Gathering the Saints: Eight Keys to a Renewed Approach to World Christian History

An ecumenical and missional approach

Telling and receiving the stories of Christian forebears through a collaborative, equitable, and empowering process is a central part of the work of the church. This crucial conviction underlies our approach to history-writing. Since we understand the identity of the church to be inseparable from its mission, we understand our approach to be both ecumenical (a church-based effort to move toward both unity and universality/catholicity) and missional (part of the church’s witness to the world, indeed part of the “the activity by which the church seeks to render itself universal,” as Jean-Marc Ela has memorably defined mission). ³⁷ In such an approach, “the very methodology used in historical research. . . becomes an ecclesial practice that can either support or undermine an imagination in which believers from North and South form a single church body, and together develop habits of memory from within ‘a vantage point of. . . unity.’” ³⁸

The commitment to an ecumenical/missional approach is listed first because it underpins all the others. The subsequent keys can be justified on various grounds, but they are also and primarily an expression of this commitment to re-member the church through stories that reflect the fullness of its diversity. Practically, in the organization of a workshop and in the subsequent book project, this conviction can take shape in many ways.

First, cultivating friendship and solidarity within the workshop group is an essential part of living out our kinship within the church and recognizing that it extends to questions of equitable sharing in the work of creating, preserving, and disseminating stories. Requiring workshop participants to stay in residency for the full week—learning, eating, and studying together—not only creates opportunities for friendship and collaboration, but also strengthens a sense of common belonging to one global church. The cultivation of bonds of solidarity helps to sustain the writers in their research efforts.

Second, learning can be understood as an expression of worship. We asked participants to integrate a biography into a morning devotional in the form of a skit, song, or Sunday school lesson. This promotes reception of biographies in the worship space using music, drama, the arts, and various cultural modes of commemoration. Biographies can be a resource for intergenerational dialogue, helping youth reconnect to the past through their elders, ³⁹ and even attracting young adults back to the church. ⁴⁰

Third, writing a Christian biography can be understood as a form of Christian witness. A biography preserves and publicizes the good news of that person’s witness, while the completed stories constitute valuable resources for teaching, training, and evangelism. Biographies are a resource for inculturation, since using the stories of local figures foregrounds local identity and culture when addressing questions of theology, worship, or discipleship. Since the stories shape a more complete, global identity for the church as Christian forebears are gathered in, the work of producing and receiving biographies is an exercise in recognizing the great “cloud of witnesses” (Heb 12:1) to which Christian writers also belong.

Here, the local-global tension that Dana Robert has identified as one of the drivers in the history of World Christianity ⁴¹ comes into play: participants’ attentiveness to the specific lives of saints within their own Christian tradition is given impetus as they also recognize their kinship with forebears outside their tradition. When participants represent a single ecclesial tradition, their analysis of biographies in the context of a global church history narrative allows the church to begins to feel larger, not smaller. And in workshops that include members of different Christian traditions, participants experience the diversity of the church and begin to wrestle with it as they develop ecumenical relationships with their co-writers. ⁴² In both cases, they gain a sense of a larger global Christian community across space and time.

Fourth, stories of Christian forebears can be connected to historical and present-day dynamics of renewal and revival. In Kinshasa, the Holy Spirit seemed nearer as participants reflected on revivals they read about in biographies and rejoiced that the long-ago work of the Spirit as documented in the New Testament was continuing in the African church. Bercie Mundedi, reflecting on the leadership of Kimpa Vita in the Antonian movement, expressed her conviction as director of a Bible institute that “if we can teach these stories, there will be a revival.” Participants connected the outpouring of the Spirit on the New Testament church, the spiritual leadership of Congolese Christians of previous generations, and the potential for revival in the church today by marveling at the renewing work of this “same Spirit” through time and space. ⁴³

