In response to the recent guidance to work from home where possible and reduce contact indoors, we have closed our doors, but we are making Click & Collect available instead. Email the librarian a maximum of five books that you wish to borrow, and we will arrange a time for you to collect them from our front door. This week only, 13-17 December 21. Make your Christmas a time of inspirational reading about the church worldwide!

Please note that we will be closed over the holiday period from 20th December 2021 to 4th January 2022.

We all wish you a very joyful and blessed Christmas and New Year!

— Ruth MacLean, Librarian

“She will bear a son, and you shall call his name Jesus, for he will save his people from their sins.” Matthew 1:21

You are warmly invited to join the book launch and discussion of Nourishing Mission: Theological Settings, by Graham Kings. Published by Brill, 2022.

To be held on Wednesday 16 February 2022, 4.00-5.30 pm (GMT), in person at Westminster College, Cambridge, and on Zoom.

Chair: Dr Jenny Leith, Dean of Studies, Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide.

Registration and Zoom link

To register, and receive the Zoom link, please contact:

Rachel Simonson, Centre Coordinator, email: centre[at]cccw.cam.ac.uk

Speakers

Rt Revd Prof Joseph Galgalo, Assistant Bishop All Saints Cathedral Diocese, Kenya and former Vice Chancellor of St Paul’s University, Limuru for ten years.

Prof Kirsteen Kim, Professor of World Christianity, Fuller Theological Seminary, USA, and an Editor of the Brill series, ‘Theology and Mission in World Christianity’.

Prof David Ford, Emeritus Regius Professor of Divinity, University of Cambridge.

Revd Dr Muthuraj Swamy, Director, Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide.

Nourishing Mission contains theological treasures that show the intriguing coherence of an unfolding vision. Earthed in the ministry of a priest, missionary, academic theologian, and well-travelled bishop, the five settings – Kenya, Cambridge, Islington, Sherborne and Lambeth – mingle art, poetry and archives with theology, history and spirituality. Memorable scenes include a Kenyan liturgy on the environment and Bishop Gitari’s preaching, the drama of worship on the streets of London, a Deuteronomic prequel to the Prodigal Son, flashes from the lives of Henry Martyn and Stephen Harding, the birth of South Sudan and the historic dialogue of John Stott and Basil Meeking.

Rt Revd Dr Graham Kings, Assistant Bishop in the Diocese of Ely, and Research Associate at the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide, founded the CCCW in 1996.

More information

For more information, please see our flyer:

The Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide purchased a large number of new books for the library prior to Covid, and continued to receive a number of books as gifts. Due to lockdowns and closure, the usual processing and cataloguing of these stalled. Now that the library has fully reopened, the work to prepare them for the library has restarted and they are now beginning to make their way onto the shelves!

Here is the first batch which are now ready for the shelves, and ready for borrowing. They are displayed on the ‘New Books’ shelves:

One of these is the long awaited ‘The Letters of Henry Martyn: East India Company Chaplain’ edited by Scott D. Ayler. In this book, Ayler has collated fully annotated transcriptions of all Martyn’s 327 surviving letters and provided a substantial introduction to Henry Martyn, missionary to India and Persia.

Do pop into the library and have a read of them yourself!

— Ruth MacLean, Librarian

The final seminar of the Michaelmas term is “Reading Simone Weil in East London”.  It will be given by Dr Anna Rowlands of Durham University and to register for the Zoom link please contact Rachel Simonson, Centre Coordinator.

This presentation draws on empirical research conducted with Jesuit Refugee Service in London. It is grounded in the experience of refugees living in destitution in the UK asylum process into dialogue with the work of Simone Weil. These experiences are connected to work which began in dialogue with St Augustine and Hannah Arendt on time and temporality in the context of refugee experiences.

Dr Anna Rowlands is St Hilda Professor of Catholic Social Thought and Practice, Dept of Theology and Religion & Centre for Catholic Studies, Durham University, UK. She is also  Chair, Centre for Catholic Social Thought and Practice and Co-Investigator Refugee Hosts (AHRC/ESRC). Dr Rowlands is author of Towards a Politics of Communion: Catholic Social Teaching in Dark Times (Bloomsbury, 2021) and co-editor of T&T Clark Reader in Political Theology (Bloomsbury, 2021).

Our final lecture in the Silver Jubilee Lecture Series is next Wednesday online only at 4.00pm GMT. If you would like the Zoom link please contact Rachel Simonson, Centre Coordinator.

Dr Irini Thabet, Assistant Professor of  Ain Shims University, Cairo and Member of the Egyptian Senate, will be speaking on “Reconciliation: Figuring Out World Christianity Amidst World Conflicts: It is Good for Us to be Here”.

“Peter said to Jesus, ‘Master, it is good for us to be here’” (Luke 9: 33). So too it is good for us to gather at the scene of the transfiguration of Christ to witness and learn the manifestation of reconciliation. But what does transfiguration have to do with reconciliation? How is the event of the transfiguration a manifestation and a declaration of the reconciliation of the whole world on the cross? How should Christianity be transfigured in reconciliation in a world full of conflicts? Is it possible to reconcile peoples within a Christian framework? In an attempt to figure out answers to these questions, different frameworks of reconciliation are studied. Alongside this, the transfiguration motifs of light, mountain, cloud, and tabernacle are considered in the light of the reconciliation of the nature of the Lord in a particular place and time with redeemed human identity. It is proposed that the new identity of Christians empowers them to minister reconciliation to the whole world. And yes, it is possible to have Christian reconciliation in world conflicts and a contemporary example is provided to demonstrate what this might look like.

