World Christianity Summer Institute 2024 “Poverty and the Church” Inaugural Address: Sunday 30 June 2024, 3-4.15 pm BST

Healey Room, Westminster College, and online

Title: ’GIVE HER OF THE FRUIT OF HER HANDS; AND LET HER OWN WORKS PRAISE HER IN THE GATE’:  FAITH AND FEMALE FACE OF POVERTY by PROF ESTHER MOMBO

Abstract

Statistics show that most families live only on the income of their womenfolk who are the bread winners. Women’s work in sustaining their families the invisible uncounted work of childbearing and rearing, feeding, cleaning arranging organizing maintaining the health and wealth of the family, serving and satisfying the needs of immediate and extended family. This labour is not recognized treated as cheap, unorganized, unrecognized labourers.

This presentation seeks to investigate how the church addresses the female face of poverty and the elevation of it, how does the church address the reality that women are providers, although their work is often not acknowledged nor valued. How is justice envisioned from the words of the proverb text “give her a share of the fruit of her hands; and let her own works praise her in the gate” (Proverbs 31.31).

Bio

PROF ESTHER MOMBO is Professor at St. Paul’s University in Limuru, Kenya, where she has served in senior management positions including as Deputy Vice-chancellor Academic affairs. Her research and teaching interests span the fields of Church History, with a focus on Mission History, interfaith Relations, and Theology & Gender Studies with a focus on African women’s Theologies. While connected to the University of St. Paul’s, the University of Dublin, and the University of Edinburgh, she has directed and examined postgraduate students. She has mentored students, especially women who now serve in churches and academic institutions in different parts of the world. In 2007 she was awarded an honorary doctorate by Virginia Theological Seminary for her work in bringing to the fore issues of gender disparity and gender justice in Church and society. In 2023 she was awarded another honorary doctorate by her alma mater, University of Edinburgh. She has been a visiting professor at several universities including the Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology, Bright School of Divinity at Texas Christian University, Graduate Institute of Theology in Yonseo University Seoul, South Korea, Candler School of Theology, Emory University and Utrecht University. She has served in several ecumenical committees including as co-chair of the Commission of Education and Ecumenical Formation of the World Council of Churches.

CCCW Talk: Tuesday 28 May 1600-1730 BST

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

Title: “South Asia’s Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim”

Abstract

South Asia is home to more than a billion Hindus and half a billion Muslims. But the region is also home to substantial Christian communities, some dating almost to the earliest days of the faith. The stories of South Asia’s Christians are vital for understanding the shifting contours of World Christianity, precisely because of their history of interaction with members of these other religious traditions. In what ways does South Asian Christianity conform to wider patterns of World Christianity relating to translation and indigenous agency? In what ways does it deviate?  This presentation addresses these questions by drawing attention to knowledge production, debate, and conversion as three sites of interfaith encounter and, ironically, as catalysts for majoritarian nationalisms which ultimately have marginalized Christians in postcolonial South Asia.

Bio

Chandra Mallampalli currently a research scholar at the Clough Center for the Study of Constitutional Democracy at Boston College where he explores challenges facing India’s diverse democracy. In 2021-22 Professor he was an inaugural Yang Visiting Scholar of World Christianity at Harvard Divinity School. His scholarship and teaching span the fields of modern South Asia, the British Empire, and Global Christianity. He is the author of four books and many articles, which examine the intersection of religion, law, and society in India. His first three books examine the evolution of Christian, Muslim and Hindu identities in relation to legal and political policies and print media. His most recent book with Oxford University Press (New York), South Asia’s Christians: Between Hindu and Muslim, describes how the lives of Christians have been shaped by centuries of interactions with Hindus and Muslims of the Indian subcontinent. His next project, “The Virtues of Mixture: Religion, Labor Migrants and Cosmopolitanism in the Indian Ocean” examines the experiences of cultural and racial mixture among South Indian labor migrants to the Persian Gulf and Southeast Asia, and whether their religious commitments either facilitated or impeded their capacity for inter-ethnic ties and world citizenship.