Fifth, painful stories of oppression and violence can be received in a church-based group in ways that lead to lament, confession, and even healing. For Josué Selemani, for example, a deeper awareness of the political context of the colonial era, a new appreciation for the challenges that both Congolese and expatriate Christians faced as they sought to situate themselves vis-à-vis the exploitative machinery of the state, and the discovery that in the midst of oppression, some Christians both white and Black were grasping for shared belonging in the body of Christ, somehow lifted a load from his shoulders. “There was a group who were with us” in the midst of oppression,” he realized. “We were not alone.” Somehow, this brought him to a place of personal “reconciliation” with the past. Dwelling carefully together on times when the church participated in sin and violence helps us to move toward what Pope Francis has called a “penitential memory”—one that is based on “stark and clear truth” in order to “love the Church as she truly exists, and love what she has learnt and continues to learn from her mistakes and failures.” ⁴⁴

In summary, insofar as this work of research, writing, and receiving the stories of the saints serves the goal of helping the church to be more complete—i.e., more catholic and ecumenical—for the sake of the world, it is the work of the church in mission.

World Christian historiography and global history framework

In both lectures and in book introductions, our approach prioritizes global history frameworks such as World History, Entangled History, and Borderlands History, which facilitate a focus on flows, inter-connections, networks of exchange, and non-state-based actors. ⁴⁵ This means centering the stories of women, focusing on renewal movements, paying close attention to the dynamics of mission, taking religion and its political significance seriously, and respecting conversion stories and motives.

Thanks to the efforts of a first generation of World Christianity scholars, it is now possible to tell a compelling story of the history of the church in Africa, Asia, or Latin America that much more accurately than before reflects the global flows of knowledge, goods, and people that contributed to the shape of the church. New ethnographic studies and biographies make it easier to demonstrate the central historical agency of local women and men in leading mission and renewal movements, and to give space to the significant impact of the colonial project without downplaying the dignity of individual consciousness and choices. ⁴⁶ We have observed that this new narrative is indeed perceived as empowering, even as a game-changer, in African seminary classrooms. ⁴⁷

However, adopting a World Christianity framework does not just mean drawing on the latest research produced by well-established scholars from our guild. It means regularly telling students that our goal is to tell the best story we can in order to empower them to tell an even better one. It means presenting clues of local missionary agency and challenging them to write biographies that can illuminate these indications. It means wrestling to get them better access to archival sources. ⁴⁸ It means calling their attention to major gaps in the historiography and inviting them to propose biographical subjects whose lives can illuminate these areas.

In Kinshasa, workshop participants spontaneously identified connections between the new narrative they were hearing about the missionary agency of African forebears, and their own responsibility to contribute to that story. Guy Kapeme, for example, linked the “richness of Christian testimony” that he gained from reading biographies with a new “assurance” that he also had “a role to play in the church,” both by writing stories and by living his own life of discipleship as a witness to others. Watson Matwala noted that identifying the “works that our ancestors, our elders in the church, began” led him naturally to a desire to use every possible technique “to reconstitute [their] story,” “to make them live again” and so to “recover something for those who are here today.” The daily alternation between lectures and practical exercises strengthened this link in participants’ minds; they read each assigned biography in light of the knowledge that they would soon be writing one of their own, and listened to each lecture with attention to how their stories of individual lives could contribute to the broader narrative.

Centering biography

Biography is a powerful and exciting narrative form that provides fresh, culturally relevant material for renewing the curriculum of African as well as Global Christian history. According to Stan Chu Ilo,

Writing African Christian history through biographies and spiritual portraits of everyday Christians . . . who left legacies of faith as African ancestors challenges the universalizing dominance of historical canons that often have marginalized the voices of minorities (. . .) This approach is an attempt at detraditionalizing the writing of Christian history in Africa. ⁴⁹

The choice of biography as a narrative form pushes the emphasis on institutional, missionary or colonial history into the background so that the light more easily shines on “the underside. . . the pathways of those unofficial agents, such as catechists, teachers, nurses, exhorters, evangelists, and translators, who took responsibility for church planting.” ⁵⁰ Such grassroots narratives help to showcase a wide diversity of voices from all Christian traditions and thus make the telling of an ecumenical history of the global church possible. Biography highlights the voices on the margins (women, “ordinary” people), offers a corrective to the “official record” (colonial registers, missions, churches), ⁵¹ and offers insights into human agency, friendships, religious conviction, the missionary encounter, and experiences of oppression or discrimination. Some stories—those of women, for example—can only be told with the tools of biography, that is, oral history methodology. ⁵²

