Living in Tanzania

One of our recent grads, Marc Ostlie-Olson, has taken his family to Tanzania for a year to live, work and preach. He’s started a blog — which at the moment is password-protected, or I’d point to it — and this morning one of his reflections caught my ear:

"Suffice to say now, as I embark on a year of sustained reflection on the joy, responsibility, and agony of the preaching life, I suspect that integrity in proclamation of God’s Word has as much to do with care and attention to the realities of people and place and moment as it does with theological adroitness, orthodoxy, and putative correctness. The particular scandal of the incarnation, so powerfully underscored by the peculiar obscenity of the cross seem to not only allow this observation, but demand it."

If only every student who came out of our place could "catch" that! We talk and talk and talk and talk about contextualization, but I rarely feel like anyone's "getting" it.