The Bible: Everywhere in Everyday Life

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Would you like to meet fellow Christians from around the world?

Spend time in the stimulating and historic environment of Cambridge?

Why not consider applying to our Summer Institute today?

Read more

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Dates: 2-7 July 2023

Venue: Westminster College, Cambridge, UK

Download a flyer here

Download an application form here

Last date to apply: Friday 14 April 2023

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*No 2*

Janet Parsons’ background includes many years in Southern Africa but also teaching English for Speakers of Other Languages in Asia and the UK.  In 2009-2011, she trained in South Africa and the U.K. for cross-cultural work in mission.  In 2013, she joined CMS as a self-supporting worker and moved to Africa to teach at Bishop Barham, constituent college of Uganda Christian University. 

Read post *No 1* here.

Read post *No 3* here.

Read post *No 4* here.

*No 1*

Janet Parsons’ background includes many years in Southern Africa but also teaching English for Speakers of Other Languages in Asia and the UK.  In 2009-2011, she trained in South Africa and the U.K. for cross-cultural work in mission.  In 2013, she joined CMS as a self-supporting worker and moved to Africa to teach at Bishop Barham, constituent college of Uganda Christian University. 

She stayed for two and a half years in Uganda, teaching and working throughout the College with Ugandans and other nationals.  She worked simultaneously — through emails — with friends, family and church members (her ‘encouragers’) in the UK and USA — to describe her work and gain support for it.   

Here are some of her messages.  They reflect the joys and sorrows, insights and dilemmas of the outsider looking in — who is also the insider looking outward with explanations for others — through her confusion and concern, joy, anger, hard-won patience and new insights.  

They are, on the one hand, early reflections on a cross-cultural challenge.  They are also current reflections — through the lens of time and distance — on experiences that unfolded in that place in the southwest corner of Uganda.   

Read post *No 2* here.

Read post *No 3* here.

Read post *No 4* here.

Seminar

Speaker

Dr Gina Zurlo

This seminar will discuss Dr Zurlo’s recent research from her Women in World Christianity Project, which was the first demographic assessment of Christianity down to the denominational level in every country of the world. World Christianity is a women’s movement because it was built and is sustained by women, and the majority of its members, participants, and affiliates are women. It is anticipated that women in the global South will take on increasingly visible leadership roles in the church, despite the barriers they face, grounded by their faith and in service to their present communities and the next generations.

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Seminar

Speaker

Dr Joanildo Burito

The last decade represented a marked shift in the profile of public religion in Brazil. After three decades of sustained minority engagement, Brazilian conservative evangelicals/pentecostals seized the opportunity to raise their profile and engaged in a majority bid under the double strategy of building a “Christian Majority” discourse and joining a far-right presidential campaign which led to the previous government. This presentation will discuss and analyse the process and its unfolding, including other voices from Christian churches and other religious and secular agents, reflecting on the possible implications for current forms of Christian politics in Brazil.

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By Muthuraj Swamy

Luke 4:16-30

I Corinthians 1: 10-18

In March 2017, Bishop Graham Kings and I were in Jerusalem for a conference. Bishop Kings was a Mission Theologian in the Anglican Communion, based at the Lambeth Palace, and is now a retired Church of England bishop, and a Research Associate at the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide. While in Jerusalem, on one day, we both together with a local friend, were travelling from Jerusalem to Nazareth. As we approached Nazareth, a city on a small hill, our local friend pointed us towards the city. As we saw the hill, Bishop Kings said, oh, this is the hill from which some people in Nazareth tried to push Jesus down!

Luke chapter 4: 16-30 is a text I have returned to several times since my student days in theological colleges. Especially Jesus’ reading of the Isaiah text, which is generally known as Nazareth Manifesto, is a key passage in theological studies because of the powerful redemptive message of God it conveys. Nevertheless, rarely I used to reflect on why some people in Nazareth were trying to kill Jesus in Nazareth.

But during the last few years I have returned to reflect on this question quite often, as it offers a number of insights and lessons for our current context – filled with tensions, divisions, conflicts, and violence in our immediate communities and wider societies.

In this text we see that people are joyful when Jesus announces the message of God’s liberation to them. We read, ‘all spoke well of him and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth’. Gracious words. Yet in a few verses down they are enraged to kill Jesus. What then happens? What happens between the gracious words they had heard from Jesus and then trying to kill him after a little while?

