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A new research prize dedicated to amplifying the voices of the world Christian movement celebrates the lives of two women dedicated to proclaiming the character of Christ in their missions and ministries across West Africa and East Asia.
The Overseas Ministries Study Center at Princeton Theological Seminary, in collaboration with the Global Spiritual Formations Project funded by the Templeton Religion Trust and administered by the Nagel Institute for the Study of World Christianity, is inviting proposals for OMSC’s inaugural Afua Kuma – Dora Yu Paper Prize.
The prize is dedicated to the study of lived theology and Christ-like formation in the contexts of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania. It is dedicated to raising up new cohorts of scholars in the Global South that will advance similar studies of spiritual formation exhibited across the world church’s traditions and expressions.
Twelve winners will be awarded $2,500 (USD) each to support their research over the course of the 2025-2026 academic year. The award will fund fieldwork, data collection, archival research and associated costs, including travel.
Each winner will also be paired with a mentor, says Soojin Chung, director of the OMSC.
These mentors will work all year with winners on their project paper, acting at times like a mentor and other times like a peer reviewer.
Easten Law, OMSC associate director, says the prize was born from the larger project that Templeton Trust is funding in support of spiritual formation around the world. OMSC is excited to join this project to expand the study into the Global South.
“This paper prize is one way of encouraging scholars to do research in this area, because it is a gap that we want to fill,” Law says.
The women the prize honors would agree.
Madam Afua Kuma of Ghana, baptized Christiana Gyane, was a prophetess, poet, and pioneering “mother tongue” African theologian.
She was the first to adapt African praises from the oral tradition into a form of Christian worship for the wider African community. The oral adaptations were later transcribed into written form by others. She believed in the importance of local theology emerging from people in their own tongues.
In her adaptations from the oral tradition – she never learned to write — her resulting prayers and poems captured the spiritual imagination of listeners through exceptional displays of linguistic, cultural, and theological inventiveness.
Madam Kuma died in 1988 at age 79 and is buried in her hometown of Obo-Kwahu.
Dora Yu, known in the East as Yu Cidu, was a prominent hymn writer and teacher of spirituality. She was a Chinese evangelist, a Korean missionary, and a leader in the 20th century Chinese church revival movement.
She was revered as “kindhearted, especially towards the elderly, and had a heart for the weak and poor. She was solemn and plain, humble and honest, and despite being derided as unsophisticated, she felt that she was simply a fragile earthen vessel, believing that God would fill her with the Holy Spirit and give her great power.”
At 15, she left home to study medicine, and in 1896, became one of the first two women to graduate from Suzhou Medical College. She then became one of the first cross-cultural Chinese missionaries when she traveled to Korea in 1898 with an American missionary to work as a doctor and evangelist.
Just eight years later, she was called to leave medicine to lead revival meetings around Shanghai and in major southern coastal cities. She began to work to train women to care for the growing number of believers, opening the Bible Study and Prayer House of Shanghai.
She continued to work until her death from cancer in 1931 at the age of 58.
Their work lives on.
Research projects should include a grounded component that connects theological principles with the lives of the church in the world. This can include, but are not limited to:
For complete details and application materials, link here.
