In this year’s Christmas Day sermon, Pastor Dondo encouraged us to sing like the angels and share the good news like the shepherds and then turned his attention to 5 groups of people who appear in the birth narratives of Jesus but miss the significance of what’s going on. He […]
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 […]
I watched American Gospel: Christ Alone this week after hearing a bit of chatter about it. It profiles the American prosperity gospel as a heresy and mentions that it is being exported overseas where it also damages vulnerable people. The only evidence given for the exporting is this famous assertion […]
We are really looking forward to getting back to church in Dar es Salaam, and once again listening to Tanzanian Christian teaching regularly. Here is a recent Facebook post from our church, with the summary of Pastor Dondo’s sermon from Sunday. My first instinct on reading this is to think, […]
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’ […]
Meet Jesus at uni 