Transcription

00:13

Emily: Welcome to the 4:18 Podcast. This podcast shares the untold stories of what God is doing through the ministry of Possibilities Africa and testifies to the power of Jesus as described in Luke 4:18 which reads, “The Spirit of the Lord is on me, because he has anointed me to proclaim good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim freedom for the prisoners and recovery of sight for the blind, to set the oppressed free.”

00:36

Today, we have a special segment for you with our founder Martin Simiyu, from his time in the USA at the end of 2024. During his time here we had the pleasure of hosting a few intimate gatherings with our local partners. In one of these sessions, a newer supporter of the ministry asked, “In Africa, what exists for training for pastors to maintain doctrinal purity? When there are economic pressures how do you make sure someone you train isn’t drawn back in to teach erroneous theology?” And this was Martin’s response.

01:08

Martin: I think one of the things we’re trying to do is to balance between prosperity gospel and just sound doctrine because we don’t want to swing the other side and make preachers become money chasers.

01:22

We want to be sure that they have a balance in how they look at life, that life is holistic. In fact, we say to them that the reason why we have problems is because we have a spiritual problem. And if we don’t sort out the spiritual problem and doctrinal problem, we can’t sort out anything else. So we’re very careful in our presentation and training to make sure that there is that perspective that this is not about prosperity. It’s not about you getting rich. It’s about you living out the Word of God.

01:52

And part of living out the Word of God is taking responsibility for your life and for your family and so on. But the second part is that it’s not because we don’t have many theological colleges in Africa, but we have them. Like I did my first Bachelor’s in Theology in Africa. The colleges are there. The issue that we have as a problem is that most of the pastors we reach live in rural villages. And so they are faced with poverty. Some of them did not go beyond high school.

02:22

They don’t have better training. And so our targeting them is really to disciple them because they already have congregations. We are discipling them to say how do you better learn the congregation that God has given you and giving them the basics of of doctrine. And one of the things we’ve seen actually as part of something that we really praising God for is a number of these pastors having gone through our program, two-year program, their eyes and their mind start opening up and they are like I actually did not know the Bible.

02:52

And a number of them have signed up and gone back to do some college–some doctrinal theological training. Either we have this Timothy initiative where they are connected to a program that can train them part-time. You know, they are still taking care of their family and pastoring, but they are getting part-time training. In some cases, we’ve had people who train in Bible colleges go out to the community and provide training.

03:22

One of our oldest communities is called a Ahero by Lake Victoria. After the bishop went through our program, he had several churches under his denomination. He mandated all of the pastors in all denominations, first of all, to go through the PA program and then we worked with him to create a partnership between his denomination and a local Bible college. So what happens is that the local Bible college sends people to his community to train his pastors and right now he has about 15 pastors who have graduated with a theology training.

03:52

So those are things we are paying attention to, to make sure that there is a balance in that whole process. We think that the congregations that are there, as imperfect as they are, they are the presence of Christ. So whatever we are doing is to try to nurture and improve on that.

04:10

Emily: Thank you so much for listening. Be sure to subscribe, leave a review, and share with a friend, so we can grow this podcast and share this good news. Thank you for being here. We appreciate your partnership in prayer and in giving. If you’re interested in partnering financially, be sure to head to usa.possibilitiesafrica.org and hit the donate button. Thank you so much for being here. God bless you.