CCCW Talk: Tuesday 7 May 2024, 4:00-5:30 pm BST
Room 7, Faculty of Divinity, 25 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP
Followed by refreshments

Title: “Migration, Pentecostalism, and Islam in Northern Cameroon”

Abstract:

Cameroon has until recently been an island of political stability in a Central-African region that has experienced civil wars, coup d’états, and violent Muslim extremism. In the last ten years this has changed. Cameroon now hosts more than 2.2 million forcibly displaced persons in addition to almost 500,000 refugees. Many of these seek to leave the refugee camps and areas troubled by terrorism and ecological crises to settle in the southern countryside, or in the three big cities Maroua, Garoua and Ngaoundéré.

This seminar investigates the approach of some protestant churches in northern Cameroon and sees how different theological and social approaches impact their encounter with the migrants. Whereas the established missionary churches have administrative resources and international networks, the newly established Pentecostal churches use their entrepreneurial skills to integrate the newcomers.

Bio: Tomas Sundnes Drønen is Professor of Global Studies and Religion at VID Specialized University, Stavanger campus, Norway. Among his research interests are religious change in Africa with a particular focus on mission history, Pentecostalism, and Islam. He has also published scholarly works dealing with globalisation, development studies, and migration. Drønen has served as Vice-Rector and Dean at VID for more than ten years but has spent the last year in Africa for further field studies.

By Graham Kings

On Sunday morning 30 June, as the first event in the 2024 Summer Institute of the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide, I will be leading a nine mile from the village of Kingston, west of Cambridge, to Selwyn College, Cambridge.

We will gather at All Saints Church, Kingston CB23 3NG, at 9.00am ready to leave at 9.30am and arrive at Selwyn in time for brunch at 1.00pm.

The co-leader of this walk will be Faith Galgalo, a 25-year-old civil servant in Nairobi, Kenya, whose father, Joseph Galgalo, co-led our ‘Oxford to Cambridge with a Camel’ walk with me in 1999, 25 years ago. We raised £50,000 for camel-based nomad schools in northern Kenya, where Joseph grew up and was a primary school teacher at Bubisa.

ITV and BBC covered the event and a 6-minute film, edited by the Church Mission Society (CMS, founded in 1799), was broadcast on YouTube.

In 1999, we walked with 22 others, including 12 Americans, and 5 Kenyans, for six days and were joined by many others each day. The last day was from Kingston to Cambridge with over 100 people. Hertford College, Oxford (my undergraduate college) and Selwyn (the college for the postgraduate studies of Joseph and me) sponsored the walk with accommodation and a feast. Churches in Aylesbury and Bedford provided for us en route. Cleo, the camel, came from Amazing Animals, north of Oxford.

The Master of Selwyn, Sir David Harrison, welcomed Cleo into the College on Sunday 27 June 1999 and Selwyn’s Christmas Card that year had a photo of Cleo processing around Old Court.

Then the procession continued into the back gate of King’s College, to the jumbo arch of the Gibbs Building, above which lived Charles Simeon, vicar of Holy Trinity Church, Cambridge for 54 years. Rich man – ‘eye of a needle’. He was a benefactor who co-founded CMS in 1799. There, the Vice Chancellor of the University, the Provost of King’s College, the Master of St John’s College, the Bishop of Ely and the President of CMS, welcomed Cleo to walk through the eye of the needle and then into the great west door of Great St Mary’s, the University Church, for a camel service of thanksgiving.

The next day, the Chancellor, Prince Philip, and Desmond Tutu, met Cleo and the walkers at the Veterinary School. Tutu asked me if I would do it again. I replied, ‘Jesus said, “The first shall be last and the last shall be first”. It is the first time we’ve done this, and it will be the last.’

25 years later, we are raising money to go towards food to allow the children to remain in Bubisa school. The fund in the Anglican Church of Kenya is administered by Anglican Development Services. For four years up to 2023, there was a devastating drought in northern Kenya. Currently a group of families at Bubisa who had 95 camels now only have 2 camels.

In 2023, Damian Arnold, Register editor ofThe Times, who is coming on the walk, visited Joseph and wrote about him and the devastating famine, ’23 million are on the brink of starvation in Kenya’, in both The Times and the Church Times.

The walk is free, the brunch at Selwyn College costs £13, and we hope that people will also donate to the fund for Bubisa School in northern Kenya.

Registration for the walk and for the brunch is through the Selwyn College web site: please click here.

Donations to the fund for Bubisa School may be given through the CCCW donation web site, Stewardship: please click here, then click ‘give as a guest’ and in the ‘message of support’ box type, ‘For Bubisa School, Kenya’.

