The Ramsden Sermon
The Ramsden Sermon, Cambridge University Sermon
Preached at Great St Mary’s Church, Cambridge
26 May 2024
The Reverend Dr James Gardom
Misunderestimating World Christianity
May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be now and always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.
May the words of my lips and the meditations of our hearts be now and always acceptable in your sight, O Lord, our strength and our redeemer.
I want to start with the strange case of the invisible gorilla.
Imagine you are asked to watch a short video in which six people-three in white shirts and three in black shirts-pass basketballs around. While you watch, you must keep a silent count of the number of passes made by the people in white shirts. At some point, a gorilla strolls into the middle of the action, faces the camera and thumps its chest, and then leaves, spending nine seconds on screen. Would you see the gorilla? When Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons did this experiment at Harvard University several years ago, the found that half of the people who watched the video and counted the passes missed the gorilla. It was as though the gorilla was invisible[1].
I run the second year World Christianity paper in the Faculty of Divinity. and do most of the lectures for it. I am honoured to lecturing as part of a wide ranging and learned faculty, as I am also honoured to be part of a wide-ranging and learned College. But sometimes as I think and talk and teach about world Christianity I feel like that invisible gorilla. Thank you for letting me stand before you in my notional gorilla suit, and draw your attention to something it is possible you may have missed.
A few years ago, I started counting churches in Cambridge. I have been a Christian in Cambridge for almost thirty years, Vicar of a local church, and then Dean of Pembroke College. As such, I knew about German Evangelical Lutheran church in Shaftesbury Road, St Ephraim Russian Orthodox parish in St Clements, and St Athanasios Greek orthodox church in Cherry Hinton Road.
I was surprised to find, without enormous effort, at least 30 non-UK heritage churches in Cambridge, within 20 minutes cycle ride of where we sit. Chinese. Korean. Taiwanese. Filipino. Kerala Catholics. Kerala Protestants. Zimbabwean. Caribbean. Romanian Orthodox, Polish Catholic and Polish Lutheran. Spanish Pentecostal. Nigerian. Ghanaian and others.Counting Christians is a hard thing to do. I would hazard that there must be at least 45 diaspora churches in Cambridge. And that is in Cambridge, which is a fairly small, fairly secular, and rather white city in East Anglia.
These churches were invisible to me, and invisible to most Cambridge people, Christian or otherwise.
So, I would like to tell you about just one of them, the Redeemed Christian Church of God, starting with Cambridge, and then looking more widely. Sometimes called RCCG or “The Redeemed”.
The RCCG City of David parish is meeting at this moment in the Paddocks, off Cherry Hinton road. I wrote to my friends there, and said I would be speaking of them this morning. The church is led by a couple, Pastor Idris and Pastor Yinka. The membership is mostly people of West African heritage. There will be more people there today than there are here. Before the service there is a Bible study. The main service got underway 30 minutes ago with an uplifting set by the band and choir. There will be a couple of sermons, a great deal of music and prayer, and the service will come to an end on the dot at 1 PM.
This Redeemed City of David parish has a strong programme of local engagement, inviting in the MP, local heroes such as firefighters. They coordinated the local church celebrations of Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee.
As you would expect, RCCG City of David in Cherry Hinton is the local expression of something much larger.
Here is the worldwide mission statement of the RCCG:
1) To make heaven.
2) To take as many people with us.
3) To have a member of RCCG in every family of all nations.
4) To accomplish No. 1 above, holiness will be our lifestyle.
5) To accomplish No. 2 and 3 above, we will plant churches within five minutes walking distance in every city and town of developing countries and within five minutes driving distance in every city and town of developed countries.
6) We will pursue these objectives until every Nation in the world is reached for the Lord Jesus Christ
They are nothing if not ambitious.
There are now two RCCG parishes In Cambridge, City of David & City of Zion, run by Pastor Patrick, who sent me his best wishes for this sermon. There are 820 RCCG parishes in the UK. For Cambridge, and much of the UK the ambition of a church within 5 minutes’ drive, has been fulfilled.
It is perhaps not surprising that I was unaware of the RCCG churches in Cambridge. Planning restrictions and neighbourly objections ensure that they meet in units on light industrial estates, well away from anywhere where they might be visible.
In Nigeria they cannot be hidden.
The RCCG is one of the largest of the new wave of Nigerian churches. It has around 32,000 parishes in Nigeria. It also has a series of extraordinary auditoriums at its headquarters is Redemption Camp, Lagos.
Do look, if you are interested, they are visible and clearly labelled on Google Earth.
When you zoom in you can see the National Teenagers Church, roughly 400 m x 500 m, and so able to hold 400,000 teenagers.
Adjacent is the Old Auditorium, 1000 m x 500 m, with a notional capacity of 1 million.
A little way off is the new Auditorium Shimawa. This is 3 km x 3 km, with a capacity of around 12 million. A friend who has visited told me it was indeed a long walk to the middle.
12 million is actually quite a big number.
To give a sense of scale, 12 million in one structure outside Lagos is 16 times as many as the combined attendance for Sunday worship in all churches across the whole of the UK on an average Sunday.
To put it another way, when the respected head of RCCG, Pastor Enoch Adeboye speaks on a full Sunday, he is heard live on one day by twice as many people as have heard Taylor Swift live in an entire year.
