Our friend Eli the bajaji driver told me about how when he goes into the bank on a Monday to make his repayments, the officials of one of Dar Es Salaam’s most famous churches are there at the same time, depositing the offerings from Sunday. This church is renowned for […]
Luphurise Mawere‘s latest podcast episode is some teaching she gave at the weekly women’s meeting she runs. This week the passage was Peter sinking after he took his eyes from Jesus. She asked, where do the waves come from? What about the hardships in your life? Her answer was that […]
Tanzanians affirm again and again that there is no God like our God. None of the other gods compare to the Most High God. I have always thought that these were statements about God’s power but this week a friend helped me to see that this is also about God’s […]
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 […]
The service leader at church joked that today’s preacher should be called ‘Engineer’ as well as ‘Professor’ and ‘Pastor’. It was the first time I’d heard this guy preach and I didn’t catch his name. It was definitely a different kind of sermon from normal, both in style (much more […]
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 […]
Meet Jesus at uni 