He comes to make his blessings flow far as the curse is found This morning our family hung the first installment on our Jesse Tree (purple circles => God). Tamie and I are going through the Common Grace Advent devotions on Being Present. And we continue to draw on the […]
Everyone’s talking about the Trump victory. It’s not just the US for whom there are consequences; the US’ trade deals and foreign policy are all up for grabs, but there’s also a symbolic nature to the office Americans are so fond of calling ‘the leader of the free world’. Here in […]
Simon Chan once said, “True theology occurs when the faithful respond with ‘amazed recognition’ to the theologian: You said for us what we had wanted to say all along but could not find the words to say it.” This was my experience reading Neither Complementation Nor Egalitarian by Michelle Lee-Barnewell. […]
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 […]
When we were preparing to come to Tanzania, we said we’d do 10 years, and we purposely put a time limit on it. We are not ‘career missionaries’: our goal has been to build up Tanzanian believers and movements, such that our input is no longer needed. In the development sector […]
In the last post I suggested that Tanzanians do not necessarily view hierarchy as inherently abusive, in contrast to how I and many westerners think. So if hierarchy is not abusive, what is? How do you define abuse? Here I try to process some of the factors involved in this […]
A well-known egalitarian scholar once told me that the reason Africans read hierarchical gender roles in the Bible is because they don’t have the theological scholarship that we do, so we need to go and educate them. I smiled politely because this guy was significantly older than me, and ironically wasn’t […]
Meet Jesus at uni 