Our Bible school has an unusual look to it. There are almost never any students wandering across our campus, and there are no office hours for the teachers. The library cannot be found, and no one has built a cafeteria here, but this Bible school has a thousand students from more than seven nations, with classes available in four languages. ISOM (International School of Ministry®) is a curriculum that is allowing Pamoja to take leadership training where it has never gone before. Our students live in communities like Illasit, hidden on the north slopes of Kilimanjaro, and places like Mbandaka, a rubber plantation in the heart of the Congolese jungle.

The success of the evangelistic movement in Africa is creating some new challenges. In many areas, the growth of the church in rural communities has completely surpassed the ability of churches and missions to provide adequate Biblical training. Many pastors across rural Africa do not even have a basic understanding of theology. Their faith is real, built on a bedrock of need and on the miraculous interventions of God, who time and time again makes Himself known to the poor and needy. But these leaders lack training, and they find it very difficult to raise up congregations of believers who can grow to maturity and interpret the Bible for themselves.

Only one in hundreds has the chance to attend a traditional Bible school, and those who do typically have to leave their wives and congregations for several years while they study far from home. Pamoja Ministries is committed to developing church leaders, especially in village settings. We represent ISOM in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda, Rwanda, Burundi, DR Congo, and Zambia. ISOM has produced a curriculum with more than 160 lessons of Bible and ministry training on dual-language DVDs. Presently, we can provide village churches or groups with world-class teachers in English, Swahili, French and Portuguese. Groups vary in size from ten people to a hundred in a single location, but their dedication to God is a common factor. These are people who are overcoming the challenges of poverty and low literacy to study the Word of God in a systematic way.

A thousand students is a big impact, but it pales against the need. For instance, a single denomination in one of the 26 provinces of the Democratic Republic of Congo (itself one of the 54 countries in Africa) has three or more primary church leaders in each of 3,000 churches that need training. That’s nearly 10,000 existing pastors in one denomination in one province of one country! For us to meet this kind of need, we need to recruit personnel, and to produce the DVDs and notes in great quantity. Each student receives five notebooks for the basic five-semester course; that’s 50,000 notebooks for one denomination in one province of one country. Startup funds are often the missing factor since we have to print in large quantity to keep the price low enough for students to afford.

For Pamoja to fulfill its mandate with this media based training, we need to multiply $2 per student notebook times a very large number of students! You are welcome to help. Right now we can continue to train a thousand leaders at a time. Would you like to sponsor the startup printing for another thousand? Perhaps you could sponsor the translation of these notes into another language? We would love the opportunity to bring the ISOM curriculum to Lingala and Chichewa speakers, for example. Perhaps you could give a gift that would empower pastors’ wives by allowing them to study alongside their husbands? Or perhaps you’d like to create new opportunities for ministry by enabling us to record some of the best leaders from Africa and add their teachings to the primarily Western teachers in the ISOM curriculum?

Discipling cultures through media means creating excellent and affordable media. It means rethinking the way things have always been done to allow them to go further than ever before. We invite you to partner with us as we become a flavor of leadership training to the nations! Come to help or give for growth, or do both!