This Sunday at church I was struck by how fear/power language permeated everything. (I wrote recently on the fear/power cultural paradigm, and we’ve previously written on it referring to it as animism, and with reference to the prosperity gospel.) In the children’s program… great attention was given to scripture memorisation. Last week’s […]
Many of our Aussie partners would be familiar with our friend Pastor John and his family because Arthur mentioned them in his deputation sermon. This past weekend they visited us in Dar es Salaam for a few days and Pastor John asked me, “How was your time in Australia? Were people pleased to […]
Tanzanians draw their gender roles and distinctions in all kinds of different places to us in Australia. They call themselves a patriarchal society, but women have freedom in places where they don’t in the west. So when our friend Isaac got married to Jema on the weekend, there was no […]
We spent a fair bit of our time in Australia talking about prosperity as a distinctive of Tanzanian theology, and the question of how to live wisely and well as a Christian. A fairly common question we got was how eschatology plays into this. That is, how does the return […]
On Sunday, TAFES were doing some deputation at Victory Christian Centre and I went along. VCC is a TAG church and the pastor is a TAFES graduate, has been a TAFES staffworker and continues to be highly supportive of TAFES. The church is a big white closed tent and I […]
A friend of ours is a Senior Lecturer at the Anglican Bible college in Dodoma and I asked him what he thought about western responses to the prosperity gospel. We feel we’ve been doing lots of learning on the topic of prosperity theology but we’re always keen to run it […]
We’ve observed in Tanzanian students talk of ‘losing the Holy Spirit’ and before each exam period, we have been included in massive prayer days where students go from church service to church service, receiving a special blessing at each. We were concerned that this was an issue of assurance. Did […]
Meet Jesus at uni 