End-month news October 2025
jimoharries@gmail.com
Dear Friends,
Here is the message I preached at the Acomb Baptist Church on Sunday 19th October 2025:
Review: Paul Planted, Apollos Watered, but God
See this review of the book recently published by the Alliance for Vulnerable Mission: Paul Planted, Apollos Watered, but God.
Two Sports as a Model for Intercultural Mission and Theological Education
https://www.asiamissions.net/wp-content/uploads/2025/10/JimHarries.pdf
Explaining soccer using tennis terms, illustrates the challenge of intercultural communication, especially in theology and mission between the West and Africa. Africans, lacking Western cultural backgrounds, nevertheless must use Western languages to express theological ideas, imitating Western thought to satisfy teachers and donors. This imitation hinders independent indigenous-culturally rooted thinking. Western terminology fails to capture African realities, much like tennis language used to describe soccer would misrepresent it. External incentives reinforce this dysfunctional pattern, encouraging Africans to adopt Western modes of expression rather than develop indigenous theological frameworks. True understanding requires engaging African contexts in their own linguistic and cultural terms.
Why the Migrants? some thoughts from me
Migration to Europe has been almost necessitated by a serious strategic error in international relations on the part of the West. Many around the world have been helped by Western education. Implicit to the West’s encouraging and at times subsidizing that, has been the belief that it would help those people to achieve what the West has achieved. This has failed. The rush of migrants is on the West – not on Japan, Korea, China, or even Mexico, or Egypt, Albania or Saudi Arabia.
Instead of finding themselves enabled, ‘beneficiaries’ of Western education have found themselves in some ways hamstrung: their imitation of the West only works when the West is in charge. Even when the West is in charge, it only works so-much.
When Western countries thought they were offering a complete package, they were giving fools’ gold. Another analogy: internal combustion engines without any means to introduce any fuel. ‘Come and learn from us how to develop your country’ was ‘come and learn from us how to be our eternal proteges’. Yes, there are wealthy powerful elites around the world. Most achieve this by linking with the West. But there are especially – many (relatively) poverty-stricken peoples.
Why has the above happened? Sin. Selfishness – the West has denied people knowledge of its Saviour Jesus and of God. They thought a secular package was all that was needed. They forgot that they are who they are due to the Christian faith of their predecessors. They failed to insist that a part of learning to do what the West does must be to learn to follow Jesus. It is really that simple. (At the same time, not simple!)
Progress and Plans
As I write, I have just completed my 2-week trip ‘up north’ in the UK. It was a good time of catching up with friends, and visiting one of my supporting churches (Acomb Baptist Church in York). My staying with the church pastor enabled us to compare notes on many things. This time around I seem to be learning more than ever about how the UK cares for its elderly. Quite sobering really – how solving other problems extends longevity until serious issues like dementia, Alzheimer’s or Parkinson’s have their terminal effects on people.
I am to be based in southern England for the next two weeks, visiting people and attending churches, especially the Wantage Baptist Church. Thereafter family time, followed by 2 weeks in Germany, before I set off back for Kenya.
Jim