Parish Magazine Article – November 2026

Tanzania 2026

Dear Friends

As I write this, I have just returned from a visit to our link diocese in Tanzania. We visited the Diocese of Masasi in the south of the country which celebrated its 100^th anniversary at the end of September.  It was an experience both joyful and gruelling in equal measure. I’m not sure the Church of England is quite yet ready for four-hour ordination services in 85-degree heat.  The celebration service for the anniversary was an hour longer laced with local music, ululation, joyful singing and a nun playing the vuvuzela! She played it again when we went to the convent for dinner one evening as part of the nuns’ dancing and singing welcome – you had to be there really.

Alongside the joy is grinding poverty and a huge disparity of wealth.  Whilst Tanzania is one of the most stable democracies in Africa, there is still widespread corruption and a poorly maintained infrastructure. It took us 13 hours to drive the 600 km from Dar Es Salaam to our Masasi hostel. Periods of fast driving were interspersed with bouncing through potholes almost as bad as South Shropshire. 

It is easy to look at the Church in Tanzania with its spectacular growth, driven by genuine conversions to Jesus rather than church hopping, and think if only we transferred their patterns here we could have a similar experience.  A simple transfer of methodology is unlikely to be successful. Culturally, English people are not as expressive. Similarly, we have such busy lives that 3-4 hour services with preaching of 45 minutes may not gain much traction.

The Christian message has always had to adapt as it moved from one culture to another through its history. Even the early churches described in the New Testament were very different from one another. There was conformity of belief, but great diversity of practice. The same is actually true in Tanzania depending on which UK missionary agency first brought the gospel to each part of the country. Even in the church of England, there is now a huge variation in congregational worship, even in the same parish.  Perhaps the greatest lesson was not about a particular style, but the motivating question. In Tanzania it was ‘how can we adapt our practice to make the message more accessible to those outside the Church so they can become followers of Jesus’?  There don’t seem to be many arguments about style of worship rooted in their personal preference. Mission comes first. Congregations are agents of community transformation. God is the one on whom they depend for everything, not a spiritual lifestyle accessory.  I think all of us who visited found this profoundly challenging. I hope we all might also.

+Richard