Dr Irini Thabet is Assistant Professor of English Literature and Western Culture at Ain Shams University, Cairo, Egypt. Also, she teaches Biblical and Liturgical English at The Coptic Orthodox Church Seminary. Her research interests include Christian studies, cultural studies, and Social and Literary Criticism. Many of her published articles in Arabic, and research papers in English, cover social, cultural and personal beliefs in connection to daily life, attitude, and ethics. In the field of Christian Studies, she has translated and edited translations of Patristics from English into Arabic which has been published. She has also published a textbook of English for the Seminarians titled, Bibliturgical English; and has presented papers on topics including Saint Mark, the image of women in St. Irenaeus’ Writings, and New Feminism. She is currently a Senator in the 2020-25 Egyptian Senate.

The lecture will be chaired by Canon Sarah Snyder, CCCW Chair and Founder of the Rose Castle Foundation.

 

Nigerian Pentecostalism and Covid-19: Assessing the RCCG’s Response to the Covid-19 Pandemic

Webinar: 3 November 2021, 4-5.30 pm

Speaker: Dr Chris Wadibia, University of Oxford

Registration is free. To join, email the Centre Coordinator.

Founded in 1952, the Redeemed Christian Church of God (RCCG) is one of Nigeria’s largest, wealthiest, and most politically powerful indigenous Pentecostal churches. The first case of Covid-19 was reported in Nigeria on 28 February 2020. The advent of Covid-19 created spaces for the RCCG to leverage its influential religious platform and development activity infrastructures to, in its own eyes, assist the Nigerian state in combatting the spread of the virus. This lecture employs the RCCG as an organisational case study to offer a critical analysis of how Nigerian Pentecostals have responded to the crisis. The RCCG’s Covid-19 response can be grouped into the following three categories: investments in palliatives, virus-related biblical exegeses, and engagement with the Nigerian state. Ultimately, this lecture seeks to equip students with an understanding of how Africa’s indigenous Pentecostal churches have delivered creative solutions in response to the considerable social and public health challenges created by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Christopher Wadibia is a Junior Research Fellow at Pembroke College, Oxford. He is researching the nexus between political Pentecostalism and racism in the UK under the aegis of Pembroke’s Religion and the Frontier Challenges programme. Christopher’s doctoral research studied the politics of how the RCCG, one of Nigeria’s most popular and socio-politically influential indigenous Pentecostal churches, invests in Nigerian development causes. Before Oxford, Christopher completed a BA in Government at Georgetown University (2016), an MPhil in Intercultural Theology and Interreligious Studies at Trinity College, Dublin (2018), and a PhD in Theology and Religion at Cambridge (2021).

Our Silver Jubilee lecture no. 4 will be held in the Healey Room, Westminster College, 4pm to 6pm today, 14 October 2021.

Please contact Rachel Simonson, our new Coordinator, to book your place, or obtain the online link: centre [at] cccw.cam.ac.uk

Theme: Transfiguring World Christianity

Ecumenism:
Figuring out Interconnected Christianities

Chaired by
Dr Jenny Leith, Dean of Studies, CCCW

To register, email centre [at] cccw.cam.ac.uk

This fourth lecture in the five-part CCCW Silver Jubilee Lecture series explores the possibilities of an
ecumenism that can hold together body, mind and heart so that more creative and holistic ways forward
can be found than either only ‘working and acting together’, or concentrating on ‘finding doctrinal
agreement’. It will explore the necessity for and the hope of ‘decolonising’ the ecumenical movement,
recognising its origins in the global North and the dominance so far within it of particular discourses and
peoples, and opening up the possibility of a more truly ecumenical movement within world Christianity.
And it will reflect on the trajectory within the movement from ‘the unity of Christians’ towards ‘the unity of all humankind’ and even ‘the unity of all creation’, by asking what ecumenism is really for within the mission of God. The lecture will be honest about challenges, but always draw hope from the power of the Holy Spirit to celebrate movement and renewal and to work towards the fulfilment of all things in the Kingdom of God.

Susan Durber has served as minister with churches in the very different contexts of Manchester, Salford,
Oxford and Taunton, as Principal of Westminster College in Cambridge and as Theology Advisor to Christian Aid. At WCC she has been involved in The Church: Towards a Common Vision, and on moral discernment. She has also been involved in work on the theme of the upcoming WCC Assembly and in ‘pilgrim visits’ to church groups often at the margins of the ecumenical movement. She is committed to making way for new kinds of ecumenism as the churches continue to call one another to visible unity.

Conference Theme: Pentecostalism and Socio-Cultural Change

Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity is often seen as a catalyst for social and cultural change. This chimes with how Pentecostals and Charismatics tend to portray their own religion – as transformative, modern, and on the cutting edge of socio-cultural developments. This conference seeks to recover a more inter-connected perspective that not only asks how Pentecostal movements have effected socio-cultural changes, but also to what extent they have rather themselves been influenced and driven by larger transformations in World Christianity and society at large.

We invite contributions to our parallel panels, with a particular interest in papers that address the conference theme.

Please submit your abstracts by 30 November 2021 to Jörg Haustein (jh2227@cam.ac.uk)

CCCW is happy to publicise CWM’s virtual event eDare, where theologians, pastors, poets, artists, and activists come together to reflect and present their insights on the challenges and opportunities for life. eDARE 2021 aligns with CWM’s theme “Rise to Life: Confessing witness to life-flourishing communities”, as well as an opportunity to critically engage with current forms of Public Theology.

eDARE 2021