I was part of a UK Twitter conversation about the place of the church and the ‘parachurch.’ Eddie Arthur then responded on his blog, and what he said got me thinking: DNA: you can trace the origins of church congregations back to the New Testament. There has been a lot […]
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 […]
We knew our sense of not belonging in Australia would increase with each home assignment, and after almost 7 years in Tanzania, we are definitely feeling it. One big change is that people in Adelaide don’t see us as “one of them” anymore. We are outsiders. We no longer have […]
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. […]
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’ […]
Yesterday we visited a different church, to see our friends Eliud and Dorothea get officially engaged. The denomination was Evangelistic Assemblies of God Tanzania (our normal church is just run-of-the-mill Tanzania Assemblies of God), and this particular church was called ‘Kambi ya Waebrania’ — the camp of the Israelites. Up […]
I am still planning to come back to the question of how the cross and the atonement feature in Tanzanian theology, but here I want to give a write up of our pastor’s sermon from just before Christmas, because it neatly summarises some important themes in Tanzanian theology. It was […]
Meet Jesus at uni 