My friend Mike Taylor, who studied at Moore College in Sydney, is now principal of the Munguishi Bible College in Tanzania. Theological education is one of the most useful things we can provide for our African brothers and sisters. Mike is looking for supporters – perhaps you could help?
Here’s Mike’s letter:
Munguishi Bible College is the Diocesan Training College for the Anglican Diocese of Mt Kilimanjaro. It is situated in Arusha, Tanzania. We are a reformed evangelical College. Currently we have about 40 students, from all over Tanzania, who are trained to be ‘evangelists’ and ‘pastors’.
One such student is Musa (pictured here with his wife). He lives in a traditional Maasai area, with no access to electricity or water. Still only 22 he is head of his late Father’s extended family. He became a christian as a young adult, and has recently graduated from our 1 year Evangelist course. Christian Maasai are despised by their people and face many difficulties in proclaiming the gospel. Most Maasai, especially men, see the gospel as an affront to their custom and refuse to accept it. Musa patiently perseveres in proclaiming Christ against this hostility, and by the grace of God, the gospel is bearing fruit. We hope, under God, that Musa will return to do our Pastors Course, be ordained and continue church planting in ‘Maasai-land’.
All of our students are subsidised by donations to the college. They cannot study, and we cannot train them without the generosity of our brothers and sisters around the world. A student will typically pay about $70 per year for tuition and board. Realistically it costs about $1200. We continue to look for more partners in sponsoring students and funding our College to do this important ministry.
Munguishi Bible College has some income generating projects with a view towards self-sufficiency. We rent some land, and farm some more land. Our farm provides maize and beans for all the students and staff each year with enough left over to sell. Currently we are investigating a Solar-Light selling project run by the Anglican Church of Tanzania. This has enormous potential – but will take some time to bear fruit.
The college is carefully managed, and accountable to the Diocese and College Board. We strive for efficiency and accountability in all that we do. We meet the requirements of the Province of Tanzania for our Awards. Over the next few years we will start a Degree program. Our current budget is $70,000 per year. This budget includes Tanzanian faculty and other staff salaries, stationery, food and water, utilities, maintenance of buildings and other running costs.
It is our hope and prayer that you will partner with us in this strategic ministry. The church in Tanzania is crying out for humble, faithful, godly and well trained leaders—men and women who understand the gospel and proclaim the grace of Christ in word and deed. By God’s grace, Munguishi is producing faithful leaders for his church.
Please, will you consider giving a small grant to enable and sustain our ministry here. There are two ways of giving,
- provide a scholarship for one student: $1200 per year.
- give a donation directly to the College.
Thank you for considering this, and for your partnership with us.
Mike Taylor
Principal.
If you can help, please get in touch with Mike to let him know: mktaylor@cms.org.au
From The Briefing:
One lazy afternoon in 1999, travel writer Bill Bryson discovered a shop that sold pet supplies and pornography.1 It was at the far end of the main street of an unassuming Australian country town called Young.
The front of the shop contained rather mundane supplies of flea powder, fish flakes, and other pet accessories. But at the back of the shop, behind a small wooden gate, there was a whole section devoted to the sale of explicit pornographic material. Bryson was apparently baffled by the existence of such a bizarre establishment. But I think I can explain what it was doing there.
If memory serves me correctly, there was a period during which various local planning laws existed to get rid of the ‘adult’ industry in Australian towns. The lawmakers didn’t ban small stocks of pornography in shops that existed for other purposes (e.g. newsagents2). But they did try to make sure that all such stocks were strictly controlled. No shop was allowed to have pornography comprising more than a certain small percentage of its total stock. Therefore, no dedicated ‘adult’ stores could exist. The laws were designed to create a safe and wholesome town environment by ensuring that the sale of explicit material couldn’t become a business in its own right (remember, at this point the internet was still taking off).3
But what actually happened? Did the laws work as intended? Not quite. Instead, bizarre shops started to spring up, shops like the one Bryson encountered. The shops still had pornography as their real core business, but to get around the planning laws, the stores put up not-very-subtle ‘fronts’. A shop that advertised pet supplies out the front could ‘legitimately’ claim that it was not really an adult store, since its main purpose was something else. And since there were more individual packets of cheap flea powder and fish flakes on the shelves than there were magazines out the back, the stocks of pornography technically came under the legal limit. But everybody knew what the shops were really for. The laws, despite their good intentions, had failed.
This is a clear illustration of a problem that crops up whenever we try to use laws to make things better. These planning laws were good. They were worthy manifestations of our community’s desire to uphold marriage as the proper context for healthy sexual expression, and to limit the harm and exploitation that arises when this context is ignored. I’m glad the lawmakers did what they did. But the legislation couldn’t, by itself, get to the heart of the problem. The laws couldn’t make men love their families more. They couldn’t convince people that being a real ‘adult’ is about care and responsibility, not self-gratification. The letter of the law did nothing to make people love the spirit of the law. It just brought about grudging compliance and tragically comic workarounds that exploited loopholes. A good law doesn’t make people good.
