Students of Education with Religious Studies Meet Their Counterparts at the Charles Lwanga Catechetical Centre, Mzumbe

A first-year cohort from JUCo spends the day in dialogue with catechists-in-training at Mzumbe — discussing the vocation of the catechist, the study of religion, and the beginnings of an academic partnership worth building on.

There is a kind of learning no lecture hall can quite hold — the kind that happens when students step out of the familiar and into a living community that embodies the very subject they study. On this day, sixteen members of the Jordan University College (JUCo) family did exactly that.

The first-year students of the programme in Education with Religious Studies set out with Dr. Jacek Gorka OFM, Director of Outreach and Internationalisation, for the Charles Lwanga Catechetical Centre in Mzumbe — a respected house of formation led by Fr. Dr. Karoli Mroka, its Director. What awaited them was not a formal inspection or a ceremonial courtesy call, but a genuine encounter between two communities that, in their own ways, serve one shared purpose: forming the people who will carry faith and knowledge into Tanzanian society.

The reasons for the visit were happily layered. JUCo holds a distinctive place in the national landscape as the only university in Tanzania to offer a programme in Religious Studies — a distinction that carries responsibility as much as pride. Building on that role, the College served strategically in the past year by offering a dedicated course for catechists within the Catholic Church in Tanzania. And now the Department of Religious Studies nurtures a sincere hope: to establish lasting academic links with the Mzumbe Centre, so that scholarship and pastoral practice might teach and strengthen one another.

Two complementary missions

The two institutions meet from different but wholly compatible starting points. JUCo’s Education with Religious Studies programme is open to all, regardless of religion — a space for the academic, comparative and reflective study of religion. The Charles Lwanga Catechetical Centre, by contrast, has a focused vocation: to train future catechists for the needs of the Catholic Church in Tanzania. One studies religion broadly and openly; the other forms the Church’s own teachers. It is exactly this difference that makes a partnership between them so promising.

The visitors were warmly received by two teachers and catechists of the Centre, Augustine Madenge and Divinus Mkalaga, whose hospitality set the tone for the hours that followed. There, the sixteen from JUCo joined more than thirty students of the Catechetical Centre for a truly inspiring meeting — animated by friendly questions and equally generous answers, and by the quiet delight of discovering that all present were, in fact, fellow travellers on the same road.

At the heart of the exchange lay the vocation of the catechist and its meaning both within the Catholic Church and in wider society. The conversation did not linger on the surface. JUCo’s Religious Studies students drew out the important distinction between catechetics — the discipline and study of religious instruction — and catechesis, the living act of handing on the faith. They went further still, unpacking the difference between faith and religion: that quiet but consequential line between personal conviction and its structured, communal expression. And they pointed forward, underlining the need for the New Approach, an updated methodology for conducting catechesis that meets today’s learners where they are.

Why the links matter

It would be easy to describe a day like this as a pleasant excursion and leave it there. But the Directorate sees something more durable taking shape. Academic and friendly links between JUCo and the Charles Lwanga Catechetical Centre promise real benefit on both sides. For JUCo, partnership offers its students a living classroom — a place where theory meets the daily realities of catechesis, and where the study of religion is tested against lived pastoral experience. For the Diocese of Morogoro, collaboration brings the resources of a university to the formation of its catechists: updated methodologies, academic accompaniment, and pathways for further study for those who feel called to go deeper.

Friendship, in other words, is not a soft addition to the academic project; it is the ground on which good collaboration grows. That is the spirit the Directorate of Outreach and Internationalisation hopes to cultivate — students and institutions that do not merely absorb their disciplines but carry them into dialogue, into service, into relationship. What began as a visit has the makings of a bridge; and bridges, once built between houses of faith and learning, tend to carry traffic in both directions for many years to come.