Boston University’s Center for Global Christianity and Mission held a workshop “Mapping Christianity in China, 1550–1950: Developing Relational and Geospatial Tools for the Study of Christianity in China,” part of its ongoing China Historical Christian Database (CHDC, chcdatabase.com) initiative. Nearly 300 people from twenty-eight countries attended the November 19–21, 2020, online event. “Scholars, computer scientists, and archivists worked together to lay out a pathway for the CHCD to become transformative for the study of modern China and modern Chinese Christianity,” said Daryl Ireland, the Center’s associate director and author of John Song: Modern Chinese Christianity and the Making of a New Man (2020). The workshop recordings are available online. The database is designed, he added, to “map where every Christian church, school, hospital, monastery, orphanage, publishing house, and the like were located in China between 1550 and 1950” and as a “tool that can create spatial maps of when and where Christians were located in China.” The BU Institute on Culture, Religion, and World Affairs and the BU Center for the Study of Asia supported the workshop.
Editors of the SAM China Mission Photograph Collection have been updating their extensive online collection of visual materials—twenty-six photo albums belonging to Roman Catholic missionaries who served in China under a Chinese native bishop from 1926 to 1952 and an equal number of boxes of loose photographs and religious images. In 2017 Whitworth University, Spokane, WA, digitized thousands of photographs from the Société des Auxiliaires des Missions (SAM) archives in Brussels and hosts the collection. The photographs and archival documents, which lacked descriptive context until recently, “provide an eyewitness and grassroots visual account of the beginning and growth of the first Chinese-led Roman Catholic local churches . . . as well as its survival after the Communist takeover of China in 1949,” said project director Jean-Paul Wiest (jpwiest@gmail.com), former research director of the Beijing Center for Chinese Studies and author of Maryknoll in China: A History, 1918–1955 (1988). For details and to view the photographs with their captions, go online to https://digitalcommons.whitworth.edu/societe_auxiliaires_missions.
Documentary filmmaker and ethnographer James M. Ault Jr. released Machanic Manyeruke: The Life of Zimbabwe’s Gospel Music Legend in November 2020. “I have always been impressed with how Manyeruke found fresh ways in his songs to recount stories from the Bible,” said Ault, who is making the eighty-five-minute film freely available online and is giving any donations received to Manyeruke and his music team to help support their ongoing work. The film “holds some important lessons about church growth in cities and also about music and the contextualization of Christian faith,” he added. Ault is known for producing the two-part 2013 documentary African Christianity Rising and for Born Again: Life in a Fundamentalist Baptist Church,” which aired on PBS in 1987. To view his latest film online, go to http://jamesault.com/documentaries/machanic-manyeruke/.
Seeking to discover the gender makeup of Christianity in every country at the denominational level, the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary, started a two-year “Women in World Christianity” research project, according to Gina A. Zurlo, codirector and an IBMR contributing editor. She said the endeavor wants to know, “Where are the women in World Christianity, and what are their contributions to congregational life?” To explore those and other questions, they planned to commence a Gender and Congregational Life Survey in January 2021 in English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Korean, Mandarin, and Mongolian. With this survey, Zurlo noted, “we want to find out how Christians around the world understand the roles of men and women in their congregations.” The Louisville Institute and the Religious Research Association are funding the project. For details, go online to www.gordonconwell.edu/center-for-global-christianity/research/women-in-world-christianity/.
Bloomsbury Academic announced plans to publish Christians in the City: Studies in Contemporary Global Christianity, a series of monographs on twenty-five of the world’s great cities. Volumes are being planned on New York, Los Angeles, Shanghai, Bangalore, Lagos, Johannesburg, Moscow, London, São Paulo, Havana, Sydney, and other cities by series editor Dyron B. Daughrity, professor of religion at Pepperdine University, Malibu, CA. Authors will use anthropology, ethnography, sociology, and historical methods, according to a press release, to “highlight how Christianity is changing particular metro areas, as well as how those areas are impacting the Christian religion” and to “understand what is happening with Christianity as it engages the great urban centers of the world.” For details, e-mail Daughrity, dyron.daughrity@pepperdine.edu.
Brill announced plans to publish Studies in Global Catholicism, a book series that, a press release says, “will spark development of scholarship within this field by creating a venue for new work.” Publications will range across disciplines, incorporating historical, social, and theological perspectives. Conceived as an area of study within the broader context of World Christianity, the series will build on cultural, historical, and social scientific approaches to study expressions of Catholicism. The publisher especially seeks “writing projects that promote or encompass research that cuts across what had formerly been segments or isolated categories and fields,” the announcement added. Of particular interest are comparative theology and congregational studies. For details, go online to https://brill.com/page/sgc/forthcoming-series-studies-in-global-catholicism.
The 2021 annual meeting of the Yale-Edinburgh Group on the History of the Missionary Movement and World Christianity will be held June 22–24—online for the first time since the gathering started in 1992—and will be hosted by the University of Edinburgh. Participants will discuss the theme “Oral, Print, and Digital Cultures in World Christianity and the History of Mission.” The 2020 conference with the same theme was postponed because of COVID-19 concerns. For details, go online to http://divinity-adhoc.library.yale.edu/Yale-Edinburgh/.