This isn’t just a problem for Australian planning laws. In fact, the problem also crops up when we try to put God’s law at the centre of our lives. In Romans 2:17-24, the apostle Paul has a debate about this very issue. Paul and his debating partner were Jews. This means they were law-people, and glad of it. The God of the entire world had especially revealed himself to Israel through the law of Moses. Jews had a fantastic privilege: they knew God’s will in the law. They knew what was good and right and proper, because the Creator himself had told them all about it. Jews were also equipped to teach other people all about this great revelation of God’s will. But Paul insists that God’s law-revelation has a fundamental problem. It’s not that the law is bad; actually, the law is great. But the problem is that the law won’t change the heart. God’s good law doesn’t make God’s people good. In fact, as Paul goes on to show in Romans 3, the law does something else entirely. In the end, the law makes our sin and hypocrisy crystal clear. It silences every mouth, and holds us accountable to God (Rom 3:19-20). The law doesn’t save us. Instead, it shows up our failure, and points to something greater: the forgiveness and transformation that we find in Jesus Christ, through the word of the gospel and the Spirit of God.
A heart that relies on the law to find salvation before God is a bit like that store at the end of the main street in Young. It might look respectable and well-ordered. It might seem quite attractive to a casual passer-by. It might have a plentiful stock of law-compliant good deeds on the shelves. And yet there are those sealed sections, the bits at the back. At one level, these sealed sections might seem small or insignificant compared to the much more obvious good deeds that can be pointed to as examples of that heart’s own inherent goodness. But in fact, it is these back sections that truly show up the heart’s real orientation. And if we admit it, there’s a bit of that hypocrisy in all of us, isn’t there?
Simply knowing God’s character and will, even his character and will as expressed in the pages of the Bible itself, will not solve our biggest problem. If we want actual forgiveness, salvation, and transformation, we need something far more radical and powerful than God’s law. We need God himself to forgive us. We need the cross of Christ. And we need God to change our hearts, imperfectly now, and soon our whole heart, soul, and strength perfectly on that last day.
1 Bill Bryson, Down Under, Black Swan, London, 2001, pp. 109-110.
2 Newsstands to American readers.
3 I’m relying on my memory of news reports. I’ve tried hard, but haven’t been able to track down the laws that were in effect twelve years ago.
Comments at The Briefing.
From The Briefing:
I’m about to use Yoda as a model for Christian love. If you haven’t seen the Star Wars movies, you’ll probably be mystified by what I’m about to say. This is not the article you’re looking for.
Our home group recently spent a few weeks discussing Christian love. We were focusing on how to love people facing particularly difficult problems like depression or relationship crises. We were thinking about how, in these situations, we could ‘speak the truth in love’ (Eph 4:15). We talked a lot about some of the mechanics of speaking the truth in love: for example, how do you ask the kind of questions that get to the heart of the issue? When a person reveals personal information to you, how do you organize the information in your head? Most importantly, how do you bring the gospel of Jesus Christ to bear in the situation?
We soon discovered that there were two kinds of people in the group. Firstly, there were the ‘naturals’, people who were instinctively good at loving people facing hard times. They knew how to be kind, they knew when to listen, they knew when to comfort and when to challenge. When it came to speaking the truth in love, they were Jedis. But there were others, like me, who were less intuitive. We needed to be more deliberate and conscious. We were more like apprentices, young Luke Skywalkers.
To some of the Jedis, all this talk about the ‘mechanics’ of love seemed a bit wrong. They thought: “Isn’t it a bit cold and calculating? Isn’t it inauthentic, formulaic, non-relational? Surely you just have to love people genuinely, from the heart, and the rest will follow?”
But after a while these Jedis realized something: the apprentices were different from them. The ‘just do it’ approach didn’t work for the apprentices at all. In fact, the apprentices needed the wisdom of the Jedis. We needed them to reflect on what they were doing, to break it down into little bits and teach us.
In other words, we needed the Jedis to become Yodas. Yoda was more than just a Jedi. He was a Jedi master. He knew that other people didn’t share his natural intuition. He reflected long and hard about his own innate Jedi skills. He was patient and kind. He shared his Jedi powers with Luke, in simple steps, so that Luke could understand and learn.
The Jedis in our group were very gracious to us. They became Yodas for us—and it was incredibly helpful.
When it comes to speaking and serving the body of Christ, what gift comes ‘naturally’ to you? In this area, can you become a Jedi master, break it down, and teach the rest of us?
