With Christmas approaching, our pastor preached on Jesus as Saviour. After all, this is what is announced at Christmas time. “Today in the town of David a Saviour has been born; he is the Messiah, the Lord” (Luke 2:11). Both Mary and Joseph receive separate instructions that he is to […]
Our pastor opened his sermon yesterday by talking about the importance of names. Most Tanzanian names have some kind of meaning. Sometimes these meanings are positive e.g. Amani (peace) or Furaha (joy). Sometimes they’re neutral, for example, you can be named after the day on which you were born. And […]
We’re into week six of sermons about money at church. It turns out our pastor has almost as much to say about money as Jesus did! This week was the third on tithing. The passages were Haggai 1:9-13 and Malachi 3:10, and he did all the things that Aussie evangelicals […]
I’ve been having lots of conversations here in Australia about brokenness, guilt and how these things are particularly poignant for women. Consider the woman who yells at her child, or the one who is Facebooking when her child’s asking her to build a GUP out of Duplo (again!), or the one […]
Arthur and I find ourselves in the Aussie reformed evangelical camp, but both of us have significant streams of influence from Holiness / Wesleyan / Methodist traditions from earlier in our lives. We’ve re-discovered these most recently by following Seedbed, which is how I picked up a copy of ‘Holiness […]
Over the next two posts, I’m going where married women fear to tread: addressing single women. But my vast hope here is that these will be words of grace for you. I’m really liking some of the talking back that’s going on in the church and outside it about singleness, […]
Part 6/6 in a series on the history of Tanzanian universities We’ve sketched out a brief history of Tanzanian universities: postcolonialism, founding and accreditation, the 1960s-70s, 2001 and the present day. There’s a range of implications for student ministry to do with things like: The legitimacy of student ministry in […]
Meet Jesus at uni 