After reading the passage from the book of Isaiah, Jesus talks about how prophets are not usually honoured in their hometowns. It might have irritated the people, but what really enrages them is something that follows. Jesus then moves to talk about how God had dealt with the Gentiles, clearly communicating that the gracious words they just had heard were not exclusively for the people claiming to be chosen by God, but are open to everyone as per God’s plan. Jesus says:

“the truth is, there were many widows in Israel in the time of Elijah, when the heaven was shut up three years and six months and there was a severe famine over all the land. Yet Elijah was sent to none of them except to a widow at Zarephath in Sidon. There were also many with a skin disease in Israel in the time of the prophet Elisha, and none of them was cleansed except Naaman the Syrian.”

This enrages those who were around.

The problem was that they saw God’s grace was available only for themselves, and not for others. They saw that God was dealing with them alone, and not with anyone else. They were not willing to see and accept that God was extending God’s grace to others too. A vision and faith lacking to see God on the other side. In other words, a lack of openness to others that shorten the vision and faith one has about God.

This Sunday is the week of prayer for Christian unity, from 18th to 25th January. All over the world numerous efforts are made to overcome divisions and conflicts in our churches and to stay united in witnessing to God revealed in Jesus Christ. However, we continue to face many obstacles in staying together. One of the obstacles is a lack of openness to differences and an unwillingness to journey into otherness, which our Gospel text today highlights.

I often think that the entire story of Christianity, both in the Bible from the book of Genesis, and in its 2000 years history, is a story of journey into otherness. Creation is God allowing a different other to come into life and existence, and God making covenants with them. Incarnation in the New Testament is God coming into the world taking the form of human, a different experience for God. Salvation is not simply redemption from personal sin, but the whole process involves a journey into otherness – from individual to church community, from belonging to the self to belonging to Christ, from narrow mindedness and isolation to seeing God in places where we may not want to see.

During the last three years, my time in Cambridge has been very good and enriching. Coming from another country, the acts of welcoming and friendship and the huge support my family and I have received from friends, colleagues and church communities has been very helpful. Working at the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide, Cambridge Theological Federation, and at St John the Evangelist church Hills Road, is a great experience for me to learn in a different context to my own. When reflecting on otherness, often I recollect a version of blessing a former curate at St John the Evangelist church, Chris Campbell, often used to use at the end of a worship service: ‘Grace, love and fellowship of God be with you all, with all those who you love, and with those who you find hard to love.’ ‘With those you find hard to love’ are the words that invite us to journey into otherness. To see God’s grace to even those we may not like. It doesn’t matter how close to Jesus we are and how close he is to us, we do not have control on God’s grace freely available to others.

During this week of Christian unity, an invitation to journey into otherness is also about how we work for better unity in our churches. In our Epistle reading we see Paul writing to a divided church in Corinth. He writes to them, ‘I appeal to you, brothers and sisters, in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, that all of you agree with one another in what you say and that there be no divisions among you, but that you be perfectly united in mind and thought.’ He asks them a powerful question: ‘Is Christ divided?’

Today it is not just our wider societies are divided nationally, culturally, ethnically and so on. Our churches too are divided, and this on one hand reflect the divisions in our wider societies, and on the other hand, divisions in our churches also contribute to the conflicts in our societies, directly or indirectly.

In this regard, I would like to say something about what we do at the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide, which I direct, and how we understand and practice Christian mission as connections and a journey into otherness. One important aspect of Christian mission that is not seldom addressed is how we as Christians need to stay connected among ourselves. Christian mission for centuries has been strictly about reaching the unreached, reaching non-Christians. But to do that effectively, Christians to stay connected and care for each other is important. Reading St Paul carefully shows that his missionary journeys were not strictly about reaching the non-Christians and establishing churches, but also inviting the established churches to stay and connected together – as he does about the church in Corinth – and to care for and support each other. Our annual World Christianity Summer Institute in my Cambridge Centre tries to create a platform for Christians from diverse backgrounds to come together, learn from each other, and stay connected, so that we can witness to the Gospel effectively.

Let me say a prayer, from the Churches Together in Britain and Ireland resource for this year which has come with a title, Be-longing.