Furthermore, biographical methodology bridges the gap between church and academy. In 2018, Dana Robert noted that biography is “an increasingly important form of scholarship,” and the thirty-year trajectory of the DACB’s biography-focused work has served to further raise its status in scholarly circles. ⁵³ Biographies are accessible narratives that introduce ordinary church members to their local Christian “ancestors.” ⁵⁴ After a workshop on writing women’s stories, a few Ghanaian priests and pastors are now telling these stories to the women in their parishes. ⁵⁵ In Egypt, the use of biography helps to redeem the scholarly calling and dispel the commonly held belief that theological scholarship is only the domain of those who have no faith. ⁵⁶ Workshop participants saw biographies as evangelistic resources to reach nominal Coptic Orthodox Christians. ⁵⁷ The use of biography to commemorate the lives of Christian martyrs helps to encapsulate what it ultimately means to follow Jesus. ⁵⁸

Finally, biographies help to fill gaps in the historical record. Stories of individual lives, like dots in a pointillist portrait, illuminate a larger political and social context. ⁵⁹ As Dana Robert points out,

Biography illustrates how people construct meaning in the midst of social, cultural, and political processes that often seem overwhelming and uncontrollable. When hearing about or reading about the life of someone with whom we identify, our own lives are validated, and we are strengthened for the struggles ahead. ⁶⁰

A contextualized biography is about “the point where the person and society meet and the interplay of personal and impersonal forces.” ⁶¹ In the African context, in particular, a biography is not the story of a solitary individual but of a person in relationship with their context—reflecting the meaning of the Bantu term mu ntu (human being, person) with its connotations of “being with.” ⁶² Well-crafted biographies are rooted in ideas and events larger than the person and therefore show the importance of place, circumstances, and change in a person’s life. ⁶³ This makes them particularly well-suited to contexts where other historical narratives are biased or sparse.

Recovering Women

For a long time, the best-kept secret in the history of global Christianity has been the vital role that women have played in the expansion, nurture, and prosperity of the church. ⁶⁴ Although women make up more than half of the world church, ⁶⁵ the stories of women are severely under-documented or, in some instances, completely absent from the historical narrative. ⁶⁶ We intentionally seek to collect the stories of women to fill that historical gap, and we offer specialized training to assist writers of women’s stories. ⁶⁷ Because it is important not only to recover women’s stories but to empower women writers and scholars, in each workshop we model female leadership—by having at least one female instructor, for example. We maximize women’s participation as authors, insist on parity between women’s and men’s stories in all our volumes, and include women’s stories in lectures and readings. When women, men, and youth work together to creatively tell the stories of the whole church, then the whole church is enlivened. The first women’s biographies to emerge from the Kinshasa workshop, for example, illuminated the missionary agency of a first generation of Mennonite women in Congo in a way that no scholarly efforts had yet been able to uncover. ⁶⁸

However, women everywhere still face many obstacles to advancement in the church. We found that contacting women and getting them to apply for the Congo workshop was a struggle. We later discovered that women in one of the denominations never received notice of the opportunity. The women who did attend the workshop were revived and strengthened in their faith by what they learned. Charly Ntumba Malembe reported that

The women felt very valued in this workshop and cast off the inferiority complex that gnaws at us daily. Inspired by this first experience, women feel capable of assuming any responsibility in our Mennonite communities in particular and society in general. ⁶⁹

Another challenge in documenting the lives of women is when stories of violence and abuse come to light. It is difficult but essential to guard the safety of the author and the interviewees and to be attentive to the impact of a disclosure on the survivors’ family while also facilitating transparency and truth.

