The Need for Training

Pamoja Ministries was born when the Feser family moved to Kinshasa, Zaire (present day Democratic Republic of the Congo), called by God to help train leaders in Nzambe Malamu churches. They experienced overwhelming revival with signs and wonders, and also saw the incredible need for training and resources. In over 3,000 churches of that group alone, there were not even a dozen trained leaders!

The lack of trained leaders was compounded by a lack of leadership resources. As Joy Feser says, “We had to leave Kinshasa after only seven months because of a government vs. church dispute, but that was time enough to see Maimona (a local pastor) totally entranced by a topical teaching in a magazine on our coffee table. We asked what fascinated him so much; he told us that to prepare a teaching on a subject he could: remember scriptures, ask a friend, or open the Bible and hope that it would fall open to a passage on that topic. The leaders had no reference materials, not even a concordance.”

Resources for Leaders

In the months that followed their departure from Zaire, Sig Feser began a work of love – a topical concordance to send back to Kinshasa. An organization called World MAP heard about the concordance that Sig was working on and asked him to extend the scope of it so that it could be put into Ralph Mahoney’s excellent 1,000-page minister’s manual called “The Shepherd’s Staff.” This project connected us to World MAP’s worldwide literature ministry. Since 1989, we have partnered with them, first doing the concordance for The Shepherd’s Staff, then translation and distribution of their books and “ACTS” magazines.

We have sent over 50 issues of “ACTS” Magazine in Swahili to 70,000 leaders. These days, we supply books in Swahili, English, French, and Portuguese to more than a dozen countries in Africa, and send copies of “The Shepherd’s Staff” to thousands of new leaders every year.

A Mobile Bible School

Traditional missions work in Africa has focused on evangelism, and has been very successful. Many people have come to Christ, and these new converts have started churches in villages across the continent. Unfortunately, the vast majority of village pastors have essentially no Biblical training. Beginning in 2005, Pamoja Ministries entered into partnership with GSMI to translate into Swahili and administer the International School of Ministry (ISOM) curriculum.

ISOM is a dvd based Biblical training program in which top teachers from across the United States were filmed alongside a live Spanish translator. By simply replacing the Spanish translation with a Swahili one, we are able to make that training available to Swahili speakers across East Africa. By combining these dvds with mobile players and a little bit of either solar or battery power, we are now able to turn any thorn tree into a Bible school, and to empower village pastors to achieve their dream of attaining a quality education.

Though print media such as “The Shepherd’s Staff” and “ACTS” magazine, as well as through visual media using ISOM dvds, Pamoja Ministries is discipling cultures through media.