All I Want for Christmas . . is a Book. #217. 09/12/2025
Out of Many, One People
All I Want for Christmas . . is a Book.
Welcome. If you are still looking for a Christmas present for an inter-culturally minded Christian then hopefully this blog may point you to something suitable. The next blog will be on 13th January. Meanwhile may the fact that God came as a baby to one place, at one time, and to one culture continue to fill you with amazement and joy. And may 2026 unfold another year of discovering God’s goodness.
Bishop Rose Hudson-Wilkin: The Girl from Montego Bay. SPCK. 2025
Andrew Walls: Christian Conversion and Mission – A Brief Cultural History. Orbis Books. 2025.
Bruce Gordon: The Bible – A Global History. Basic Books. 2024.
Bijan Omrani: God is an Englishman – Christianity and the Creation of England. Forum. 2025.
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Bishop Rose Hudson-Wilkin: The Girl from Montego Bay.
Amongst several heavy-weight commendations the one by Rev Jonathan Aitken stands out: ‘the most humane, humorous and enjoyable Episcopal autobiography in living memory’. My suspicion that the title was trying to lure us with twee exoticism was unfair. Her personal reality was of a very unsettled, often brutal childhood, uncared for by both of her biological parents, in Montego Bay and Kingston - very far from the world of tourism posters. The first of several mainstays in the book appears in her close, loving and enduring relationship with her sister Shirley, whilst set against her disrupted childhood her journey of faith seems remarkably serene. She attended a mission church whose care and community strength is a reminder of the unpredicted impact that ground level Christian ministry can sometimes have. By age 14 she was already preaching. In her early twenties she was accepted by the Church Army and came to Britain for training where she met another mainstay, her husband Ken.
After marrying and time in Jamaica they came back to England, to work with Archbishop John Sentamu. Training for the diaconate and ministry then took her to the West Midlands, including time as Diocesan Officer for Black Anglican Concerns, where her encounters with racist obduracy become more marked. The book then takes us through her incumbency in Hackney, appointment as Chaplain to the Queen, Chaplain to the House of Commons, Bishop of Dover, and her involvement in high profile events such as the wedding of Prince Harry and Meghan Markel, and the Coronation of King Charles.
Two important features of Bishop Rose are that she is ‘Britain’s First Black Woman Bishop’ as the cover says. Issues of gender often come to the fore, over waiting for ordination to the priesthood, over acceptance in parish ministry (though with recurring positive outcomes), or coldness and rejection by other clergy. An indication of her pastoral sensitivity is how she feels for the problems Queen Elizabeth must have felt as a woman. In some ways gender ranks higher than the more obvious issues of race, possibly reflecting deep roots in her experience, though I think she lacks sympathetic understanding for those who disagree with her theologically.
As regards race, she recounts several occasions of directly confronting racism at a parish level. At a more senior level at times one senses a malign presence that is never clearly specified – letters not replied to, appointments not made, or suspicion when she does get offered major roles. I liked John Bercow’s comment about appointing her to be Chaplain to the Speaker of the House of Commons: ‘You had presence’.
Her Jamaican roots were never sentimentalised, but run strongly through her story. Her frequent use of patois, the inclusion of Jimmy Cliff’s classic ‘Many Rivers to Cross’ for her Desert Island discs, her links with old friends from her youth and her frequent visits back. But deeper still are the roots of faith, with a clear trust in God’s guiding hand on her life, a desire to share his love and goodness with all, and a heart-warming and deep seated valuing of prayer warriors.
If the warmth and readability of this book make it just right for Christmas, the following three will take you into the new Year and reflect my liking for long range histories. The first is quite short; the two following with a bulk to match their content.
Andrew Walls: Christian Conversion and Mission – A Brief Cultural History.
This book is a little like a Bob Dylan ‘Bootleg’ album – items culled together from various sources, but all shining with distinctive and creative brilliance. Sadly, Andrew Walls is not with us, dying in 2021 in his early nineties, after a ministry begun by teaching theology in West Africa and then teaching and writing about the history of World Christianity in Edinburgh and then Liverpool. His creativity was such that he found it hard to be content with producing a definitive text. Thus, here we have four lectures on a cultural history of the Christian faith, followed by four articles gathered from various sources. They are edited by Mark Gornik, an ex-student, and now director of ‘City Seminary of New York’ (which sounds like an interesting project in developing urban, inter-cultural theological training, which is worth following).
