Mid-month news July 2026
If you want to receive my news via whatsapp go to this link.
Dear Friends,
Family Time
I spent the month of June in the UK. This was primarily so as to be with mum. Mum continues to be well looked after in the nursing home she has already been in for some months, in Fareham in Hampshire. I am grateful for friends of mine who managed to arrange a place for me to stay, just 4 miles (easy cycling distance) from mum, so that often I could visit her several times per day.
Mum’s condition has, unfortunately, not really improved. She does seem to be more at peace. That in itself is a wonderful thing. She is much more settled than when I spent a month with her September last year. Then she talked a lot. Now she hardly talks at all – four words in all the time I spent with her the whole month. She likes to walk around, walking from one chair to the next, sitting for a minute or so, then on again. She shows no sign of recognizing me, or anyone else. I think she has come to enjoy the company in the nursing home. She regularly spends many hours in one or other of the sitting rooms. There she is surrounded by people. While she doesn’t talk to or apparently engage with anyone, I think she likes being with so many people. Please pray for mum, and give thanks for how well she is being cared for.
Podcast: ‘Vulnerable Mission: The Radical Shift Missions Needs Today w/ Jim Harries’
I recommend having a listen to this podcast! It is with Missio Nexus, the American organization that parallels Global Connections in the UK.
(This title, given by the podcasters, is only partly accurate. It makes me sound really radical. Actually, all that I say, is that SOME Western missionaries ought to work with people without buying or controlling them. That, to me at least, sounds very reasonable.)
Trying to make Missionary Work ‘illegal’?
I am facing a remarkable situation. While, since the 1990s, I have been promoting vulnerable mission as the necessary way forward for relationship for some between the West and Africa, parts of the British government seem to want to make vulnerability in mission illegal.
By vulnerability, I mean a missionary putting himself into a position in which their thriving, and even survival, depends on the whim of local people. Local people call the shots. The foreign missionary falls in line (while maintaining a Biblically-moral stand). Not to pretend to go native, that in many ways is impossible. But to always talk in the local tongue, and not to use Western money to amplify what the missionary does or to control people.
What do I mean by ‘illegal’? Some authorities in Britain are wanting to regulate the kinds of relationship that Western missionaries are permitted to have with African people. They want Brits always to be under UK government supervision. They certainly do not want them to work entirely amongst Africans, out of sight from Western colleagues. Alarmingly, this potentially puts the philosophy of mission that I have been following since 1993 at loggerheads with my own country’s authorities. The implications of this development, that seem to have gone largely under the radar, seem to mark a sealing of the fate of African people. They are financially dependent on the West. That financial dependence is being used to force Africans to do what the Western governments wants. There is less and less possibility of African people thinking for themselves.
I do not take the above lightly. Please pray for me in this! How come governments are prescribing who can be one’s friends? Can a government say ‘you must not visit people X’, or ‘you are not allowed to relate to people by means Y’, when X and Y are very above-board highly morally acceptable positions? Years ago, it would have been unbelievable that a Western democratic government could try to control its citizens overseas in these ways. Now some are wanting to do so.
See here for an article I had published on all this in 2023.
Go here for one of the latest iterations of proposed restrictions on the freedom of overseas workers.
(I do not take this lightly. The British government is right to be concerned about sexual exploitation and abuse. At the same time, as a missionary working with indigenous people in Africa, the rules some are trying to put into place seem to be distressingly harsh.)
Should British Education be Illegal in Kenya?
Being in the UK has updated my appreciation of cultural gaps between my fellow Brits and Kenyan society. The vastness of the gap was often in my face … especially whenever I moved outside of ‘Christian’ circles. This made me realise again: foundations needed to grasp and benefit from formal education British style, are largely absent in Kenya. Yet Britain leads formal education in much of Africa.
Solutions? Perhaps there are two: 1. Change the educational system in Kenya, which will require changing the language which is the medium of education. 2. (Related.) Stop incentivizing Kenyans (Africans) to travel to the UK, and to connect to UK organisations, for example by pegging salary levels to standards in people’s home countries and not in the countries to which they migrate. Sounds very unlikely!
I believe that African authorities should consider moving their educational systems away from English. But this would be a very major challenge. In the meantime, we have an ongoing serious situation. What will happen if nothing is done about this? I do not have a crystal ball. But I am alarmed. … Another thing also alarms me:
Cultural Insider
A translator must be “a cultural insider of the target culture in the translation,” wrote the author of a book I was recently reading. ‘He is right!’ I thought to myself.
What does this mean? In simple terms, that Westerners should be providing Western people’s understanding about Africa, using Western languages. That Africans should be providing African people’s understanding of the West, using African languages. But THIS RARELY HAPPENS. Instead, Africans educate Westerners about Africa, and Westerners educate Africans about the West.
I increasingly find the above to be a very serious and very dangerous error, that needs urgent attention.
(I am happy to acknowledge, that the above implies that my teaching in East Africa using Swahili is of limited effectiveness. I end up speaking into contexts that I do not understand. In a way, my hope in doing this, is to encourage Africans themselves to value their own languages more instead of preferring English even when engaging with fellow Africans. At the same time, I believe that teaching using Swahili is a much better way of communicating with African people than is teaching them using English.)
Back in Tanzania, and the days ahead
I am grateful to have got back to Tanzania, on 1st July. At the border, a Tanzanian immigration official recommended that I look into acquiring a 2-year residence permit. Please pray for me as I go about applying for this. Give thanks that my host church here in Tanzania is ready to be my sponsoring body in this. If this succeeds, it will mean that I will be free to travel in and out of Tanzania as often as I want to for two years, and to stay as long as I want to. I will be a ‘volunteer’, so not allowed to do any paid work. This could halve the cost that I have been incurring of regularly applying for a visa for Tanzania.
Applying for the above permit is keeping me busy. I have done very little teaching at the Bible school I am under. I did however give a lecture on 8th July. (Perhaps more a discussion than a lecture.) This was to all students and all teaching staff. Give thanks for having been given this opportunity. I presented entirely in Swahili. The topic was, translated literally back to English, Treatment for Friction. This could alternatively be translated as; Healing for Stressful Lives.
Please pray for my plans over the next few days, to spend time 2 hours away, at a place called Mbulu. I am planning to visit friends and engage in ministry with churches there over the weekend.
Wednesday 15th, I am to begin my travel to Johannesburg in South Africa. There is to be a big global academic conference there, 17th to 21st July. That is on Christian mission. Pray for me for the paper I am to present, that will look at differences in how the Gospel engages African as against Western people. After this conference, I hope to attend the graduation of the Bible school here in Tanzania on the 25th of July. The following week I plan to spend time with some of my ex-children who are now living in Nairobi, before getting home to Yala in Kenya at the end of the month. That will have been 2 ½ months away from home.
Pray for my time at another Bible school in Tanzania teaching Old Testament survey in the last two weeks of August. Then for the lectures I am to give every week at Trellis College in Kenya, that is about 12 miles from my Kenyan home, beginning in September.
Jim