‘Everything takes so long.’ This is a refrain of living in the majority world. It’s why many people consider house help a necessity, for example. We often get asked why things take so long, what is actually taking up the time. We say, ‘something always goes wrong’, or at least […]
This post is part of a series. A few years ago, I was on a parish council which received a request from a Korean congregation: would we be open to them using our building? It didn’t sound like a merger or even a partnership, just a congregation looking for a […]
Some of us Christians in the West are claiming grave concerns about religious liberty and/or the decline of Western society. And we Christians are clearly losing the influence we once had. A lot of Christian commentary and ‘cultural analysis’ is coloured with these anxieties. What’s the world coming to? Are […]
Last time I gave a bit of a description of old paradigm mission. I don’t believe that this old paradigm should be completely done away with. Even if some new paradigm came sweeping in, there would no doubt still be a place for pioneer missionaries from the West, as well […]
Mission Matters: Love Says Go by Tim Chester, Inter-Varsity Press, 2015. All page numbers indicated below are Kindle locations. Tim Chester‘s short new book is a call to world mission. It’s concise and comprehensive — and it may just have been written for the wrong century. The book opens with […]
Last Friday I looked at Vinoth Ramachandra’s account of multicentred world history and postcolonial criticism, and pointed out his emphasis on the need to specify and honour context. This is part of what inspires his diverse series of theological reflections. Many of these are about renovating how we as (Western) Christians see the world. ‘The “we” in Christian […]
Since we moved to Tanzania last year, we’ve begun to field questions from friends interested in volunteering. For the first time I’ve heard about a couple of the big, international volunteer organisations, and it’s been fascinating to see how they talk — so intriguing that I’ve been doing some source […]
Meet Jesus at uni 