Pastoral Training
Over 1089 East African pastors have been trained and 104 trainers have graduated training since 2013. They have started 29 training centers in their local churches and each trainer is committed to train at least 15 pastors in the next year.
The Need:
As many as 85% of all Christian Pastors and Church Leaders in East Africa, like in much of the Continent, have had no formal or systematic training in Bible or Foundational Christian Doctrine. Due to this lack of training, the Church has become syncretistic and highly fragmented. We believe that training effective leaders is part of God’s strategy for evangelizing Africa and building His Church on the continent.
Hundreds of pastors and leaders from different denominations attend our training seminars each year. Our year-long pastoral training program involves 4 weeks of initial intensive training, followed by ongoing weekly discipleship, mentoring, and community engagement. We equip pastors with the Biblical knowledge to be able to teach and preach the word of God correctly, and we also train them in servant leadership. We provide materials for every pastor to use for the purpose of ongoing discipleship training for their congregations.
Pastoral Training:
After pastors have completed our Pastoral Training program, we choose a few that stand out and we train them as Trainers. We sign a memorandum of understanding with their sending churches that after we train them as trainers, they will in turn train others in their local churches and villages.
We believe that leadership truth can best be delivered by using African Pastors that have gone through our training and have been trained as trainers. This is because the African pastors know the local language and understands the idiosyncrasies of the culture.
Trainer Training:
Impact:
As we follow up on these pastors and church leaders, we find that the majority have been transformed in their walk with the Lord and their churches have been growing spiritually and in number. In many cases these pastors have trained others who are now ready to lead new churches.
ATL founder and president, Robert Kamau, has written a two-manual curriculum that we use in our Pastoral Training. Both manuals are available in English and Swahili.
"Transformational Servant Leadership in the Church and Community" equips and empowers pastors with servant leadership skills.
"Church and Culture" addresses cultural issues such as polygamy, wife inheritance, female genital mutilation, witchcraft, HIV/AIDS, pain and trauma, gender discrimination and others.
This curriculum is used to teach Christian leadership skills to enable economically disadvantaged pastors to lead their congregations in a Godly way. This curriculum is unique because it is written from an African perspective with a Western training structure—a rarity in Africa.
