Last year, Pastor Ngalubenge, the Baptist Convention's coordinator for evangelism and discipleship, gathered three alarming statistics.First, more than 50% of rural pastors in convention-affiliated churches have reached retirement age.While many continue to serve congregations, it is likely that health and other issues will cause them to leave the pastorate in the next few years.Second, of the formally trained pastors now serving rural congregations, more than 80% received their training at one of the two rural pastor's schools.Third, the rural pastoral institutes are now graduating on average fewer than 15 students per year to serve rural churches.
The first question to ask is why is it so difficult to train more pastors in Congo?The answers largely revolve around cost and general poverty.First, institutional training has relatively high fixed costs – costs that remain the same whether you train 10 people or 100 for ministry; a minimum corps of qualified instructors, library resources, housing, classrooms, office equipment, etc.The real cost of training a student is $500 to $1,000 per year.
Secondly, the students come from among the poorest Congolese, subsistence farm families with only the slimmest margins of surplus.Their sponsoring congregations on average pay their pastors only $48 per year.Supporting even the $100 per year student tuition (only 10% of the real cost remember) is usually beyond their limited means.And distance between village and pastor's school rules out contributions in kind – manioc, corn or fish, for example.
Third, mission money that used to fill the gap between the real cost and what students can pay has dried up and contributions from Congolese congregations has not replaced it.The result is that fewer and fewer students can afford pastoral training and this challenges the economic viability also intellectual and spiritual vitality of the pastor's schools.
Clearly there is a huge challenge facing the Baptist Convention: revitalizing pastoral training and adapting it to current economic and social conditions.Unfortunately the leadership crisis in our rural churches is staring us in the face right now.
How can the Baptist Convention of Western Congo fill the leadership gap in rural churches using its very limited resources?
Already in the late 1980s and early 1990s, the Baptist Convention faced the beginnings of the same problem.Gifted lay people are often the only pastoral leaders that a rural congregation will have.But the cohort of lay pastors was already aging and recruitment and training of replacements was lagging.The challenge was clear.Regional church leaders clamored for training specifically focused on equipping lay people to step into the gap in pastoral leadership and care.The convention recruited Arley and Ruth Brown to develop teaching outlines, publish a series of booklet manuals and coordinate area workshops.
The "portable school" program organized intensive workshops for groupings of rural churches. Typically one or more trainers would lead a weeklong orientation seminar for local pastors.The pastors looked over the material to be taught, studied appropriate teaching methods and prepared practice lessons.After the orientation, these local pastors would gather the area's lay pastors and leadership candidates for an intensive one-month training covering the course materials.In areas where there are no formally trained pastors, they use outside teachers or lay pastors who have already been through the course.
The course adapted by the Browns gallops over 5 broad subject areas:the spiritual life and work of a lay pastor, an introduction to the Bible and how to teach it, the church service, teaching Christian doctrine and its practical application to the problems of village life, and the church: its organization, a thumbnail sketch of church history and ministries of the church.
The program was pushed widely in the Baptist Convention (CBCO) until 1991, when a series of civil upheavals started a decade of unrest making convention-wide programs difficult to sustain.For more than 10 years now it has languished, lacking an advocate to push ahead and funds to allow the advocate to mobilize believers for the task.
Pastor Ngalubenge is convinced that the only way CBCO can hope to develop adequate leadership for rural churches in the short-term is to reactivate the "portable schools" program and extend it to every region of the convention.He says, "Our first aim is to train lay pastors in the mobile schools, incidentally giving current pastors a refresher course, as they teach others."
With only the proverbial widow's mite, he began to organize local pastors to start filling the gap.Since 2002 they have held two mobile schools in the Lukaya region in the province of Bas-Congo.More are planned for the Cataractes area further west.
In August 2003 Pastor Ikomba, the CBCO president, joined Pastor Ngalubenge for a mobile school in the town of Nioki in the Mai-Ndombe region (the area north of the Kasai river).The aim was to train local pastors for a mobile school push in Mbali and points east.(I have already mentioned leadership needs in the Mbali area.)During 3½ weeks, a total of 48 lay pastor candidates and pastors were trained, of whom 38 come from different CBCO village congregations.The other 10 are from sister denominations at Nioki, anxious to get good training not available in their own churches.
The program has just sent teachers to give the same training at Mashambio and Osamukolo (moved from where it was first planned, at Kwa-Mouth), in the northern Plateau area.
Pastor Ngalubenge says, "Despite the tiny means currently at our disposal, we thank God for this extension program and contributors from the US who have made it possible.It will be the salvation of the Western Baptist Convention of Congo.Without it we would have almost no trained rural pastors or lay pastors in the future, and almost certainly we would see the disappearance of our rural churches everywhere."
He goes on: "The reactivation of this program is an urgent priority for the entire church, given the imminent danger we see before us.We have started the official involvement of the church with the Bas-Congo mobile schools and reprinting the Lingala curriculum books.We dream of adding additional teaching units on current problems such as sects, "revival" churches, specific teaching on sorcery, and Christian response to environmental problems.We also would like to revise and reprint the discipleship training materials in all languages.All is, of course, subject to the financial means available."
God helps His people do amazing things with the proverbial loaves and fishes.Pray for the exploits in leadership training that Umber and his colleagues are undertaking.May believers be strengthened and the Lord's name proclaimed.
Miriam Noyes
Lusekele, Democratic Republic of Congo