end-month news February 2026
jimoharries@gmail.com
Dear Friends,
I write while engaged in two weeks of theological education under the Tanzanian Mennonite church, based in Musoma, that is about 100km south of the Kenyan border. I am teaching on the Work of the Holy Spirit, to a group of 17 students.
Widening Cultural Gap
I sometimes reflect on the ‘cultural gap’ that has opened up between my fellow Westerners and myself as a result of my living in African community for most of the last 38 years. This reflection can be quite disconcerting. I remember a day, when I considered that the UK really was on top of things when it came to understanding of what is important for human thriving around the world. Africans, when I first came to Africa, had little clue.
My perspective has changed! The UK indeed has much to offer. These days many in the UK do not seem even to realise what it is that they have to offer to the rest of the world. Many of my UK colleagues seem to have been convinced, often they have convinced themselves in a kind of false humility, that things which they actually have to offer to Africa are already in Africa. They fail to realise the valuable qualities that they have inherited from their Christian past! They want to share the products of those qualities, like technology and capital, but they do not want to share the source of that wisdom, the Gospel of Christ.
‘What a Privilege’
While in Tanzania, I have periodically reflected, on what a privilege it is to be able to do Bible college teaching ministry here. It can be all too easy to forget, that but for God’s grace, nothing like this would be possible.
The environment is however a tough one! On this trip, we have often had no running water whatsoever. Instead, water is brought to my house from the neighbour’s to fill a large bucket, and that’s it. The environment, as so many in Africa, is one in which hygiene can seem to be somewhere down people’s priority lists. Poverty, aggravated by fears of witchcraft, prevents people from developing safety nets. Many live hand to mouth. Dust periodically blows in the air. Having a runny-stomach has been troubling me this time around. Perhaps the water situation and this are related? Please pray for a full recovery, and an exit from what’s been a cyclical decline into severe diarrhea.
A Theory of Unerdevelopment
‘The West’ seems these days to be caught up politically in its endeavours at keeping others beyond its shores. Before today’s mass migration, the issue was often ‘Development’, how to help Majority World countries to ‘catch up’ with the West. The idea was, that then they would not have to migrate to the West in order to prosper.
Many things can have said to have foiled the West’s grand plans on how to develop others. Not least of these, although not much discussed as it is not very endearing of the West itself, has been the West’s sharing of its own languages, notably English. The latter endeavour has been extremely successful. English is official language for up to 25% of the world’s population, despite less than 5% of the world’s people being native-English speaking people.[1] That the massive percentage who have adopted English are now severely handicapped through not being able to develop-themselves, is probably too difficult for countries like the UK to acknowledge.
Increasingly, my working theory for why many African countries remain so poor is also unfashionable. My suggestion in a nutshell is that if one could measure it, the nature of and power of envy of one another that citizens of a particular country have would be a good predictor of how well they can develop. To promote development, reduce envy!
Envy being a sin, this would fall in line with Christian thinking. The theory would not be palatable for secularists. The latter have gone the route of a double whammy; wanting to ‘hear from the poor’, with the poor speaking to them in English. ‘The poor’ often won’t concede to being envious. This is exactly because envy is known to be a vice. The vice remains invisible. It is assumed not to be there. Thus it (i.e., sin) is not addressed. Development programmes stumble and fall. Secular thinkers remain blind to the process. Thus dominant advice on how ‘the poor’ should develop, often totally misses the point. This is a massive injustice constantly going on under our noses.
Mum
Mum is back out of hospital and in a nursing home, near Portsmouth, in which judging by reports I get from family, she is being very well looked after. Mum’s situation remains very serious. She is often clearly agitated and evidently struggling to come to terms with her current state in which her mind and understanding has been seriously damaged by a stroke.
Why Be a Celibate Father of Orphans?
I have been raising orphan children in Kenya since 1997. (In fact, I also found myself living together with children for most of my 9 years in Africa before that. When one shares life with local people, children are almost always on the scene.) Some may wonder, would it not have been better to rear orphan children while married? Could someone like myself not have married either a European woman, or an African woman, and then reared orphan children together with her?
My response: it is almost impossible for someone of European origins like myself, to rear orphan African children, if married. This is because it is almost impossible to find a partner who would accept the constraints of a life that shares in African ‘poverty’ in preference to following a more materially extravagant lifestyle that is enabled through links to Europe. I say ‘almost impossible’. Frankly though – impossible. One would end up, in raising African orphans, Europeanizing them, taking them away from their own people. This would defeat the object of sharing God’s Word with them in a way that had a fit with local culture.
The only non-destructive way to raise orphan children I could see (raising African children as if they are Europeans can easily be ‘destructive’, it can confuse them culturally, leave them in a no-man’s land, tear them apart from their own people, and so on) was through an agreement to raise them together with an African woman in an openly celibate relationship. Hence this is what I have been doing for the last 29 years.
The above illustrates a massive continent-wide disenfranchisement of African people today. Even if not at all intentional, Africa’s colonial legacy has everywhere resulted in African capitulation. That is, predominantly African people have not learned from others by improving their own lives. In most cases it would not have been possible to do this, so engrossed are they in hegemonic witchcraft fears. All too often, instead of learning from foreigners in ways so as to improve themselves, they capitulate and throw themselves into dependence on foreigners. This produces ‘hybrid’ ways of life that are imitations and unsustainable without foreign intervention and control. It has rendered it almost impossible to work with Africans as fellow-Christians without presenting the Gospel of Jesus as a Gospel of prosperity.
For Prayer
Give thanks for the privilege of being able to share God’s word with some of his servants in Tanzania. Tanzania recently came to global attention due to violence associated with its election. Unlike many surrounding nations, Tanzania is characterized by having a populous Islamic presence originating, ironically, from my understanding, in the historic Arab slave trade. All told, it remains an incredibly peaceful country in day-to-day terms.
Please pray for my mother.
Theological educators in Africa are constantly faced by challenges of cultural diversity. Africa’s ways of life are vastly different to those in the contemporary modern West. Yet theological, and other education, is often simply a cut and paste from the West. This can very quickly replace truth with man-pleasing behaviour by locals, in hope of material profit. Pray for my few humble efforts at taking African contexts seriously in providing theological education.
[1] Statistics derived through use of AI.
