CCCW Director, Emma Wild-Wood is moving to the University of Edinburgh in January 2018. A new director for CCCW has already been appointed who brings skills and experience which are complimentary to previous directors. The new director comes from the Global South. His appointment is subject to obtaining the right to work in the U.K. and will be announced in the New Year. Watch this space!

Anna Mack, Missionary at Shamokin, Pennsylvania 1745-1755

Title: ‘I Felt a Power from His Wounds & Blood’: Native American Women & Female Missionaries in early Moravian Missions in North America, 1742-1765.

Click here to read the seminar paper given by Revd Jennifer Adams-Massmann, from the Faculty of Theology, University of Heidelberg, on 22 November 2017.

Angus Crichton’s seminar on Wed 18 October, ‘Treasure & Trials: On Publishing The Ugandan Churches & the Political Centre’ is available to listen to and read here.

Saturday 25 November 2017, 10.15am – 4pm,  at Westminster College, Madingley Road, Cambridge CB3 0AA.

Our theme of Empire and Missions Revisited takes us beyond conventional views of the easy overlap between missionary endeavour and imperial expansion. Presbyterians in 19^th-century Brazil wanted to counter assumptions of US imperialism in Portuguese-speaking territory. British missionaries had to report to their public in 1914 an imperial war which shattered new-found global Christian unity. In the Congo, Anglicans needed to negotiate their place in a Belgian colonial territory and then in independent Zaire. These diverse experiences offer a chance for Christian reflection on the complexity of the relationship between empire and missions, and the challenges of teaching about it.

For information on how to book and the programme for the day please click here.

CCCW was pleased to host four visitors from the Diocese of Kigali, Rwanda and show them something of our extensive archive. Dorcus Uwinmaana, the Mother’s Union adviser, found a photograph of her grandparents whom she had never met.

Dorcus was visiting the centre with Ven. Anotine Rutayisire, Principal of Kigali Anglican Theological College, Revd Manasseh Tuyizere, Director of Evangelism & Training, Catrin Tuyizere, Early years Adviser in the Schools department of Kigali Diocese and Matthew Thorne from the Department of Mission, Diocese of Ely.

CCCW archivist Dr Philip Saunders showed them some of the Joe Church holdings, which pertain to the East African Revival from the 1930s. As well as the photograph of her grandparents Yosiya and Dorcus Kinuka on a motorbike, Dorcus also saw a newspaper article written on her grandfather’s retirement. Kinuka was a prominent preacher and evangelist in the East African revival and the article plays tribute to him as a missionary from Ankole (Uganda) to Rwanda.

Kigali diocese is also developing its own archive, which Jesse Zink visited two years ago. CCCW and Kigali Diocese are looking for sponsors to fund a project for the preservation and sharing of these two important interconnected collections on two continents.

Dr Ian Randall received a Cambridgeshire Association for Local History award for the CCCW publication, The Cambridge Seventy. The occasional paper is a study of a group of Cambridge students who, in the 1950s, decided to become missionaries. Inspired by the Cambridge Seven who had taken the same decision seventy years earlier they worked across the globe at a time of transition in Protestant missionary thinking that marked the end of the colonial period.

The study was ‘highly commended’ as ‘an interesting and well-researched publication on a little known aspect of Cambridge.’

Copies are available on request from the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide. Price £3 + p&p.

The Ugandan Churches and the Political Centre edited by Paddy Musana, Angus Crichton, and Caroline Howell was launched on 22 September 2017 in Makerere University.

Amid heightened political tension in Uganda regarding the Presidential Age Limit Bill, the launch panel discussed the fundamental issues raised by the book about how the Ugandan churches have and do engage with the political centre.

The book, published by the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide, has been reviewed in Uganda’s national newspaper: New Vision.

The Cambridge launch, organised by Dr Angus Crichton (Ngoma Project) will take place at the upcoming CCCW seminar: Treasure and Trials: On Publishing The Ugandan Churches and the Political Centre on 18 October 2017 from 16:30-18:30 in the Divinity Faculty.

Copies of the book will be available at the launch.

Relocating World Christianity

A new book co-edited by the CCCW director, Emma Wild-Wood, and Cambridge colleagues, Prof David Maxwell and Dr Joel Cabrita, offers a new perspective on World Christianity studies. It explains why scholarship has focused upon the local and the regional and argues for the importance of transregional connections in the study of Christianity worldwide.

Relocating World Christianity: Interdisciplinary Studies in Universal and Local Expressions of the Christian Faith is newly published in print and electronically by Brill.

Case-studies by J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, Naures Atto, Pedro Feitoza, David C. Kirkpatrick, Chandra Mallampalli, Dorottya Nagy, Peter C. Phan, Andrew Preston, Joel Robbins, Chloe Starr, Charlotte Walker-Said highlight the universalist, globalising aspirations of many Christians worldwide.

“While we do not neglect the importance of the local, our aim is to give due weight to the significant transregional networks and exchanges that have constituted Christian communities, both historically and in the present day.” — back cover

A print copy will be available soon in our library.

The Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide is seeking to appoint a Director from 1 January 2018.  Applications are invited from candidates who wish to promote the understanding of and engagement with Christian mission and World Christianity.

This is an excellent opportunity for a creative and enterprising individual with a strong academic record to discern contemporary needs and develop the Centre’s educational role.

For further information click here.