Appointed. Michèle Miller Sigg, as executive director of the Dictionary of African Christian Biography (DACB, https://dacb.org) and editor of the Journal of African Christian Biography (JACB, https://dacb.org/journal), effective September 1, 2020. She succeeded Jonathan J. Bonk, OMSC’s executive director emeritus and former IBMR editor. He started the online, multilingual, open access reference tool in 1995, moved it to OMSC in 1997, and relocated it in 2012 to Boston University’s Center for Global Christianity and Mission; he launched the journal in 2016. Bonk, who lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, is research professor of mission studies at BU and cochair of the DACB senior advisory council. The October 2020 JACB special issue is dedicated to Bonk, who is retired. Initially hired in October 2000 as project assistant, Sigg served as project manager from 2003 to 2018, when she became associate director.
Appointed. Thomas Schirrmacher as secretary general and CEO of the World Evangelical Alliance (WEA, https://worldea.org) as of March 1, 2021. Previously he was associate secretary general for theological concerns. He also led the Office for Intrafaith and Interfaith Relations and the Theological Commission, and he was WEA’s ambassador for human rights. He is director of the International Institute for Religious Liberty, a network of professors, researchers, academics, specialists, and university institutions. Schirrmacher was a pastor and rector of Martin Bucer Seminary, Bonn, Germany, which he founded. He also teaches at West University of Timisoara, Romania, and at Regent’s Park College, Oxford University. Schirrmacher is presiding bishop of Communio Messianica, whose members in seventy-five countries are first-generation Christians from Muslim backgrounds. He is author of Missio Dei: God's Missional Nature (2017) and many other publications in German. He succeeded Efraim Tendero, a Filipino who had been secretary general since March 2015 and was national director of the Philippine Council of Evangelical Churches for twenty-two years.
Died. Juan B. Stam, 92, professor, author, and advocate of what he called a “radical evangelical theology,” October 16, 2020, in Costa Rica. A native of Patterson NJ, Stam studied at Wheaton College, Fuller Theological Seminary, and the University of Basel, where he earned a doctorate in 1964, studying with theologian Karl Barth. He and his wife, Doris, arrived in Costa Rica in December 1954 to serve with the Latin American Missions. He was the pastor of several rural congregations, and as a result of what they learned, the couple eventually became Costa Ricans. Beginning in 1957 he taught systematic theology for several decades at Latin American Biblical Seminary, San José. Stam also taught in several other theological schools in Latin America, the United States, Canada, India, and the Netherlands. By the 1960s, he was speaking frequently on Christ and Marx, urging Christians to emphasize social justice. A founding member of the Latin American Theological Fraternity, Stam is author in Spanish of The Good News of Creation (1995) and the four-volume Commentary of the Book of Revelation, (2006–9). Stam wrote “My Pilgrimage in Mission,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 38, no. 4 (October 2014): 198–201; also for the IBMR he wrote “The Challenge of the Gospel in Nicaragua,” vol. 9, no. 1 (January 1985): 5–8.
Died. Willi Henkel, OMI, 90, German Catholic priest, author and editor, mission historian, librarian, November 19, 2020, in Hünfeld, Germany. In 1951 he joined the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and in 1952 he was sent to Rome to study at the Gregorian University. In 1958 he received priestly ordination and was sent for advanced studies in missiology at the University of Münster, where he received a doctorate in 1968. In 1966 he was invited to join the three-man team of editors of Bibliotheca Missionum and Bibliografia Missionaria in Rome, where he also became an assistant to Johannes Rommerskirchen, who was head of the Pontifical Missionary Library. In view of his additional responsibilities he obtained a diploma in library sciences at the Vatican in 1967. In 1972 he was appointed director of the Pontifical Missionary Library, succeeding Rommerskirchen. In 1973 he was also appointed professor of mission history in Latin America at the Pontifical Urban University.
Among Henkel’s major achievements was the transfer in 1980 of the mission library from the historic Palazzo di Propaganda Fide in Piazza di Spagna to a new library building at Urbaniana, where he merged the two libraries of the “Propaganda” and the “Urbaniana,” and the collections grew to 275,000 volumes in over 500 languages. He also supported the computerization of most of the data of the Pontifical Missionary Library. In 1991 he was appointed consultant of the Congregation for the Causes of Saints. As a member of the International Association for Mission Studies, he organized two international mission congresses in Rome at Urbaniana, in 1980 and 1988. He was also active in the International Association of Catholic Missiologists. A Festschrift in his honor, La Missione senza Confini, edited by Marek Rostkowski, OMI, was published in Rome in 2000. Also in 2000 he was awarded an honorary doctorate from the Catholic University of America. His personal bibliography contains some ninety published items.
At the end of 2000 Henkel retired and ended his academic career. In retirement, in poor health, he devoted much of his time to the care of his spiritual life and was active in his Oblate community, until the arrival of the COVID-19 virus in Hünfeld. He was one of the first infected, and he could not cope with the disease. Henkel told his story in “My Pilgrimage in Mission,” International Bulletin of Missionary Research 31, no. 2 (April 2007): 84–86. —Gerald H. Anderson