Small scale

Although we have an ecumenical and global vision for this book series, we have become convinced that the best way to pursue such an expansive vision is to make space for small contributions to lead to change over time. As historians, we have observed that long-term cultural change occurs from the bottom up, as individual stories, lives, or friendships each shift the ground a little bit. ⁷⁰ Our decision to pursue a small-scale, bottom-up approach took shape in several ways.

First, workshop locations and volume foci are allowed to emerge organically. Instead of topics and books being commissioned from above, collections of stories grow naturally from those available to write them, following the energy and collaborative networks as they develop, sometimes in unexpected places. Instead of planning ahead for volumes with a specific content or focus, we follow existing relationships and networks to identify a starting point, and then see what comes next. While certain criteria give coherence to the series (such as parity for women’s stories, and a World Christianity framework), the topics grow from the ground up rather than being pre-set.

Second, we have learned that a group of 12-16 motivated participants is about right for a workshop. This size is small enough to allow for mentoring and follow-up, and it makes it easier for the group to bond into a coherent and committed group and to create friendships that will support them through the research and writing process. At the same time, it is large enough to allow for small group work, role-playing, and shared worship with a rotation of leadership. If a couple of people are unable to finish their biographies, there are still enough left for a robust collection.

Keeping groups small requires being tough in implementing an admission process and quality control. ⁷¹ For the Kinshasa workshop, we limited group size by implementing a selection process, in close collaboration with trusted local advisors, which required all who responded to the workshop invitation to submit a writing sample and to respond to questions about their previous experience of, and commitment to, historical research. ⁷² This yielded a group of committed participants, which both we and they later identified as a critical factor in the success of the workshop.

Quality

When a project showcases heavily edited work from untrained writers without meaningfully supporting them in their academic development, this can be a form of appropriation, collecting Global South voices while continuing to exclude them from global conversations. In our teaching experiences in Africa, we have seen that it is a priority for students to get their work published and globally visible. They welcome any input that helps them push past barriers to their inclusion in international forums. ⁷³ We have unapologetically promoted quality as an essential investment in equity and ecumenicity. Equipping writers with solid skills is a way to give their contributions legitimacy within a global conversation from which many tend to feel almost completely excluded. In addition to keeping the workshop small, we prioritized quality in three main ways.

First, we offered solid academic mentoring and resourcing to workshop participants. In Kinshasa, we developed participants’ reading and writing skills by requiring everyone to read two biographies each day and to write short summaries, which we evaluated daily. Participants could sign up for individual mentoring conversations. We developed a course manual with checklists of common errors and guides to footnoting and references. ⁷⁴ We provided a copy of all readings and a selection of discounted books for sale. ⁷⁵ During practical sessions, we walked participants through each step of creating a biography: identifying a subject, preparing a questionnaire, conducting interviews, weaving sources into a coherent yet vivid narrative, documenting sources, and engaging in revisions with the editors. One participant, co-author of an earlier collection of Congolese Mennonite biographies, remarked that the workshop finally gave him the tools to produce “work that is acceptable.” ⁷⁶

Second, during editing, we sought to bolster authors’ writing capacity rather than taking over their role. Before submitting drafts, authors were asked to carefully review a checklist of the most common grammatical and stylistic errors, and we held off on detailed editing until this level was met. ⁷⁷ After this, Anicka returned to authors with lists of questions via WhatsApp, while drawing on her archival access to bring additional primary sources or photos to their attention. ⁷⁸ She suggested rewrites, but tried to ensure that the author did the revising. ⁷⁹

Third, our approach promotes quality at the publication stage by securing a reputable publisher and including a scholarly introduction in each volume that places biographies into historical, political, and social context within a World Christianity framework. Ensuring that the biographies appear in print books—instead of only online—gives authors greater visibility, and so allows people from different parts of the academy and the global church to become conversation partners in new ways.

