Arthur’s previously argued that much of the talk of prosperity in Tanzania coheres more with the Bible’s wisdom tradition than it does with western ideas of the ‘prosperity gospel’. We’ve become convinced that prosperity teaching in Tanzania meets a very real need in Tanzanians’ lives and recently as I was […]
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 […]
My post office adventures are turning into a bit of a thing! This one is about our local post office, on campus at St John’s not the big one in town. Our campus post office is tiny, with just one worker, and the worker has changed again. First there was […]
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/105108849 w=600] Tanzania Snapshots is our educational video library, designed to provide cross-cultural perspectives for our partner churches.
We’ve been planning with student leaders for an upcoming ‘semina’, like a day conference. One of the issues that came up was whether we should have a ‘sadaka’, meaning ‘offering’ or ‘sacrifice’. This is a collection, taken up at the end of a meeting. It happens at just about every […]
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 […]
Is ‘Africa’ really rife with a false gospel? Here’s one version of the story: As we’ve seen, however, examples like Lizzy and Mwakatwila mean we can’t automatically equate prosperity talk with ‘prosperity gospel’. Tanzanian headspace is concerned with everyday questions, and Tanzanian Christians are connecting those questions with the parts of […]
Meet Jesus at uni 