Firewall Trailblazers Get Training
Cleveland, TN–Sixty pastors and church leaders from Tennessee, Georgia, South Carolina, Michigan, North Carolina, Virginia, and Kentucky were the first U.S. personnel to get training recently from two South African pastors to prepare them for participation in the African Firewall initiative. The meeting took place at the North Cleveland Church of God.
The Firewall is a project involving the African Council—the Church of God team of national overseers and missionaries who coordinate African ministries—and Men and Women of Action, who serve as project leaders for the World Missions movement. In the past year, nearly 500 Church of God congregations have already been set up, and the goal is many hundreds more.
The South African leaders who taught have been involved for the last 12 years in an African church planting venture involving several denominations that has resulted in more than 20,000 local churches being established. Learning of Church of God World Missions’ plan to establish hundreds of churches along the geographic line that separates Christian Africa from Islamic Africa, they have committed to training African and U.S. pastors to use the successful plan they developed in order to advance Church of God efforts.
The need American pastors will supply is the training of hundreds of new pastors for the newly established churches. The teaching team from Africa will gather with the U.S. pastors for a series of two-day training events in Cleveland. The first of these, just completed, oriented them to the broad outline of the program. The next two-day training will be content-centered, sharing the books and giving an overview of the subject matter. In late 2015 or early 2016, the pastors will travel to Africa in teams to train the pastors gathered by the African leaders.
The next training will be in spring 2015, and will be open to newly interested pastors, while the ones who received the first instruction will move to the next phase of the training. Those interested in more information may contact Teddie Bennett at Men and Women of Action. Her email address is [email protected], or call her at 423-478-7956.
