In this year’s Christmas Day sermon, Pastor Dondo encouraged us to sing like the angels and share the good news like the shepherds and then turned his attention to 5 groups of people who appear in the birth narratives of Jesus but miss the significance of what’s going on. He […]
Our church’s sermon series on faith is continuing, with a woman preaching yesterday. Imelda is the wife of Pastor Patrick, and he introduced her before stepping off stage and sitting down to listen. This is the first time we have heard a woman preach, in the year we have been […]
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 […]
Merry Christmas! We celebrate Emmanuel, God with us. We had a sermon on this at church last Sunday, though it wasn’t initially apparent to me that it was a Christmas sermon. The text was Daniel 3:24-25, about the three young Jewish slaves who are thrown into the fire because they refuse […]
Jesus will build his church. Not sin or corruption or poor leadership will stop Jesus building it. This was the message brought to us at church on Sunday from Matthew 16. Jesus will be triumphant. His glorious church is not dependent on you because he is the master. He can even do […]
Tanzanians draw their gender roles and distinctions in all kinds of different places to us in Australia. They call themselves a patriarchal society, but women have freedom in places where they don’t in the west. So when our friend Isaac got married to Jema on the weekend, there was no […]
We spent a fair bit of our time in Australia talking about prosperity as a distinctive of Tanzanian theology, and the question of how to live wisely and well as a Christian. A fairly common question we got was how eschatology plays into this. That is, how does the return […]
Meet Jesus at uni 