Central to Walls’ reading of Christian history was ‘the serial nature of Christian expansion . . a serial process in which it has encountered successive cultures and found expression within them, often withering in the areas of apparently greater strength and finding new homes in quite different soil’ (p 2). Thus he notes several ‘just in time’ shifts of Christian focus. In the mid first century it secured footing in the Graeco-Roman context, just before the destruction of its Judaean homeland in 70 and 135. Having become established in the Roman Empire it made gains in the barbarian north, east and south, before the Empire collapsed. Now the evisceration of Christianity by rationalist secularisation in the West has been preceded by its massive growth in the global South. His short section on the differences between Enlightenment and African worldviews (pp 87-91) is outstanding.
Walls’ account of those geographical shifts brings to light evidence often overlooked by a western-centred Christendom focus – the surprising spread in the first six centuries of Christian faith, southwards to the Horn of Africa and Yemen, south-east to India, and westwards across Central Asia to China. Meanwhile Hellenistic culture impresses upon Christianity ‘orthodoxy, a canon of right belief, capable of being stated in a series of propositions arrived at by a process of logical argument’ (p 119). Whilst in 325 the Council of Nicaea could maintain theological unity, by 451 the Council of Chalcedon ‘did not satisfy those who thought in Coptic or Syriac’. Thus ‘In effect the sixth century saw the breakup of the great multicultural church and its division along linguistic and cultural lines’ (p 112).
The conversion of barbarians also led to a new mutation of being a Christian – the conversion of a ‘people’ rather than individuals: ‘A community must have a single custom’, exemplified in democratic Iceland where when a slight majority of the assembly chose Christianity, the dissenters ‘felt bitter and betrayed, but no one suggested a division into communities with different religions’ (p 123). Not least, England, as with the conversion of Northumbria, saw ‘the idea of a Christian nation’. The dialectic between the conversion of individuals and the conversion of peoples has dropped beneath the surface with the triumph of atomistic individualism in the West (thereby bolstering the stress on evangelical conversion) but it has been and continues to be an important feature in the spread of Christianity, and adds complexity to the debate about the significance of empire in promoting mission.
The collection of Walls’ writings ends with a section on ‘Diversity and Coherence in Historic Christianity (pp 128-9). Despite the varieties, he ‘can discern a firm coherence’: 1) the worship of the God of Israel, 2) the ultimate significance of Jesus of Nazareth, 3) that God is active where believers are, 4) that believers constitute a people of God transcending time and space.
Both migration and on-line global communications have brought the diversities that Walls chronicles into ever closer inter-action. If Pentecostalism is the now dominant metier of Christianity’s shift to the global South, how does it interact with the intellectual seriousness bequeathed by the West’s history, and with the community loyalties of the grievously suffering Eastern churches? These are indeed interesting times, and we owe Walls a great debt for his thorough research and stimulating formulation of the issues.
Bruce Gordon: The Bible – a Global History.
Bruce Gordon, professor of Church History at Yale, begins his book by paying tribute to how Annie Vallotton’s illustrations for The Good News Bible have ‘captured the Bible’s invitation to readers to encounter themselves in its pages’ (p 2). Gordon, in fact, gives a detailed and thorough account of how for almost two millennia and now across the globe the bible has been disseminated, translated and taught. He covers the same long history of Christian faith and expansion as Andrew Walls above, but whilst Walls’ account is like an Annie Vallotton illustration – major developments are illuminated in a few masterful strokes, Gordon gives us a Breughel-like, informative, richly detailed portrait of its passage through time.
What themes emerge from Gordon’s history?
* ‘Their work thus helped bring the Bible to new souls and allowed a stunning array of people from different cultures to develop their own relationship with God’ (p 333) is Gordon’s summary of the work of the missionary ‘Bible women’ who entered communities in the Middle East and South Asia where men were not allowed. In all the changes and developments seen in the world-wide spread of the scriptures their capacity to enable people find a personal relationship with God is central to the story that Gordon narrates.
* ‘The intimacy of word, image and movement’ refers to the paintings in a late-medieval monastery in Bucovina, Romania (p 110), but the phrase also captures Gordon’s awareness of the variety of ways through which the Bible was communicated – in painting, drama, music, illustrations within the scriptures, in worship, and including its iconic significance as an object itself. Before the advent of widespread literacy and of printing especially , the Bible was often communicated as more than just words on a page.
