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.

A group of people attending a seminar or conference in a room with wooden benches, some taking notes and others engaging with each other, with water bottles on the tables.

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.

A large group of people seated in a hall, attending a meeting or conference. They are taking notes and listening attentively. The hall has high windows, and a Bible verse, Luke 1:37, along with the phrase "For nothing is impossible with God" are painted on the wall.

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:

Two men shaking hands and exchanging red books in a room with beige curtains and windows.

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:

Group of people standing in a circle outdoors near a Kenyan Medical Training College campus.

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.

Book cover for 'Transitional Servant Leadership in the Church & Community' by Robert Kamau, featuring a man in traditional attire pouring water on a person seated on a chair, with a purple gradient background and a logo with the African continent and a cross.

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.  

Curriculum:

Book cover of 'The Church and Culture' by Robert Kamau, featuring a woman carrying a child and a man walking in a field, both wearing hats, with a logo of Africa and Christian cross above.