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 […]
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 […]
Yesterday we visited a different church, to see our friends Eliud and Dorothea get officially engaged. The denomination was Evangelistic Assemblies of God Tanzania (our normal church is just run-of-the-mill Tanzania Assemblies of God), and this particular church was called ‘Kambi ya Waebrania’ — the camp of the Israelites. Up […]
My friend Cath has been enjoying my recent reflections on Tanzanian theology, and asked me what has been challenging or helpful to me. I was aiming for a coherent blog post, but for the time being, I’m just going to reproduce the stream of consciousness comment I made to her […]
A notable absence in my recent discussions of Tanzanian theology has been the atonement. I asked questions about this way back in 2013 but it has not featured much since then. Atonement in terms of forgiveness of sin is preached in Tanzania in two contexts. First, we have observed it in evangelistic […]
I am still planning to come back to the question of how the cross and the atonement feature in Tanzanian theology, but here I want to give a write up of our pastor’s sermon from just before Christmas, because it neatly summarises some important themes in Tanzanian theology. It was […]
Arthur and I have put a lot of energy over the last 6 years into blogging about a Tanzanian understanding of prosperity. In part that’s because it is everywhere. If you talk to Tanzanians about the things that matter to them, success and prosperity dominate. We also believe that western […]
Meet Jesus at uni 