We received the sad news this morning that the senior pastor at our church when we were downtown died very suddenly. It was a big church and I did not know him personally but I learned a great deal from Pastor Ranwell and am thankful for his ministry. One sermon […]
We’re into week six of sermons about money at church. It turns out our pastor has almost as much to say about money as Jesus did! This week was the third on tithing. The passages were Haggai 1:9-13 and Malachi 3:10, and he did all the things that Aussie evangelicals […]
We’re getting a pretty good feel for the rhythms of our church now. The service is meant to go from 10am until 12:30pm but it’s only finished on time once of the times we’ve been there. Everyone’s always quite concerned about that though, and there’s lots of talk of keeping […]
Merry Christmas! We celebrate Emmanuel, God with us. We had a sermon on this at church last Sunday, though it wasn’t initially apparent to me that it was a Christmas sermon. The text was Daniel 3:24-25, about the three young Jewish slaves who are thrown into the fire because they refuse […]
Jesus will build his church. Not sin or corruption or poor leadership will stop Jesus building it. This was the message brought to us at church on Sunday from Matthew 16. Jesus will be triumphant. His glorious church is not dependent on you because he is the master. He can even do […]
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 […]
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 […]
Meet Jesus at uni 