Spiritual Artifacts from West Africa at the Übersee-Museum Bremen“

Professor Birgit Meyer, Utrecht University

Tuesday 17 March 2026, 4.00–5.30pm GMT

Lecture Room 7, Faculty of Divinity & Online

Abstract: The starting point for this lecture is my work in a collaborative, international research project – the Legba-Dzoka Project – which investigates the origin, significance and future of a missionary collection from the Ewe-speaking region (now south-east Ghana and south Togo) held at the Übersee-Museum Bremen. This collection, consisting largely of spiritually charged artefacts – dzokawo and legbawo – was given to the museum by Carl Spiess, a missionary with the North German Mission, around 1900. I understand these artefacts as time capsules that contain complex connections between mission, museum, colonialism and conversion and can thus be interrogated as witnesses to this complex history of interdependence. In my lecture, I will a) trace the history of the collection’s origins in the missionary-colonial context, b) critically examine the Eurocentric attribution of terms such as ‘idol’, ‘fetish’ or ‘magic,’ c) develop an alternative understanding of the artefacts in the collection as carriers of power, which understands them as an expression of the indigenous Ewe knowledge system, and d) discuss multiple positions formulated vis-a-vis the possibility and desirability of a return of the items in the collection to Ghana and/or Togo, ranging from downright rejection in the name of “idolatry”, to recognition as valuable cultural assets and forms of heritage, to an their embracement as spiritual forces. Arguing that these positions evolve around the secular-religious boundary, I will pay special attention to the notion of heritage, which is situated at the core of that boundary.

Professor Birgit Meyer (PhD, 1995) is Professor of Religious Studies at Utrecht University. Trained as a cultural anthropologist, she studies religion from a material and postcolonial angle. She directs the research program Religious Matters in an Entangled World (www.religiousmatters.nl) and co-directs the collaborative Legba-Dzoka research project (https://religiousmatters.nl/the-legba-dzoka-project-tracking-and-unpacking-the-collection-carl-spiess-ubersee-museum-bremen/).

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“A Dialogue through Time: Revisiting the Cambridge Seven in Contemporary China”

Dr John Usher, International School of Qingdao in Shāndōng, China

Tuesday 3 March 2026, 4.00–5.30pm GMT

Lecture Room 7, Faculty of Divinity, University of Cambridge & Online

Abstract: History is a dialogue between the subjects and the interpreters, shaped over time as new evidence, circumstances and perspectives emerge. One hundred and forty years ago, seven young men associated with Cambridge set sail for China, “Never before,” The Nonconformist effused, “probably, in the history of missions has so unique a band set out to labour in the foreign field….” This moment coincided with the height of the Western missionary movement and the British Empire, when China’s so-called “open century” came at the cost of Chinese sovereignty. The China of a century and a half ago is almost unrecognisable from the China of today. This paper offers a reflective dialogue with the Cambridge Seven, grounded in personal experience and informed by historical and missiological analysis, comparing and contrasting contemporary China with the China of the late Qing, early Republic and Warlord Era.

Dr John Usher teaches at the International School of Qingdao, China. He is the author of Cecil Polhill: Missionary, Gentleman and Revivalist Vol.1, 1860-1914 (Brill, 2020), and the forthcoming Cecil Polhill: Missionary, Gentleman and Revivalist Vol.2, 1914-1938. His research combines historical and missiological analysis with reflective engagement shaped by long-term experience in contemporary China.

Please download a flyer here.

‘The Challenges of Sacred Charters for World Christianity‘

Prof Dana L. Robert, Centre for Global Christianity and Mission, Boston University, Boston, MA

Tuesday 17 February 2026, 16.00-17:30 GMT

Runcie Room, Faculty of Divinity, 25 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP & online. Prof Dana Robert will join us in person.

Prof. Dana L. Robert’s books include: Christian Mission: How Christianity Became a World Religion (2009), and Nationalism and Internationalism in the Young Ecumenical Movement, 1895-1920s (2025), edited with Judith Becker. Robert is a Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

Christianity, Class, and Masculinity in Late Colonial and Postcolonial Sri Lanka

Dr Jessica A. Albrecht

Friedrich-Alexander University of Erlangen–Nuremberg

Tuesday 3 February 2026, 4.00–5.30pm GMT

Lecture Room 2, Faculty of Divinity & Online

Christian missions and colonial education profoundly reshaped Sri Lanka’s social landscape, leaving Christian schools as powerful institutions long after independence. Although Christians form a minority, prestigious former missionary colleges continue to educate much of the island’s political and economic elite. This presentation analyses how these schools have produced and stabilized specific ideals of middle- and upper-class masculinity from late colonial rule into the present. It traces how curricula, discipline, school rituals, and extra-curricular activities such as scouting and sports cultivated a Christian, English-speaking, heteronormative male subject imagined as modern, respectable, and globally mobile. Placed in relation to Buddhist and state schools, Christian education appears as a key site where class privilege, masculinity, and a “secular,” multicultural form of Christianity are tightly entangled. These institutions offer a language of tolerance, meritocracy, and good citizenship while simultaneously reproducing ethnicized and classed boundaries of belonging and leadership. By foregrounding these dynamics, the presentation shows how Christian schooling has helped to shape postcolonial masculinities and continues to structure access to power in Sri Lanka’s contemporary democracy. More broadly, the lecture speaks to debates on religion and secularism, postcolonial nation-building, and the gendered production of elite subjectivities in South Asia and beyond.

Dr Jessica A. Albrecht is a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Advanced Studies (“Alternative Rationalities and Esoteric Practices from a Global Perspective”) at the Friedrich-Alexander University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Germany. Her main research area lies in the history of religions in late colonial and postcolonial South Asia, particularly Sri Lanka. In addition, she works on gender, queer and crip studies approaches in the study of religion with a specific focus on (post)colonial societies. 

The Meaning of the Atom Bomb: Takashi Nagai and Nagasaki

Dr Alastair Lockhardt, University of Cambridge

Wednesday 26 November 2025, 4.00–5.30pm GMT

Lightfoot Room, Faculty of Divinity, West Road & Online

On 23 November 1945, near the ruins of the Cathedral of the Assumption in Nagasaki, Dr. Takashi Nagai – himself a victim of the explosion – delivered a funeral address for 8,000 Catholic victims of the atomic bomb that had been detonated over the city four months earlier. The address offered a penetrating and arresting account of the deaths as a sacrifice for the ending the World War. This paper sets Nagai’s eulogy in the context of his wider account of the nuclear attack on the city – The Bells of Nagasaki (1984 in English, originally published in Japanese as Nagasaki no Kane in 1949) – and the longer history of Nagasaki as the preeminent Christian and Catholic city of Japan. The discussion explores the theodicy of the bomb offered by Nagai to examine some of the theological tensions it contains.

Dr Alastair Lockhart is a member of the Faculty of Divinity in the University of Cambridge, a Fellow of Churchill College, and Director of Studies in Theology at Hughes Hall. His work focusses on the historical and conceptual study of religion and belief in the twentieth century, with particular research interests in apocalypticism and related movements and the psychology of religion. He is author of several works including the monograph Personal Religion and Spiritual Healing: The Panacea Society in the Twentieth Century (SUNY, 2019).