I am sorry this is turning out to be rather a numerical sermon. I have a few other big numbers, if you have the patience…
RCCG it is a part of the worldwide Christian Pentecostal movement. Over the past hundred years, Pentecostalism has been the fastest growing religious phenomenon in history. A good scholarly estimate is that one in a little over a century it has gone from one small community to 650-700m
It is not just Pentecostal Christianity that has grown. Counting Christians is hard, but a good scholarly estimate is that the number of Christians has grown from 600m in the early of last century to more than 2 billion this. Perhaps 30% of global population. Of the 2+ billion, half are Catholics. The Catholic church is incomparably the largest voluntary organisation in the world. It is not just large. It has a remarkably effective central command and control structure. (I would say it might be the envy of the University of Cambridge)
So, thank you for listening to my numbers. The numbers are huge, but in fact that is not my main point.
I did not know all this. I suspect that this is news to quite a lot of us here. People I respect, institutions I revere, news sources upon which I depend somehow contrive to be almost completely oblivious of these enormous, extraordinary and consequential realities in the world. These big things are somehow as invisible as the Cambridge diaspora churches I mentioned at the beginning, and the gorilla with which I started.
For the title of this sermon, I used the Bushism “Misunderestimating World Christianity”. There is something almost clownish in our ability to not see something so large.
I would like to make it clear that I am not being triumphalist in rehearsing these large numbers.
In general, I don’t think that Religion as a human behaviour is either good or bad. It is powerful, or it can be. Bad religion is powerfully bad and good religion is powerfully good. Much the same applies to Christianity. Some good, some bad – all of it under divine judgement.
I am not triumphalist, but do want to ask the question, “How comes it that we, as open-minded thinkers and Christians, contrive to know so little about something so large and consequential. So little about dozens of diaspora churches in Cambridge. So little about the billions of Christians around the world?”
I started with the Gorilla nobody could see. What is going on there is called by the authors “Inattentional blindness.” It may be nothing more than this.
However, I cannot help wondering whether something more is going on.
World Christianity was not mentioned in my Oxford degree in Theology.
World Christianity was not mentioned in my theological training for Ministry at Ripon College Cuddesdon.
World Christianity is not, as far as I know, an option within the current Bishop’s regulations for theological training of Church of England clergy.
When I sit at High Table, and good friends and colleagues asked me about my work, and I talk about Pentecostalism, it is clear they think that I’m immensely learned, and that this a niche and obscure speciality, on a par with the 17thcentury Muggletonians, or the 19th century Irvingites. It is 600 -750m people – around the population of Europe.
So why is this so far from our thoughts and our discourse?
Partly, surely this is our own version of the Whig view of history.
The Whig view of history is the notion that somehow all history is leading up to us, our glorious present, and that our reality is everybody else’s future.
We live in a culture where there is a sense that we have got the measure of Christianity we know that it is diminishing, irrelevant, almost defunct. So why bother to know about it?
Even for those of us who are Christians, we are unconsciously sure that all these big numbers elsewhere represent an earlier stage of development which will lead, surely, to something like our present, which if not glorious, is at least reasonably comfortable.
Christian or not, we have all seen the future, and it is like us and not like the Redeemed Christian Church of God. That is our Whig understanding of history.
It must be relevant, also, that this ignored and unknown reality is mostly to do with people who are not white. Black lives matter, to be sure. Black Religion, not so much. It is hard not to think that there is an unthinking racism underlying our ignorance.
Our sense that history culminates in us. Our unthinking Racism.
There may be a third reason for our shared blindness to what is going on in World Christianity. Our attention is too focused on the wrong things.
The participants in the invisible gorilla study who could not see the gorilla were blinded by the fact that they were focusing on something different – in this case the number of passes made by the people in white shirts.
We may be failing to see World Christianity, because we are looking for the wrong things.
The relevant Christian phenomena don’t always look like the churches and chapels with which we are familiar.
Here are a few examples of things we might not be looking for and so might not notice.
· A church network that is entirely a drugs rehabilitation movement, in Bulgaria
· Churches that are composed of evangelising small businesses in Zhejiang.
· Churches that are whole self-sufficient townships outside Lagos.
· Churches that disguise themselves as secular coach trips for Beijing grandmothers,
· A black mega-church at an old scout camp in Kent
· Brigades of Christian Militia in Iraq
· Zambians who keep Jewish law, customs and dress, and worship Jesus, believing that they are Jews, from the lost tribes of the Northern Kingdom of Israel.
· Bangladeshi Muslims devoted to Jesus (Isa) and are more or less invisible Christians.
· A Black led white membership Christian NGO movement in Ukraine.
These are strange – and not at all like out churches and chapels.
Perhaps we do not see, because we can do not stretch our imaginations to see what is unexpected, and we were looking for something different.
So, Our self-centred view of history. Our unthinking Racism, Our failure of imagination.
Even were it nothing worse than inattentional blindness, that would be somewhat shameful.
But if, individually or collectively, we are refusing to see, choosing not to see, then that is something more than shameful.
For a Christian, refusing to see what the Spirit is doing is deeply serious (it may even be the Sin against the Holy Spirit, for which there can be no forgiveness).
For an Academic to contrive or choose not to know things that are inconvenient to one’s understanding of the World is pretty serious too.
The remit of the sermon is the Extension of the Church, with particular reference to the Commonwealth of Nations.
The burden of this sermon is that the Church is extending, not least in the Commonwealth of Nations, and we seldom look, barely notice, scarcely understand.
As thinkers and as Academics, we need to forget what we think we know, and pay attention to what is actually going on.
And, as Christians, we need to remember the most fundamental fact about the Christian Revelation. God does not play by our rules, God does not conform to our expectations, God is not limited by our imaginations. God is God.
And to that God, who is able to do more than either we desire or deserve, be ascribed as is most justly due, all might, majesty, dominion and power, henceforth and forever more. Amen.
[1] http://www.theinvisiblegorilla.com/gorilla_experiment.html