After my post about mafanikio, another missionary here in Tanzania wrote to me with some questions. In her experience, people who are on the road to becoming successful are torn down by others until they stop striving, so they never reach it. Mediocrity and inertia are what Tanzanian culture produces. […]
In the English dictionary, ustawi (ooh-STAH-wee) is prosperity or welfare; mafanikio (ma-fa-nee-KEE-oh) is accomplishment or success. The latter is a very popular topic for teaching in Tanzania. The former does not feature as much, but a long-time missionary suggested it to us as an alternative to mafanikio to distinguish prosperity […]
What is the message of Good Friday? Until I lived in Tanzania, I would have thought it was fairly straightforward: the focus is the death of Jesus for our sins, in short, the atonement. But at our church yesterday, the atonement was present, but characteristically not the focus. The ‘liturgy’ […]
The next time someone laments to you about the sad state of theology in Tanzania, or the poor examples of Christian leadership, ask them about Christopher Mwakasege. Mwakasege is not a pastor or apostle or prophet: he uses the title “Mwalimu” (teacher). He’s an itinerant teacher, moving from place to […]
“Maybe we should just go home next year,” Arthur said to me. It was a question of how we can best use our resources. The money we raise for our family’s living expenses is maybe 90% of the entire national staff budget for TAFES. Nationally, there are about 20 staff. […]
Kufa kwa wengi ni harusi means ‘For many, (a) death is a wedding,’ where wedding is representative of a big party. When I first heard this proverb, I assumed it was about people who die, that for them death is a happy thing or a release. It’s not that. The […]
I feel like the longer we are here, the more I see how much we have to learn. If we spent our first three years trying to get our heads around prosperity gospel, I have spent the last few years trying to get inside Tanzanian understandings of hierarchy, and it […]
