Gina Zurlo, Ph.D.

The “Irruption within the Irruption”: A Women’s History of the Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians

In 1976, theologians from Africa, Asia, and Latin America met for the first time in Dar es Salaam to reflect upon a rapidly changing world. Rising nationalisms, colonization, and decolonization were reshaping the globe, and Western overreach was impacting all areas of society, including the churches. The Ecumenical Association of Third World Theologians (EATWOT) represented a new theological center of gravity in the wake of the Second Vatican Council, independence movements in Africa and Asia, and Christianity’s demographic shift to the global South. Although innovative, EATWOT quickly became known as another “boys club” that omitted the perspectives and contributions of women. This historical project, co-authored with Raimundo Barreto of Princeton Theological Seminary, addresses this omission, detailing women’s contributions to this theological network and placing EATWOT in the broader history of the Non-Aligned Movement, the emergence of contextual theology, and World Christianity studies. The project hinges on a defining moment: the 1981 international meeting in New Delhi, where, as described by Ghanaian theologian Mercy Amba Oduyoye, an “outburst” of women initiated by Indonesian theologian Marianne Katoppo finally brought attention to their sub-standard status. This bombshell moment showed men that their talk of liberation was not truly liberative for women. Oduyoye named this moment “the irruption within the irruption.” This project is supported by the American Society for Church History Research Fellowship (2025).

Women in World Christianity Project

In 2019, Dr. Zurlo received a Louisville Institute Project Grant for Researchers for a ground-breaking project on studying women in World Christianity. Demographers, social scientists, historians, and scholars of other disciplines have stated for decades that women are “more religious” than men. Yet, there exists very little hard data on women in global Christianity. Demographers estimate that world Christianity is majority female, but have no comprehensive, global data to back up that claim. The Women in World Christianity Project aims to fill this gap and adequately report on the status of the world Christian movement by providing up-to-date information on the percentage female of every Christian denomination in every country of the world. This project also received funding from the Constant H. Jacquet Research Award from the Religious Research Association. Women in World Christianity: Building and Sustaining a Global Movement (Wiley-Blackwell, 2023), is now available for purchase.

As a Yang Visiting Scholar of World Christianity at Harvard Divinity School, Dr. Zurlo completed another research project to women in World Christianity, where she investigated women’s leadership in congregations worldwide. Her findings were published in the peer-reviewed Review of Religious Research: “Gender Gaps in World Christianity: Membership, Participation, and Leadership.”

World Christianity and the Climate Crisis

Dr. Zurlo, with research assistant Han Zhao, are working on research that addresses the following questions related to World Christianity and the climate crisis:

• Who is, and who isn’t, talking about the climate crisis, and what are they saying about it?
• How does ecological activism in World Christianity differ based on geographic location and church tradition?
• How can we address the cost barriers of doing global research?
• How can we study trends in World Christianity using online tools and data sources?
• Can ChatGPT be used to enhance the social scientific study of religion?

This ongoing study examines discussions about the climate crisis, sustainability, and the environment from the largest Christian denominations around the world via public statements on their websites, assembled using online text mining with Google APIs (application programming interfaces). The paper is under review in Studies in World Christianity.

History of Quantification in World Christianity

Dr. Zurlo’s dissertation is about the life and work of David B. Barrett (1927–2011), who arrived in Nairobi, Kenya as a missionary with the Church Missionary Society in 1956 in the midst of nationalist movements leading up to the demise of British colonialism. Barrett was a trained aeronautical engineer, ordained Anglican priest, and held a doctorate in the Sociology of Religion. He started his work by doing field surveys of church affiliations in Kenya, but his research quickly expanded to encompass religious affiliations of all types throughout Africa and eventually worldwide. In the process, he established the Unit of Research of the Church of the Province of East Africa in Nairobi in 1965. After thirteen (1968–1981) years of research and travel to 212 countries, Barrett’s work culminated in the 1982 World Christian Encyclopedia (WCE), published by Oxford University Press. The WCE contained information on some 22,000 Christian denominations in every country of the world and was hailed by the media, scholars, and missions communities as a vital resource. Barrett’s work represents a shift in thinking from missionary statistician to professional religious demographer. Until now, his life and work have never been researched to see what impact he had on the development of religious demography as an academic discipline—arising from a long tradition of missionaries as sources of scientific data—as well as our contemporary understanding of world Christianity.

From Nairobi to the World: David B. Barrett and the Re-Imagining of World Christianity (Brill 2023) is now available for purchase.

Demography of Religion

“Religious demography” is defined as the scientific and statistical study of the demographic characteristics of religious populations, primarily with respect to their size, age-sex structure, density, growth, distribution, development, migration, and vital statistics, including the change of religious identity within human populations and how these characteristics relate to other social and economic indicators. In this sense, we go beyond basic demographic features of religion (age, sex, fertility, mortality) and look at religion as a demographic characteristic of human populations deserving its own field of inquiry. Dr. Zurlo’s research on world religions and Christian denominations contributes to both the World Christian Database and World Religion Database. 

The International Religious Demography Project at Boston University, where Dr. Zurlo works as Research Associate, provides a venue for the cross-validation of religious demography sources, reconcile conflicting sources of data and determine the best sources for countries where data are in short supply. The project compares cross-tabulated adherent data from demographic and health surveys, census data, and other social science sources with other demographic information such as age, level of religious participation, and so forth. However, survey and census data are lacking for many countries of the world. To make estimates for countries where such data is absent, the International Religious Demography Project has the capacity to analyze the World Christian Database’s unsurpassed collection of religious membership data, as well as draw on its extensive ethnolinguistic data, which provides an alternative method to estimate the size of religious groups in countries for which religious adherent data are not available.