My friend.
I want to tell you about a unique program that Perry has been working on. Sometimes he gets so busy doing what he does that he loses track of time and moves on to the next step or activity in training. So I am going to fill in a blank, so to speak.
When we first came, and they told him to rebuild the school and its training program, he was a little overwhelmed. He struggled to understand what they were asking him to do and what would be involved in carrying out their vision. After a couple of months, getting better acquainted with the language, culture, and school, he had an idea.
It was pretty simple, but he had discovered that no one answered his questions about the vision, the needs, and the real situation of the school. So he prepared a survey. Nothing complicated but critical. One survey for every church asking key information. The first area was the information on the pastor (e.g., age, where he has been trained, and how long he had served). The second area had to do with the church in regards to when it started, how many members it has, and a few other key areas. The last part was the critical one and was about the ministry of the church. The key questions were about how many preaching points and daughter churches each church had.
From this survey, he quickly saw the needs and hurdles to overcome. The big one was the fact that of the 120 churches in the survey ,only about 100 had pastors and about 15% of those pastors were close to retirement. The second one was the bigger shocker. There were over 200 daughter churches and preaching points. This fact was overwhelming, and he tried to chart how long it would take for all the training programs to catch up and fill all of these and any new ones that were established over the next 10 years. The end result was that if we depended on the training programs we would never catch up and lose more and more ground, resulting in more and more groups of people without any kind of trained leadership.
This motivated the board to close the old program early and advance the reopening of the school. This in turn put a lot of pressure on Perry to develop and put into action so many things all at once.
To try to ease the situation in the area near the school, Perry assigned all the daughter churches and preaching points that could be reached on foot, to the students. Then he began a project to buy bicycles to make it possible to go farther and even plant new churches. This worked on a local level, but again it became evident that it would not meet the needs of the entire church.
Towards the end of our first term, he began to think through a plan of lay training. That plan would have to wait two long years until we returned. As soon as we got back, he began talking with JY the DS about this and they organized the first lay pastors training program in our district. Twelve people came from places with no pastors. The program was a big success and they took the idea to the national board.
The next year, 18 men from three districts were sent to this program to join the other 12. The program was to involve two events of one week each to cover 16 key topics for leading a church. When these men reported to their districts, there was a growth in interest and when the national board heard about the results they approved the program and included that. From now on, every district would organize a lay pastors training program for their district.
Here is where it gets really exciting. This year, year three, three districts have organized and held this training with over 200 people attending. It has taken 5 years to get here, but now we are capable of providing a trained leader for every church, daughter church, and preaching point with the capacity to do even more.
Well enough bragging on my husband. Thanks for letting me bend your ear. God has truly blessed this process. There is more in the planning, like creating a resource center in each district where these men can come and borrow books and other resources for a month or two to continue learning. Most cannot afford to buy books, but working together we can provide key books and other materials to help them continue to grow and serve.
Nancy
How adaptable are you in meeting the training needs of the people where you live? Do you know what the options are? How important is it to train lay pastors?