Categories
Church: UK Politics

Face to Faith

The Bishop of Durham (Tom Wright) wrote engagingly in the Guardian recently (7 April) about one of his favourite topics: Resurrection. He is brilliant at writing thorough yet very readable theological tomes, but I’m so glad he also manages to find the time to write the occasional thought-provoking newspaper article like this one: Face to […]

Categories
Africa Computing/Internet

High Speed Internet

Paul Shaddick comments on a recent trip to Africa that ‘high speed internet is definitely a relative term’. I have to say that I agree with him, though the connection we have here in Senegal is pretty impressive and fairly fast. The only problem is that it loses it’s ability to resolve internet addresses every […]

Categories
Observations

Toothache!

Thanks to everyone who asked and prayed. My toothache has really settled down over the last couple of days. I still can’t handle drinking very cold water, but even that seems to be improving. It certainly makes concentrating on meetings easier.

Categories
Church: UK Church: World

Challenges Facing the Western Church

Brian Russell has a very sobering post today that is worth a good read.  Life in the West goes on and flourishes around decaying reminders of an age in which churches and church attendees held positions of prominence and prestige in their communities. Too many communities of faith live with an ache that their best […]

Categories
Africa Observations

Translating

One of the things which I often end up doing at international meetings is translating talks from French into English (and sometimes vice-versa). Simultaneous translation is the intellectual equivalent of adventure sports. You never know what will come next and whether you will be able to understand what is being said, much less translate it. […]

Categories
Africa Church: World

Growing churches

I have a Google news alert set for Ivory Coast, so every time it gets a mention in the news somewhere I get an email giving me the link. More often than not it is an article mentioning one of the many Ivorian footballers who play for teams in the Premiership or in Europe; sometimes […]

Categories
Africa

Senegalese Rice

One of our favourite foods when we lived in Ivory Coast was tyep or Senegalese rice. I was never sure if the Senegalese actually ate the stuff, or whether it was one of those things like French toast or English muffins which would never be recognised by the people who were supposed to have originated […]

Categories
Observations

Perspective

I try very hard to think about the wider world and not just concentrate on my own concerns and here I am, in a gathering of Christians from lots of countries all drawn together to talk about Bible translation across West Africa. But, for me, it’s very hard to think on such a large scale. […]

Categories
Africa

Where Am I?

I flew out of Southampton yesterday and after a lay over in Paris (one hour longer than it should have been) I flew on to Dakar in Senegal. For the next week I’ll be in meetings of leaders of Bible translation organisations from across West Africa. Dakar is about as far was as you can […]

Categories
Church: UK Church: World Mission

Thoughts on Church

There are a couple of interesting new posts on the nature of Church. Phil looks at report on how people in traditional churches tend to contract out the responsibility for their spiritual growth to their church rather than taking the responsibility themselves. Brian starts from first principles and seeks to redefine what a church is: […]