You made us, God,

in your own image,

and then became one of us,

proud of those you have made.

Make us proud of being part of that

worldwide family,

and eager to discover and celebrate

your image

in every person, every culture,

every nation

that we are privileged to encounter. Amen.

Ian Randall, Mutharaj Swamy and Graham Kings

This timely book was published by The Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide in 2022, over twenty years after the Henry Martyn Library became the Henry Martyn Centre. It was later re-named the Cambridge Centre for Christianity Worldwide.

The Centre is the fruit of the amalgamation of two Trusts established in Cambridge by Evangelical Anglicans in the 19th century– the Henry Martyn Trust in 1881 and the Henry Martyn Library Trust in 1898. Both Trusts were to encourage members of the University to offer to serve the Church overseas, in response to the visit of David Livingstone in 1857 to Cambridge, and his challenge to the universities delivered in the Senate House, to respond to his call to mission abroad. This call had led to the establishment of the University’s Church Missionary Union, of which John Barton was the Secretary. He later became the Vicar of Holy Trinity Church in the city after 20 years serving with the (Anglican) Church Missionary Society in India. The piece of land found for the establishment of a venue for the work happened to be next to that Church. The Henry Martyn Hall, opened there in 1887, was in memory of the outstanding 18th century missionary priest and Fellow of St John’s College, Henry Martyn. He had been curate of Holy Trinity Church, when the great Charles Simeon, co-founder of CMS, was Vicar. The Hall was dedicated to the support of world mission and ‘Christian converse and counsel’.  The library was to complement it, providing suitable background reading about world mission for potential missionary candidates. This again complemented the foundation in 1877 of the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (CICCU), mostly for Evangelical students of different denominations, which used the Hall from its inception. The book traces the developing wide use of the Hall and the Library, their amalgamation in 1934, and the eventual move of the Library to Westminster College in 1996. Later there was the development on that College site of a customized home for the project. It was re-named the CCCW in 2014. The book is also valuable as it traces many religious developments in Cambridge University and city from the 19th century to the present day, and the way in which the Centre has contributed to the academic and practical study of Christian mission from an ecumenical point of view. It has also given encouragement to candidates for mission, and to Christians from abroad coming to study in Cambridge. I wish, however, that it had an index, as so many key people in the religious and academic world are mentioned in the text!

Written by Canon Brian Macdonald-Milne (Corpus Christi College, Cambridge), Formerly missionary priest in the Pacific, Trustee and then Archivist of The Melanesian Mission UK

Speaker

Dr Hannah (Briscoe) Mollallegn

Abstract: This paper is a generational analysis of missionary children in the development and impact of the Ruanda Mission from before its foundation in 1922 through the East African Revival and the first few decades of Kabale Preparatory School (KPS). It not only examines how missionary children experienced these events and changes, but also investigates how the Ruanda Mission itself was shaped by these children. It explores the influence of an earlier generation of British Evangelical networks, including Keswick and the Cambridge Inter-Collegiate Christian Union (CICCU), in creating the conditions in which the Ruanda Mission was established. It then highlights the strategic role of two missionary children in the founding of the Ruanda Mission—Algie Stanley Smith (co-founder of the Mission) and Handley Hooper (friend and incoming Africa Secretary for CMS)—and their diplomatic influence during a fragile time of theological upheaval and post-war financial hardship. The analysis then widens out from this friendship to a larger relational network and explores the particular “family” identity of the Ruanda Mission. It argues that the establishment of KPS was a significant component to the mission’s family-identity and longevity and examines the significance of KPS in the lives of the children. This paper is an investigation of the flow of knowledge and values between these generations and argues that the Ruanda Mission was uniquely shaped by missionary children in ways that are distinct from the CMS more generally.

Click here for further information.

CCCW Day Seminar online and in-person

Speaker

Revd Dr Thomas John Hastings

Abstract: After touching on Kagawa’s traumatic childhood, conversion under the influence of American Presbyterian missionaries, decision to live and work in Kobe’s worst slum, and activities as an evangelist, social reformer, writer, and peace advocate, I will address the “Kagawa Phenomenon” in the West with special reference to his whirlwind 1936 speaking tour across the United States. Finally, I will explore the multiple dimensions of Kagawa’s witness and thought and consider his continuing relevance for our time.

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