When I read Pentecostal Theology in Africa, I felt that it articulated many of the things Arthur and I have wondered at or groped for as we’ve been trying to understand Pentecostalism in Tanzania. Clifton Clarke’s introduction interacts with Ogbu Kalu’s work on Africa’s Pentecostalism. Kalu is against the view […]
Something we’ve been confused about here in Tanzania is why so many Christian women marry Muslims. We asked our student friends, one of whom has a sister who got married to a Muslim. They said it’s not family pressure. Instead, for most girls, it’s seeing the money the Muslim guys […]
The longer we’ve been in Tanzania, the more convinced Arthur and I have become that we need to come to terms with Tanzanian Pentecostalism. What are its distinctives? How is it different from Pentecostalism in Australia? What is its history? Where is it at these days? As I’ve chatted with […]
Reading Macchia’s ‘Global Pentecostalism and Baptism in the Spirit’, I found myself asking in what sense his argument is global. It seems that in the western Pentecostal crisis about the efficacy of ‘baptism in the Spirit’, Pentecostal theological method as practiced in the majority world has come to be seen, […]
I had an experience almost twenty years ago where I went to Adelaide’s foremost pentecostal church and discovered that they thought I hadn’t experienced the fullness of the Spirit because I hadn’t spoken in tongues. These days at that church, speaking in tongues still features, but it’s not the centrepiece […]
We’ve been thinking a bit about the prosperity gospel and keen to learn from local sources here in Tanzania. So when we had dinner recently with a Christian leader from a region about 2 hours north of Dodoma, we took the opportunity to ask him what he thought. He doesn’t […]
Meet Jesus at uni 