David Brian Barrett

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David Brian Barrett (born August 30, 1927 in Llandudno , North Wales , United Kingdom , † August 4, 2011 in Richmond , Virginia , United States ) was a British Anglican priest, missionary, missionary scholar and religious sociologist. In 1982 he first published the World Christian Encyclopedia , a reference work in which 10,000 religions and over 20,000 Christian denominations were listed and described on over 1,000 pages.

Live and act

David Brian Barrett attended Keblehaus and Berkhamsted Schools. He studied at the University of Cambridge , where he graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1945 and a master's degree in 1952. From 1948 to 1952 he worked for the Britain Royal Aircraft Establishment as a scientific officer in aerodynamic design. He left the Air Force to design bombs and then joined the Church of England . In 1954 he received a Bachelor of Divinity and was ordained a deacon and a year later a priest in the Province of York .

From 1956 to 1957 Barrett trained at the Society Missionary Training College in Chislehurst . In doing so, he felt a call to work as a missionary overseas. Formative for him was the book about the unreached millions of people by Bishop Stephen Charles Neill . In 1957 he traveled to Kisii in the Nyanza Province in Kenya . His beginning of work was overshadowed by church conflicts and a church separation. The Jehora movement, known as the People of Love, left the Anglican Church in Kenya . Fellow missions encouraged him to cultivate relationships with split-off African Christians rather than disciplining them as the church leadership had intended. He learned their languages Luo and Swahili , and he even joined the separated African Church and collected and wrote their history. In 1961 after his first assignment, Barrett left Kenya to work with the evangelist Bryan Green in Great Britain.

From 1962 Barrett studied as a fellow at the Union Theological Seminary in New York City in a twenty-person ecumenical study program with Pitney Van Dusen, Kenneth Scott Latourette and others. He carried out studies in the sociology of religion and discovered that his experience of church separation was not an isolated case, but rather he found 6,000 church movements in Africa that had emerged from separations. He also found information in the seminary's 100,000-work mission research library. He received his Ph.D. in Religion in 1965 from Union Theological Seminary and Columbia University , which had a collaborative program. Although many professors were more left-wing liberal, they supported Barrett in his meticulous research. In his religious studies he was also able to apply methods adapted from his first degree in natural sciences.

Barrett returned to Kenya in 1965 and assembled a research team supported by the World Council of Churches and the All Africa Conference of Churches . The project was: The Evangelization of West Africa Today: A Survey Across 21 Nations and 150 Tribes . He visited most of the African countries to collect data on African religions, ethnic groups and missionary activities. He became research secretary of the newly formed research unit of the Anglican Church in the province of Kenya, where he worked under an African bishop until 1985. In 1968 he published his doctoral thesis with the title Schism and Renewal in Africa (German: Separation and Awakening in Africa ) at Oxford University Press . This made him a well-known expert on new African religious movements. As early as 1970 he published his estimates in the International Review of Mission that Africa would have 350 million Christians in 2000. In 1968, Kenneth Grub presented the World Christian Handbook to Barrett . He then created the World Christian Encyclopedia , which was published by Oxford University Press, after thirteen years of traveling and research, visiting 212 of the 223 states worldwide.

After conflicts with African church leaders, Barrett left the Kenyan capital Nairobi with his family in 1985 . He became a researcher and advisor to the International Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention in Richmond , Virginia , where he worked until 1993. He helped the board to gain a sharper perspective and apply a more effective strategy for proselytizing unreached people groups. Until his death in 2011, Barrett continued his independent research work in the World Evangelization Research Center (German: Forschungszentrum für Weltevangelisierung ) in Richmond and later in the Center for the Study of Global Christianity (German: study center for global Christianity ). The latter was established in 2003 by Todd Johnson at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary in South Hamilton near Boston , Massachusetts . In 2001 Barrett and Johnson created a second, expanded edition of the World Christian Encyclopedia . With the encyclopedia, which has now grown to 2,600 pages, Barrett statistically presented worldwide Christianity, its missionary activities and growth in the 20th century with its more than 33,000 denominations, thus showing its worldwide relevance. His work also made it statistically measurable and therefore clear and clear that Christianity had shifted quantitatively from Europe to Africa and Asia at the end of the 20th century.

Private

Barrett was married to British missionary Pam Stubley from 1972 until his death. They have three children and several grandchildren.

Fonts

  • Urban Pressures on Religion and Church: A Study of the Luo of Kenya . STM thesis, Union Theological Seminary, 1963.
  • To Mission: An Analysis of Independent Church Movements Across Two Hundred African Tribes . Ph.D. diss, Columbia University, 1965.
  • Schism and Renewal in Africa: An Analysis of Six Thousand Contemporary Religious Movements . Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1968.
  • AD 2000: 350 Million Christians in Africa . International Review of Mission 59, no. 233, January 1970, pp. 39-54.
  • Interdisciplinary Theories of Religion and African Independency . In: African Initiatives in Religion: 21 Studies from Eastern and Central Africa , pp. 146–159. Nairobi: East African Pub. House, 1971.
  • World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World, AD 1900-2000 . Nairobi: Oxford University Press, 1982.
  • with George K. Mambo, Janice McLaughlin, and Malcolm J. McVeigh: Kenya Churches Handbook: The Development of Kenyan Christianity , 1498–1973. Kisumu: Evangel Publishing House, 1973.
  • with Todd M. Johnson: World Christian Trends, AD 30 – AD 2200: Interpreting the Annual Christian Megacensus . Pasadena, CA: William Carey Library, 2001.
  • with George T. Kurian and Todd M. Johnson: World Christian Encyclopedia: A Comparative Survey of Churches and Religions in the Modern World . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

literature

  • Todd M. Johnson: David B. Barrett: Missionary Statistician . In: International Bulletin of Missionary Research 36, January 1, 2012, pp. 30-32.
  • Gina A. Zurlo: A Miracle from Nairobi: David B. Barrett and the Quantification of World Christianity, 1957-1982 . Ph.D. diss., Boston University, 2017.

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Gina A. Zurlo: Barrett, David B. (1927-2011). Boston University website, accessed February 20, 2019 .
  2. ↑ Todd M. Johnson: David B. Barrett: Missionary Statistician. International Bulletin of Missionary, January 30, 2012, accessed February 20, 2019 .
personal data
SURNAME Barrett, David Brian
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Barrett, David
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Welsh Anglican priest, evangelical missionary, missionary scholar, sociologist of religion and statistician of religion
DATE OF BIRTH August 30, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH Llandudno (Wales) , Northern Wales , United Kingdom
DATE OF DEATH 4th August 2011
Place of death Richmond , Virginia , United States