Comments at The Briefing
What’s changed: From now on my regular posts on Christian life and ministry will appear on the new Briefing site. The Sola Panel is now dead.
What hasn’t changed: I’ll continue to use this site (Forget the Channel) to post about more technical biblical and theological topics.
Check out the shiny new Briefing site; it’s full of free goodies. Tony, the Publishing Director, says:
September 1 has come at last, and we’re thrilled to be launching our new Briefing site. We hope you enjoy having a browse around. Here’s a quick guide to some of the main new features:
- It’s all free! All our content from now on will go up on this site, without any payment or subscription barriers. If you prefer the paper edition (in which the best of our content will be published every two months), that will cost you a small amount. To find out more about the paper magazine, see all the details here.
- Pretty much everything is tagged in one of five main categories: Life (growing in godliness and holiness as we live each day as Christians); Thought (growing in understanding and knowledge of God through his Word); Everyday Ministry (being equipped and encouraged for the nuts-and-bolts ministry that all Christians share); Pastoral Ministry (material especially, but not exclusively, for those engaged in full-time ministry); and Review (where we look at books, ministry resources, and anything else we might cast our eye over).
- These five categories tell you most of you need to know about what we believe and stand for, and what we’re trying to do on this site, but if you want more ‘about us’ sort of info, including our doctrinal statement, go here.
- The Sola Panel blog is now hosted here on The Briefing site, with six regular panellists from around the world.
- Col Marshall and I are launching a new podcast called ‘Trellis and Vine Talk’, in which we talk every couple of weeks about some aspect of the ministry that we all share. The first episode will be online in the next few days.
Please tell us what you think about the new site, and fire off any questions you might have. We very much want to contribute to your lives and ministries, so any suggestions on how to do that will always be gratefully received.
 Just putting in a plug for Christ Evangelical Reformed Church—a small but growing independent church in Malaysia to which I’m formally connected by being their “consultant elder”. Malaysia desperately needs to hear the gospel of Jesus Christ; CERC is among those churches who are boldly training up a new generation of godly and discerning Christians to speak this gospel.
Please support them: check out their website, like them on Facebook, pray for them, visit if you’re nearby; you might also like contact them for further information on how to support them financially.
The causes of famine in Somalia are many and complex: politics, corruption, war, greed; the list goes on. At this particular moment, however, what is needed most urgently is funds to buy food. Unicef says that if they can buy food, they can get it to where it’s needed.
Apparently we haven’t taken this crisis seriously enough because we’ve been distracted by other news stories; stories about foam pies thrown at Rupert Murdoch, for example.
If you’re in the UK, you can donate to Unicef here. If you know of any other charities or channels through which funds can be given to get food urgently to Somalia, please comment.
“The debate is over” – this is an argumentative gambit I’ve noticed quite a few people using recently around the web. It’s a subtle rhetorical device, designed to make people who disagree with you sound petty and ill-informed.
The three debates that I’ve noticed it being used in are as follows:
- The debate concerning the place of faith and works in the Christian life, related to the so-called “New Perspective on Paul”
- The debate concerning God’s sovereignty and human responsibility in evangelism, related to mission strategy in the Diocese of Sydney
- The debate concerning evangelism and good deeds in mission, related to the Lausanne Conference
Here’s how the device is used:
- You raise the issue
- You declare with authority that “the debate is now over”
- You observe that nevertheless, certain people are still debating the issue
When you use this device, you are implying two things:
- You belong to a privileged circle of people who are properly qualified to talk about the issue (i.e., in the cases I mentioned above New Testament scholars, a group of Sydney Anglicans, missiologists), and who are no longer interested in talking about the issue.
- Those who are still debating the issue don’t belong to the privileged group. They are therefore ill-informed, or petty, and clearly not qualified to talk about the issue, and not worth listening to.
I don’t like this device, and I think it should should stop. Why?
- It’s elitist. Just because your own circle claims to have worked out the issue, doesn’t mean that other areas of discussion about this issue are irrelevant.
- It’s illogical. If people are still debating the issue, then the debate is not over.
To follow up from my previous post:
BBC News – World’s oldest man Walter Breuning dies in US aged 114.
The world’s certified oldest man, whose advice to others included the observation “you’re born to die”, has passed away aged 114 in the US.
I’m not preaching on Easter Day this year. But if I were, I’d be using this as my sermon illustration and/or introduction.
BBC News – ‘Oldest’ marathon runner Buster Martin dies
A London man who claimed to be the world’s oldest marathon runner has died.
…
He features in a film by American documentary-maker Mark Wexler being released in the US in May, called How to Live Forever.
…
A biography on the website for the film that features Mr Martin, described him as “Britain’s oldest working man” and said he enjoyed “a beer or two and 20 cigarettes daily”.
Since I can’t use it, this story is now going free to a good home. Enjoy!
