The CGCM Global Anabaptist Histories Fund helps to support the capacity of Anabaptist-related churches around the world (but especially in Africa, Asia, and Latin America) to tell the stories that shape their identity as part of a global church. Donations in response to this appeal will help support the editing of the first volume of a new global history series under the auspices of Mennonite World Conference (a global communion of Anabaptist-related churches): Global Anabaptist Forebears.
Each volume in the Global Anabaptist Forebears series will feature high-quality biographies of Anabaptist-Mennonites in Africa, Asia, and Latin America who have played an active role in the transmission, appropriation, and contextualization of their faith. Biographies are written by local authors who receive training and support in a collaborative, small-scale workshop-based approach.
By documenting the lives of individuals who might otherwise be forgotten, the project will contribute to a more accurate understanding of the global flows and non-Western initiatives that have always been part of the church’s story. Efforts to create and preserve biographies of global South Christians are critical to making the new face of global Christianity more broadly known.
This project leads the way in collaborative history-writing by paying attention to equity in the process of research and writing and to the accessibility of the final product.
The Global Anabaptist Histories Project supports efforts to train and empower historians in Africa, Asia and Latin America to document the life stories of believers who have had an impact on their communities. Biographies illuminate the active agency of leaders, both women and men, who have helped to make Christianity into a world religion. Books in the series – to be available both online and in print – can be used in academic and church contexts to complement World Christianity textbooks, to promote reflection about church renewal, and to draw Christians from North and South into a broader, shared identity.
Photo: Sengu Rebeca or “Kina Ndjindji,” third from left, was a women’s leader in the Congo Mennonite church. Here she is together with other “Bible women” in the late 1960s. Sengu’s biographer, Mundedi Bercie, writes, “Sengu guided the Mennonite women in their spirituality... She was one of the ‘Bible women’ … who carried out door-to-door evangelism. When these women visited a family, they evangelized the entire family.”
Source: Africa Inter-Mennonite Mission Records, 1911-2018. X-68. Mennonite Church USA Archives. Elkhart, Indiana.
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