Anicka Fast

Anicka Fast serves with Mennonite Mission Network as a Specialist in church history and missiology, currently based in the Netherlands. She also serves as Secretary of the Mennonite World Conference Faith and Life Commission.

Currently, Anicka’s main focus is on editing a new Mennonite World Conference Global Anabaptist-Mennonite history series (successor to the previous, now-completed Global Mennonite History Series), to be based on biographies. She is currently co-editing the first volume in the series, which will feature biographies of Congolese Mennonites and will also inaugurate a new DACB book series, together with DACB Executive Director Michèle Sigg.

To support this project, make a tax-deductible donation to the CGCM Global Anabaptist Histories Fund.

All donations go directly to support the research, editing, and travel costs related both to the book series and to the broader tasks of empowering African historians through teaching and mentoring, to which Anicka is committed.

More about Anicka

Anicka’s PhD dissertation (BU, 2020) focused on a missionary encounter in 20th century Belgian Congo while also exploring broader questions of memory, gender, and catholicity in the global church. Anicka teaches courses in church history, mission and/or theological studies at various francophone theological institutions in West and Central Africa. She mentors and trains African historians and archivists and supports the development of church archives, as a way to build the capacity of African Christians to tell the stories that shape their identity as part of a global church.

Anicka is a member of the International Editorial Board of the Dictionary of African Christian Biography.. Her ongoing research interests include:

  • the development of pedagogical tools to facilitate historical remembering within the global church
  • the missionary agency of early 20th century Congolese Christians in the Kasai region
  • the shifting structures of North-South ecclesial collaboration within Protestant and Mennonite contexts in the 20th century
  • the interactions among gender, race, and ethnicity in mission
  • the politics of knowledge production in the global church
  • the ways in which church practices and performances have functioned to support or undermine a catholic ecclesial imagination within missionary encounters.

Read the April-July 2022 issue of the Journal of African Christian Biography, guest edited by Anicka with a focus on African Mennonites here.

Listen to Anicka discuss the importance of remembering stories of mission as a way of strengthening our identity as members of a global church here.

Read a participant’s story about a biography-writing workshop recently co-taught by Anicka and Michèle Sigg in Kinshasa here. The biographies that workshop participants wrote are currently being edited for publication by Langham in its Global Perspectives Series, and in the Dictionary of African Christian Biography. Find more reflections on this innovative workshop and publication approach by Anicka and Michèle in the July 2023 issue of the JACB, p. 44-57.

Read Anicka’s full CV here.