Title: Disciples professor breaks ground with China appointment
Date: July 2, 2001
Disciples News Service
Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)
Contact: news@cm.disciples.org
01a-36
INDIANAPOLIS (DNS) -- The Chinese government this week granted official permission to an Ohio Disciples theologian and a San Francisco Presbyterian professor to teach at a Chinese seminary -- the first time since the 1949 communist revolution that foreigners from any country have been allowed to go to China for extended periods as religion educators.
The Rev. Carolyn Higginbotham, a member of First Christian Church (Disciples of Christ), Zanesville, Ohio, and her husband James, also a Disciples minister and FCC member, will leave for Nanjing (China) Union Theological Seminary in August. She has been granted "foreign expert" certification to teach the Old Testament at the seminary. He has been certified to teach English. Both have applied for visas, having cleared the more difficult foreign expert evaluation by the Chinese government. They will spend a year in their posts.
Antoinette Wire, a Presbyterian Church (USA) educator, will teach the New Testament at the Nanjing school.
"Clearly my focus above all is on the tremendous need for theological education in China," Higginbotham said. "The church is growing so rapidly. There is a tremendous need for trained pastors. I'm very honored to have the opportunity to help provide solid biblical training for pastors in China and to be a part of church growth in that way."
Work in the overseas mission field runs deeply in Carolyn Higginbotham's family. Her great-grandparents, Disciples evangelist Frank Garrett and his wife Ethel, went to China as missionaries in 1896, about ten years after the first Disciples missionary went to the Asian nation. Garrett, ironically, taught the Old Testament in Nanjing in 1912. Higginbotham's grandmother, Rose Garrett Holroyd was born in China, returned to the U.S. for an education, and returned to mission work in China. She met and married a YMCA representative to China, and Higginbotham's mother was born there. Several aunts and uncles served as missionaries in China as well.
The Higginbothams' ministry in China comes at the request of the president of the Nanjing seminary and the China Christian Council, the official church of China's estimated 15,000,000 Protestant Christians. They were called as missionaries in April by Global Ministries, the common overseas mission agency of the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ) and the United Church of Christ.
Carolyn Higginbotham is associate professor of religion at Muskingum College, New Concord, Ohio, a school related to the Presbyterian Church (USA). Her husband is a religion lecturer at the college and is completing his doctoral studies at Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tenn.
Higginbotham hopes her and her husband's year of ministry will open other cross-cultural opportunities. "I'm very excited about the possibility for building new bridges between the American and Chinese churches, and American people and the people of China. Hopefully ... this will enable other scholars to share in exchanges with the Chinese church in the future," she said.
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