Donations may be made from anywhere in the world and the donors do not need to come on the walk.

So, please do consider supporting us – in person on the walk, through donations, through prayer, through following us on X (@CambridgeCamel) and through forwarding this article to friends who may be interested. Many thanks indeed.

We will be closed on Good Friday and Easter Monday (29th March and 1st April). 

We wish you a very blessed Easter!

CCCW Talk: Tuesday 12th March 2024, 4:00-5:30 pm GMT
Room 7, Faculty of Divinity, 25 West Road, Cambridge, CB3 9DP
Followed by refreshments

Title: “From Sacred Canopy to Ethnic Umbrellas: Re-Thinking the Future of Christianity in Ethiopian Politics”

Abstract: Ethiopian Christianity has long been in the forefront of social innovation. Creating a unifying national story which eventually became a source of social covenant is one of its cultural inventions. The Ethiopianness constructed through a theologically informed exceptionalism depicted the Ethiopian state as a “sacred canopy” elastic enough to accommodate ethnic and religious diversity.  This presentation sets out to ask: Where does the transition of national conception from a “sacred canopy” to multi-ethnic umbrellas leave the church? How do the emergent political dynamics affect Christianity’s position in society? What are the potential ways Christianity can make a positive contribution for peaceful cohabitation in a conflict-ridden country?

Bio: Mohammed Girma is Tutor and Senior Research Fellow at IBAC, British Bible Society and Visiting Lecturer at University of Roehampton, London. Girma is the author of Understanding Religion and Social Change in Ethiopia (Palgrave, 2012) and editor and co-editor of three books including The Healing of Memories: African Christian Response to Politically Induced Trauma (2018). Girma has authored numerous book chapters and peer-reviewed articles in academic journals.

CCCW Talk: Tuesday 20th February, 4pm–5.30pm.

Title: “Christ in Islamic Clothes: Evangelicals and the Saga of Muslim Contextualization”

Abstract: During the 1970s, as evangelicals applied anthropology to the task of evangelising the world’s cultures, striking proposals were made at Fuller Theological Seminary for how Christianity might be expressed in Muslim terms. Bold mission-field collaborations followed in South and Southeast Asia over the next two decades, in which mosque prayers and Muslim festivals became reworked around Christ for converts, and new Bibles were translated that incorporated Quranic language and style. In many cases, new believers were encouraged to retain their Muslim identity, which led to a large “insider movement” in Bangladesh. Somewhat controversial from the outset, Muslim contextualization became publicly contested by the turn of millennium, as evangelical fears of “syncretism” with Islam emerged. By 2011, tensions had converged on the issue of Muslim-oriented Bibles which contained non-literal renderings of “Son of God”. So acute was the crisis that it was only resolved when Wycliffe-SIL, the world’s largest Bible translation organisation, submitted its policies to the verdict of global evangelical tribunal.

Bio: Christian J. Anderson is a PhD candidate in Cambridge’s Divinity Faculty, where he works on the theology and history of evangelical encounters with Islam. His thesis is the first full-length account of a decades-long American evangelical missionary controversy over Muslim-style churches and Bible translations. His research has appeared in the journals Studies in World Christianity, Exchange and Mission Studies.

The Centre for Research in the Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences (CRASSH) at the University of Cambridge, together with the Cambridge Faculty of Divinity and the Cambridge Interfaith Programme are inviting applications for funded Visiting Fellowships for Scholars from the Global South.

Applications are invited from scholars whose research is connected to the theme of inter-religious relations, with a particular focus on religious boundary-making.

For further details and instructions on how to apply, see: https://www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/research/fellowships/global-south-fellowships/#

The Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide is looking for an enthusiastic and experienced administrator to join our team as the Centre Coordinator.

Vacancy type: Part-time, fixed contract for 12 months, renewable
Hours: 18 hours a week
Start Date: 01 April 2024
Location: CCCW, Westminster College, Madingley Rd, Cambridge CB3 0AA

Full job advertisement available here. Further information and a full job description are available on request. A complete application consists of a CV and a cover letter with the names of two referees. Application material should be emailed to Mrs Rachel Simonson: centre[at]cccw.cam.ac.uk

Closing date for applications is 29 February 2024.
Interviews in Cambridge during the week beginning 5 March 2024.