From the Sola Panel:
According to a computer analysis, one particular Sunday in the 1950s (the 11 April 1954, to be exact) was the most boring day in the twentieth century. The most interesting things that happened on that day were a Belgian election (yawn) and the birth of a Turkish physicist specializing in atomic microscopes and computer chips. Apart from that, nothing much else happened.
Being boring seems to be a particularly heinous crime nowadays, even amongst Christians. Of course, this isn’t true at all times and in all places. It’s hard to think of the Protestant martyrs who were burned at the stake in the mid-1500s, or Christians today in Pakistan being sentenced to death for blasphemy, being especially worried about the prospect of boredom. On the other hand, if you’re reading this, you probably belong to that portion of humanity with quite a lot of time on our hands. Time to read blogs, for example. Or play sport. Or to like things on Facebook. And since you probably spend quite a bit of time reading, playing and liking, you probably care a lot more about the ‘interest factor’ in your entertainment, your sport and your friends than, for instance, the average Protestant martyr.
So is there actually anything wrong with being boring? Is boredom just a 21st century Western problem that we all just need to ‘get over’?
On the one hand, we need to acknowledge that being boring can have terrible consequences. Thoughtful Christian parents know this all too well: there is great danger in boring your kids out of Christianity. If, for example, you teach your kids by your words and your actions that the gospel is a simple formula for a ticket to heaven (especially if your version of ‘heaven’ sounds suspiciously like an endless succession of 11 April 1954s), that the Bible is a book of morality tales to make us nice, and that the world is a nasty place that should be avoided wherever possible; if your kids perceive that you are going through the religious motions of church and sermons Sunday after Sunday, year after year, without it affecting your life, destroying your pretensions or humbling you before God—this is, indeed, perilously boring, for them and for you. And of course, this isn’t just a problem for parents and their rebellious yet perceptive teenagers, is it?
On the other hand, the desire to avoid being boring can be just as perilous. If we care too much about the problem of being boring, we can look for dangerous shortcuts to being interesting. This is a real problem for Christian teachers. Having spent a bit of time in the world of biblical scholarship, I can testify that a deep anxiety to avoid being boring fuels much of the scholarly endeavour. Biblical scholars are noticed, given praise, published and given jobs when they say new, novel and controversial things about their area of specialty (commentary readers, take note!). When biblical scholars just show how this or that part of the Bible fits into the whole counsel of God as preached down through the centuries, nobody is particularly interested. But this is a temptation for anyone involved in Bible teaching. Think of the pastors who feel the very real desire to monitor the latest trends; what people are liking, listening to, watching, clicking, reading, talking about … The temptation is to focus so much on being interesting that we discard anything that is perceived to be boring, to replace the Bible with entertainment or personalities, to replace what is true with what is liked. But let’s not just point the finger at the professional Bible teachers themselves. How often do we all talk about our teachers as if the most important thing that matters about what they have to say is how interesting it is: interesting = good, boring = bad? If the interesting/boring spectrum is the main thing you care about when you comment about your own Bible teachers (in private, in public, online), then you need to repent, because you are contributing to a culture which feeds the production of heresy, which leads people away from Christ.
Really, there is a far better way forward: a way which, in the end, is truly interesting. But to begin with, a lot of it looks quite boring, especially to people who are used to a quick-fix solution to their boredom. It means retelling the “old, old story” again and again, holding fast to the “faith once for all delivered to the saints”, passing on the tradition as we find it in the Scriptures. How boring does that sound! But only on the surface. Just like the sullen teenager who declares his or her parents to be boring, even though they may well have wonderful, interesting and satisfying lives through their deep relationships, their loving family, the joys and heartache of seeing their children grow; so too, to declare this activity as ‘boring’ is to miss what it’s really all about.
Because like any real and deep relationship, an ongoing commitment to the day-to-day drudgeries of our spiritual lives creates something that in the end is truly, profoundly, satisfyingly fascinating in our own relationship with God. Hours in reading and talking about the Bible together; being fascinated with the acts of God in history, in his people and in our lives; discovering and reliving and rediscovering the intricacies and the wonder of God himself as the triune creator and judge and redeemer who lives and acts and loves (the Trinity is so incredibly interesting it can never be boring!); exploring together how all these different stories and realities that we find in the Bible, which can seem so strange, do actually fit together and make sense; being astounded by the way in which God’s Spirit through his word moves us out of blandness, to apparent paradox, then beyond what we naïvely thought was paradox to a deeper understanding of who God is and how he works and what he has done for his own glory and for us in his Son Jesus Christ; seeing our lives and the lives of our brothers and sisters and those in the world around us pierced to the heart, rescued from wrath, turned upside-down, transformed, and resurrected. It would be a heinous crime to think that this was boring, wouldn’t it?
Comments on the Sola Panel
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