Before Elliot was born, a relative of mine insisted to me that when I held him in my arms for the first time, I would change my mind about going to Tanzania. He said that I would do anything to protect my child. This is the first question in considering […]
On our first week back at church here in Adelaide, one of the ‘greeters’ at the door recoiled at the idea of taking our baby to Tanzania. (I was just over 38 weeks pregnant at the time. Elliot was born 4 days later.) After her initial shock, this lady said, […]
We’ve already looked at Jesus as Creator (and therefore conqueror) but the question remains: if Jesus is so powerful, why doesn’t the name of Jesus ‘work’ or ‘win’ every time? Why do Tanzanians so often experience the spirits as more powerful than Jesus? The typical evangelical answer is that we […]
Christ has been presented as the answer to the questions a white man would ask, the solution to the needs that Western man would feel, the Saviour of the world of the European world-view, the object of the adoration and prayer of historic Christendom. But if Christ were to appear […]
Adelaideans will be well familiar with the statistic that South Australia is the driest state on the driest continent on earth. I was wondering about how this compares with Dodoma the other day and here’s what I found: Adelaide is drier. It gets 546mm of rain per year; Dodoma gets […]
An excluded middle denies the presence or at least the power of the spirits. Animism, on the other hand, seeks to control a situation by means of the spirit world: you need to have the most powerful spirit in order to get what you want. One way of viewing Jesus […]
As Tamie and I prepare to move to Tanzania, we’ve been trying to get a sense of the religious world of East Africa. ‘Animism’ — the world of tribe and tradition, of folk religion — is an ever-present background to religious life in Tanzania, whether Christian, Muslim or otherwise. One […]
Meet Jesus at uni 