Evangelicalism in Modernizing Cultures: Brazil and China

We request funding for a planning grant that lays the foundation for empowering evangelical leaders in Brazil and China to better address their social, political, and religious challenges. To achieve these ends, we will use the international database already housed in the Center for Evangelicalism & Culture (CEC), along with contacts with Advisory Board members and Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary (GCTS). Boston Brazilian-American and Chinese-American pastors can extend these contacts and provide laypersons to interview, allowing us to map networks of evangelical influence, and to identify evangelical values in home, work, and faith. By interviewing pastors whose names emerge as nodes in social network mapping, we will be able to understand the values that indigenous pastors hold, the challenges they face, and the support they need as members of rapidly growing subcultures in pluralistic societies. We will extend our reach by contacts with SEPAL (a Christian missionary support group in Sao Paulo) and Faith and Global Engagement Initiative (a Christian initiative in conversation with the contemporary world that is based at the University of Hong Kong). In subsequent luncheons with Boston Brazilian-American and Chinese-American pastors and lay leaders, we will engage speakers from our Advisory Board, recruit Pastor Collaborators and share perspectives and challenges from our interviews in Brazil and China, and integrate interviews with academic research. We will then coordinate three videoconferences with Advisory Board members on three topics (theology and identity, political and sociological perspectives, and values and communities of practice) organized by Gordon Board members, in association with Peter Berger. By this iterative process, we hope to integrate and extend pastoral and academic understanding in Brazil, China and the US, and develop a strategic plan for supporting indigenous pastors and laypersons.