Pastors' Training

After Kindergarten, we rushed home to pack for Nyagatare. There’s a short-term team here from Canada and they are leading a Pastors Training in a small town called Nyagatare (Na-ga-tar-ey). They’re letting us tag along and see what its all about. The team is made up of 3 men, pastors who are doing the pastors training, and about 5 women who are doing other things like a women’s conference (for the pastor’s wives). They’re all over 50 so its nice to have some older people around.

Nyagatare is on the border to Uganda and Rwanda, so it took us a good 3 hours to get here. But it was such a beautiful ride! It was really nice to get out of Kigali for awhile and see something besides the city. Feels more like Africa. When they say Rwanda is the land of a thousand hills, they mean it! Seriously, there are hills EVERYWHERE. Even if you tried to find flat lands, you couldn’t. it was to see all the random things on the way – things like a large group of women doing their laundry in the river, and a group of farmers in the field, a bike here and there carrying 3 times its size in sticks or rice, goats everywhere, a school in the middle of nowhere, more hills, villages and mud huts, and then more of God’s beauty in the hills.

So the Pastors’ Training … basically there’s about 20-30 pastors all over the area that have committed to being a part of this pastoral training program for 3 years. They come twice a year for a week to Nyagatare to learn more about the Bible and leading their churches – kinda like an informal seminary. Most of these pastors have no formal training, they’ve never seen notes in a study Bible. So there’s lots of “holes” that are filled in these trainings. And a lot of the trainings can also cover how to behave as a Christian. For instance, Christian husbands respect their wives and don’t beat them. That’s common in this culture I guess. And to teach them their wives aren’t expected to wait on them all the time. Then, their wives come a few days later and receive their own programming. Not sure yet what that is, but I think its things like how to live as a pastors’ wife, etc. I know one of the topics tomorrow is on birth control. Because of the Catholic influence from the British (I think??), they have no concept of birth control. A lot of the times they have so many children, that its hard to care for them all. I think part of the concept of training the wives is to hope that they will take it back to others they know in the community.

Tonight after we got here (we came up with the women), we sat in on a question and answer period for the pastors. Its very informal, and allows them to ask questions about what they’ve been learning. It was very interesting … these guys had some hard questions, and very deep. You can tell they’ve been thinking about things and they want to learn and really understand.

Tomorrow, the “interns” will hang with the girls. I’m told there’s lots of singing before, so I’m excited about that. Finally, some real African singing! Woo hoo!