Steve and Barnabas in Tanzania

It is Sunday morning in Kiruani TAG church, and I walk up to the church building to several kids exploding forth from their Sunday School area to greet me with a chittering chant of “Steve, Steve, Steve…”   I give each of them a hug or fist bump in greeting while trying to remember everyone’s name as I greet them back.   Today is a little different as Pastor Stephano also comes out of the kid’s area to greet and walk with me into church.   As usual we have business to talk about as much as our friendly greetings before church.   We agree to instead deal with school business after church and head in.   I look around for an open chair about mid-way down the left side.   The left side is predominately the adults in the church with some younger kids attached to their mothers in some way.   I like the middle because I can easily keep track of things without appearing to be hiding in the back.   This is a church of my community and despite...

Some kids drawn to our worship music I don't know if I have talked much about church at the village or in Singida.  I know I have mentioned Arusha Vineyard Church during my visits to Arusha.  To be honest, I have never liked going to the local churches in my area.  The first reason is obvious, my Swahili is not very good and the services are in the local language.  Again obviously (at least I hope it is obvious), that is my fault not theirs.   Second reason is I get a strong internal focus from these churches in that everything I do understand is mostly about what they are doing for themselves with very little to nothing mentioned about community outreach.  Some of this may be to my not being fluent in Swahili but some of it has to do with my coming from a church that has a 50/50 focus at least with a full 50% of the focus on community outreach/service.  It is something that must be mentioned that I know not all churches are this way in Tanz...