by Robert Williamson, Jr. '01

While in seminary in Puerto Rico, Cardoza-Orlandi’s life was profoundly affected by two church historians whom he met through the Latin American Council of Churches. “The ministries of Juan Marcos Rivera and Carmelo Alvarez inspired me deeply to seek out a passion for mission,” he says. “Both of these men were appointed to the pastoral ministry of solidarity and justice during the 1980’s and 90’s in Latin America. That meant they were constantly involved in issues of human rights—in Brazil and Argentina, in Chile with Pinochet, and later in the Central American conflicts in Nicaragua, Salvador, Guatemala, and Chiapas.” Encouraged by these mentors and their commitment to social justice and human rights, Cardoza-Orlandi began to explore a vocation at the intersection of academics and ministry, in the study of mission and ecumenics. In pursuit of this dream, he moved with his family to Princeton Theological Seminary, where he earned his Ph.D. in mission, ecumenics, and the history of religions.

Throughout his education, Cardoza-Orlandi served as a minister in his denomination, the Christian Church (Disciples of Christ). “Because mission and ecumenics is about congregations and community, I was always a pastor,” he explains. “In Puerto Rico I pastored almost ten years before coming to the United States. While I was at Princeton, I was a pastor of Latino churches. My first book is dedicated to those churches because the lessons I got from them in intercultural dynamics were amazing.”

Now, as a professor at Columbia, Cardoza-Orlandi strives to make his students aware of the diverse expressions of Christianity around the globe. “The demographic reality of Christianity is changing,” he says. “The majority of Christians and the vitality of the faith are not in the western world but in the third world. It’s in sub-Saharan Africa, in the Middle East, in Latin America, and in Asia. One of my fundamental tasks is to expose Columbia students to that vitality, to the trends and the challenges of those Christianities in those contexts.”

In that spirit, next year he will teach a course on the history of Christianity in Africa, which will survey the development of Christianity in Africa from the 2nd to the 21st century. “This is not a course on missionary history,” he explains. “This is a course on indigenous African Christianity, focused on Africans as agents of their own faith. Many Americans fail to realize that there has been Christianity in Africa almost since the beginning.”

Understanding these various expressions of Christianity around the globe requires Cardoza-Orlandi and his students to grapple not only with religious concerns but also with social and political realities. “We have to deal with people of other faiths, with poverty, with the legacy of Western colonialism and post-colonialism, geography, and geopolitics,” he says. “We can’t dismiss those realities and talk about Christianity as though it were something that exists in a vacuum. It doesn’t. It exists among real people living in real contexts.”

For Cardoza-Orlandi, one of the most difficult aspects of teaching global Christianity has been helping American students grasp the magnitude of the economic disparity between North America and the Third World. “It is not simply a matter of Americans helping people in the Third World move up the ladder,” he says. “What upward ladder? In the third world, where you basically have poor and rich, what is the step in between? What is needed is a restructuring so that there is a more equitable distribution of goods, so that people’s basic rights are taken care of.”

Cardoza-Orlandi is quick to point out that the study of world Christianity is no longer simply about Christianity in places outside of the United States, but now is also about Christianity in our own neighborhoods. “The number of Indian Christians and African Christians, the number of Latin American Christians—from Pentecostals to Orthodox—coming to the United States is amazing!” he says. With immigrant populations bringing their own expressions of Christianity to the U.S., world Christianity is rapidly becoming a part of every ministry context. Cardoza-Orlandi hopes he can help students embrace this changing face of Christianity in America as they head into the ministry. “What I try to do with the students here is tell them that they have permission to explore new forms of the Christian religion. Trying to maintain the old forms, without learning from our neighbors, is just not going to work.”

Changes in the demographics of Christianity in the U.S. present a challenge not only to ministers, but to theological education as well. Cardoza-Orlandi believes that seminaries such as Columbia will need to remain flexible in order to meet the needs of the church of the future. “I believe that true changes in theological education do not happen by changing curriculum but by changing the makeup of the faculty,” he says. “The fact that Columbia has hired racial-ethnic people like me suggests that the seminary recognizes that theological education is changing. My mother tongue is not English, and I am not Presbyterian. My primary theological concerns are with Latin America, Africa, and immigrant communities. And I am not the only one. We now have one racial-ethnic professor with an endowed chair and one with tenure, as well as two others who are doing very well. Together, we are four embodied statements that Columbia is committed to moving forward.”