* ‘The Jesuits preferred accommodating the Bible to Chinese scholars through creative texts such as philosophical dialogues’ (p 339). As Christian mission moved ever further into cultures with roots very different from that of Israel and its near neighbours, so adjustment to very different thought worlds became a major challenge, not least the decisions translators had to make as to what indigenous words, if any, proved suitable vehicles for expressing the Hebrew understanding of God.
* ‘Occom also employed the Bible to speak against colonial oppression of Indigenous peoples’ (p 254), referring to the 18th century Native American convert and evangelist. Indeed Gordon’s eirenic and inclusive approach is most tested when it comes to the assumptions of cultural superiority by American mission leaders. Nonetheless implicit in the Bible was the confidence that different peoples would be able to appropriate Scripture for themselves; thus Jonathan Edwards prediction that ‘many Negroes and Indians will be divines, and that excellent books will be published in Africa, in Ethiopia, in Turkey’ (p 256).
Inevitably in a book of such vast scope there will be differences in coverage. Gordon, initially a Reformation scholar, is particularly helpful in covering the history of the Bible in the modern period, especially (for a British reader) in chapter 9 on ‘The American Bible’, whilst I found his account of ‘Shangdi and Shen in China’ (chapter 11) illuminating and fascinating. Less sure-footed were chapter 12 and 13 on Africa and Global Pentecostalism where over-reliance on a few sources (for example on Kimbanguism for Africa) meant that his account was somewhat lumpy and lacked the precision and coherence of Walls’ writing. Though the final word in the Africa chapter is by Israel Olofinjana!
Overall this is an extraordinary synthesis of a long and varied history of a topic that has engrossed people of very varying capacities and convictions from the wide range of human cultures who have been drawn to the scriptures and the faith and Lord who lie at its centre.
Bijan Omrani: God is an Englishman – Christianity and the Creation of England.
All power to an author who leads with his chin. While Bijan Omrani’s name may be some protection from those who would accuse him of anglo-centric idolatry, nonetheless the title is provocative, though perhaps a good selling point. It is also a poor guide to its contents, which is better covered by the sub-title ‘Christianity and the Creation of England’. In this regard, Omrani is industrious and helpful. Part One shows the many ways in which Christianity has shaped England, followed by a shorter, apologetic Part Two arguing for ‘What Christianity can Still Give’.
The chapters look at the role of Christianity in shaping England as a nation, then its impact on the formulation of law and education, visual arts, the landscape, time, spirituality, the role of scripture, music, poetry and social transformation. Omrani is illuminating in underlining how much of what we value in society – the rule of law, the valuing of intellectual enquiry, the pursuit of creative excellence – were sourced by the impact of Christian teaching on our society.
His desire to tell a ‘good story’ about Christianity and Englishness has its pitfalls. His eirenic approach finds it difficult to give full weight of the conflicts within Christianity – of both Puritan moral seriousness and devotion to the word of God, over against Catholic celebration of the visual and of natural beauty – most obviously in the tensions and Civil War of the seventeenth century. Similarly, it comes as a shock when we get as far as p 245 to be told of the abolition of the slave trade, without having yet heard of England both practicing slavery and indeed fighting wars to get control of the trade.
Omrani does go on to acknowledge the evils that emerged in English society, but sees the need to lay emphasis on the goods that Christianity contributed. He writes in the Introduction (titled ‘Debt to a Dying God’) of the need ‘to be more open to the possibility, contrary to the tendency of present discourse, that Christianity’s influence has not been entirely malign (p 5). In particular, his account of the early centuries of Christian centrality in national life highlights several issues which have been widely neglected.
In the shorter Part 2, he begins by setting out ‘The Problem: a Sickness unto Death’ summarising the spread of secularisation in England – perhaps over-relying on Callum Brown’s controversial reading. Shorter chapters then list what Christianity offers – on Identity, Spiritual Space, Moral Space and Spiritual Worth, interspersed with a chapter arguing that a return to England’s Christian roots would not be, and very largely would not be experienced as, a threat to adherents of other world faiths.
It would be a pity if Omrani’s exercise in re-habilitating Christianity to a central place in English life were to be dismissed as hopelessly archaic and traditionalist (though his ill chosen title invites that). At a time when the sense of an existential vacuum at the centre of English life, with potentially disastrous political consequences, is being increasingly both recognised and responded to, his case – despite not being completely even-handed – deserves serious attention and promulgation.