Because Arthur and I are strong advocates of the church in Africa, often speaking about what God is doing here and the richness of African theology, we are sometimes asked, “Well, why are you there?” or “Isn’t the work of missionaries in Africa done?” These are good questions, considering the […]
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 […]
“Maybe we should just go home next year,” Arthur said to me. It was a question of how we can best use our resources. The money we raise for our family’s living expenses is maybe 90% of the entire national staff budget for TAFES. Nationally, there are about 20 staff. […]
I. In some American circles there’s a hubbub about Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option, and some Australians are interested. Stephen McAlpine, a pastor in Perth, seems to see the Benedict Option as the standout example of faithful communitarian vision, or maybe as an umbrella term for such. To my mind, the […]
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 […]
At St Andrew’s Hall, the learning centre for CMS Australia, our friends have just launched a six-part video course called Mission Mindset. The course outline begins, Rather than seeing ‘mission’ as something ‘special’ Christians do, the church is increasingly communicating that Jesus sends us out to continue his work and […]
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 […]
Meet Jesus at uni 