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Africa Church: UK

The Tough Places

In which I bang on (again) about the British church’s love affair with East Africa.

Excuse me if you’ve heard me saying this before. After ten years of blogging, I’m starting to repeat myself (it’s also a feature of my advanced years).

Over the last couple of days, I’ve heard a lot of people talking about links with churches in other parts of the world and the vast majority of those links are in East Africa. Now, I have nothing against East Africa; the bits I’ve seen are very pleasant and the people are very nice.

It’s also true that much of East Africa has a pleasant climate, is reletively peaceful and you can get away using English. It’s an ideal place for English churches to have partnerships. The problem is that East Africa also has a significant Christian population.

There are places in the world with far fewer Christians than Uganda, Kenya, Zambia, Malawi and so on, but few of these places have English churches reaching out to them. Where are the parishes and fellowships in our leafy suburbs who are reaching out to Tajikistan, Bhutan or Kuwait.

It’s tougher working in these places, the climate isn’t so good and the possibilities for partnership are more complex. So what?

As I say, sorry about banging on about the same thing so often, but I believe that this is important.

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