The service leader at church joked that today’s preacher should be called ‘Engineer’ as well as ‘Professor’ and ‘Pastor’. It was the first time I’d heard this guy preach and I didn’t catch his name. It was definitely a different kind of sermon from normal, both in style (much more […]
Estimated reading time: 5 minutes
Think of a match and a candle. They both burn with a similar flame, but where the match burns itself out, the candle lasts. The match may burn more strongly, but it cannot last. Sometimes a person burning out may not seem to be in trouble – they may be […]
Estimated reading time: 4 minutes
How have you been using debriefing and review? At TAFES Staff Orientation and Training, I spent a couple of hours with the staff team looking back over the academic year 2019-20. This year has come with a sense of three distinct seasons: pre-Corona, Corona (March-July), and post-Corona (July onwards, when […]
Estimated reading time: 3 minutes
Today at church we had Faraja Hamuli speak. She is the national leader of the women’s wing of our denomination in Tanzania and in the whole of Africa. She spoke on the woman at the well from John 4, “Give me this water.” For keen students of African prosperity theologies […]
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
We’ve recently been hearing about the ways sacrificial love plays out in middle class Tanzanian marriages. And Tamie’s been reflecting on American Gospel, a polemical film dealing with prosperity teaching. And I’ve been thinking again about how my understanding of ‘weakness’ in the New Testament has changed. In Australia, we […]
Estimated reading time: 8 minutes
In my previous post I compared the American prosperity gospel as presented in American Gospel: Christ Alone and the teachings I have heard here in Tanzania about prosperity. There was significant overlap both with the American prosperity gospel and with the American critics of it. Then there were some teachings […]
Estimated reading time: 7 minutes
I watched American Gospel: Christ Alone this week after hearing a bit of chatter about it. It profiles the American prosperity gospel as a heresy and mentions that it is being exported overseas where it also damages vulnerable people. The only evidence given for the exporting is this famous assertion […]
Estimated reading time: 11 minutes