Collaboration in planning

To be successful, history-writing workshops must be grounded in long-term collaboration and friendship. They must take existing relationships and institutional connections to a higher level, seeking to leverage them in synergy toward a specific story-telling project. Academic friendships between colleagues can be channeled toward co-teaching or co-editing. Relationships of trust, built up over time between local historians and outside experts, can make or break logistics such as venue planning, local church leaders’ buy-in, or participant selection. Organizational ties that have historically connected mission, church, and educational agencies across countries or continents—even when tainted by paternalism or financial dependency—can be examined for their potential.

The Kinshasa workshop exemplifies these levels of collaboration. First, Michele and Anicka’s friendship as colleagues at the BU Center for Global Christianity and Mission made co-teaching a joy. As lecturers from different Christian traditions, we modeled ecumenical interaction that helped participants to experience the church as larger than their tradition alone. Co-teaching allows each to work from their expertise and permits mutual feedback and better mentoring: one can lecture while the other grades reading assignments; one can meet with individuals while the other orients a group to archival sources.

Second, friendships from Anicka’s earlier years serving with Mennonite Central Committee in Congo, renewed during dissertation research, were critical. When Anicka began to imagine the Kinshasa workshop, a close friend and historian in Congo, Pakisa Tshimika, offered invaluable guidance. ⁸⁰ Our co-organizer was a friend from the Mennonite church Anicka had attended. ⁸¹ Networks from dissertation research also helped identify women candidates and potential workshop locations.

Third, broad buy-in from church, mission, and academic stakeholders was essential. Anicka spent much time soliciting grants and found many institutions ready to step up. Our host, the Centre Universitaire de Missiologie, offered free classroom spaces, airport pickup, and generator fuel. Africa Inter-Mennonite Mission personnel in Kinshasa handled money transfers. North American partners provided funding for travel, lodging, proofreading, and publication costs. ⁸² And Regnum was willing to hear our vision and agreed to publish the book series. We note that funding often seemed to flow along channels created through historic relationships connected to the missionary encounter, such as between Global North mission boards and service agencies and Global South congregations or denominations. However, although financial supporters of the Kinshasa workshop were mostly Mennonite, renewal came when we connected these sometimes-rusty channels of commitment with broader ecumenical and global organizations such as the DACB or Mennonite World Conference. In another workshop, this time in Cairo, Egypt, church support came through the Anglican Church, which underwrote the costs. The workshop nevertheless served the interests of multiple Christian communities in the country, namely the Coptic, Evangelical/Presbyterian, Catholic, and Anglican traditions.

Although attending to collaboration at all these levels can feel daunting, we have become convinced that there are no shortcuts and that the key to overcoming paralysis is to take stock of existing relationships and find small ways to advance them. At a time when structures for global missional and ecclesial collaboration are in flux, our experience matches Dana Robert’s observation that mission today in an era of global Christianity works best through “overlapping human networks” that connect people around the globe. ⁸³

Accessibility

Our ethos aligns with the open access policy of the DACB. Access to the DACB site is free, without subscription fees, registration requirements, or institutional gatekeeping. DACB content is non-proprietary, meaning users can freely download, print, and distribute materials locally with proper attribution. A translation widget enables users to access the entire site in multiple languages, while supplementary resources—including research guides, instructional materials, and sample biographies—support writers at every stage of their projects. The quarterly Journal of African Christian Biography likewise operates under this open-access philosophy, and can be freely reprinted with attribution.

When workshop participants have successfully completed their biography, there are three possible levels of publishing to create graduated entry points for authors with varying experience and skill levels. All workshop participants can publish their biographies on the DACB website, ensuring immediate accessibility and visibility. Stronger submissions may be accepted to the Journal, which offers a peer-reviewed platform. The book series, published in partnership with Regnum Books, puts biographies through a more stringent review process. All these pathways grant authors legitimacy and recognition within both academic and church contexts while encouraging continued development of their scholarly skills.

In addition to ensuring digital access, we work toward affordable print versions under local control. Our collaboration with Regnum Books ensures that electronic versions remain freely available online as PDF files while print volumes are also produced for both global and African audiences. However, establishing local printing and distribution networks in Africa remains an ongoing challenge.