Life with African Pastors

Earlier this year, we were challenged to train 500 pastors in a ministry curriculum that we were given by Randy Clark and Global Awakening Ministries. For years, we have desired to raise up national/indigenous leaders, so this sort of work was right up our alley. We immediately began emailing our contact in Kenya, working through the curriculum and planning for our time with pastors.

As time went on, we began to realize that we should start with smaller groups and then progress to a larger more comprehensive training session. So, our Kenyan contact set up a few 2 day seminars in various locations within about a two hour drive of our home base. The idea was to share sessions that would equip the pastors for ministry and also to establish relationships with them for future ministry.

Last weekend, we held our first pastoral training seminar with about 40 pastors in the small town of Samburu. Many of the pastors had traveled by foot from their villages, thrilled that someone was coming to minister to them. It was humbling to say the very least.

Our heart in ministry and in missions, is never to be the one who claims to know it all.

Contrary to popular belief, African Pastors know a lot. They’ve had missionaries, teams, ministers and everyone else come time and time again to their shores. These missionaries have often come believing that they are the ones possessing all of the knowledge and are ready to teach these untrained men and women the great things western society knows about Jesus. (I’m not suggesting that everyone comes this way, but so many have.) The aftershocks of colonialism and white supremacy are still felt 50 some odd years later.

We purposed in our hearts to set aside the curriculum we had been given until we had established relationship with the pastors. Armed with a mandate from the Holy Spirit to “go slow and stay low”, we began our time together by laying prostrate before the pastors and the Lord in a time of humility and repentance.

We repented for everyone who has come before us who thought they had it all together, we repented for white supremacy and racism, for judgement and confusion and for not coming alongside them as brothers but as rulers. It was such a beautiful time in God’s presence.

Out of this time together, we were able to minister to the hearts of the pastors as we shared with them messages on the Father heart, the orphan spirit, the Finished work of the Cross and the edification of the body through prophecy. We saw so many pastors physically healed of chest conditions, shoulder issues, partial blindness, wounds and a broken leg. We watched God touch their hearts so deeply, healing father wounds and even bringing together a Father and Son pastoral team that were fighting. It brought us to tears as we heard them testify of God’s goodness and shared a cup of tea together as the sun set over the African savannah.

There were so many men and women, who had been deeply wounded by the church and were desperate for someone to come alongside them. There are physical things they need, like bibles, and dirt-bikes (to travel to remote church plants), but the emotional needs of community outweighed them all. God has sent us to bring good news to the afflicted and to bind up the brokenhearted, and it just so happens, in this case, to be his children in ministry. It’s the honor of our lives to raise up sons and daughters that no one of earthly importance will ever know, and to reach people in mud huts and villages, whose names we can’t pronounce.

May revival come to the most unlikely of places.

Chris and Jennifer Hadsell are the founders of Retouch, a registered 501c3 that seeks to bring the restoration of God to the nations. To find out more, you can follow them at https://www.facebook.com/retouchtheworld and onhttps://instagram.com/retouchtheworld, to support the work of Retouch financially visit https://retouchtheworld.com/give/.