A common critique of the prosperity gospel, and one I’ve been delving into a bit this week, is that it presents the gospel in a human-centric way: have faith in God and get all this great stuff. Someone once said, never has so much been offered for so little! There’s […]
After church on Sunday, a friend of mine mentioned that the kind of prosperity teaching I’ve been blogging about, which doesn’t neatly fit the western stereotype of prosperity gospel and which conceives of itself quite differently, is somewhat new in Tanzania. Often we hear of the prosperity gospel itself as […]
In my previous post I compared the American prosperity gospel as presented in American Gospel: Christ Alone and the teachings I have heard here in Tanzania about prosperity. There was significant overlap both with the American prosperity gospel and with the American critics of it. Then there were some teachings […]
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 […]
Luphurise Mawere, whose podcast I’ve written about recently, advertised in our networks her online financial literacy classes. She said, “the secret to change your financial situations lies in acquiring right skills, knowledge, strategies and tools that will help to make sound financial decisions.” The response from one senior TAFES associate […]
In the English dictionary, ustawi (ooh-STAH-wee) is prosperity or welfare; mafanikio (ma-fa-nee-KEE-oh) is accomplishment or success. The latter is a very popular topic for teaching in Tanzania. The former does not feature as much, but a long-time missionary suggested it to us as an alternative to mafanikio to distinguish prosperity […]
“If you want a sermon to learn about riches,” said the preacher, “go elsewhere, because we are talking about the pathway to our permanent home.” Then he spent the rest of the sermon talking about attaining success. It was one of those moments when I realised again that what westerners […]
