Pastoring of Pastors in Western Africa

Executive Summary of West African Pastoring of Pastors

1. The West African pastoring of pastors (POP) leadership team made up of David Kornfield (WEA), Benjamin Namkpea (Cameroon), John Tandamba (Burkina Faso), Paul Abasili (southern Ghana) and Stephen Aputara (northern Ghana) met for a day before the seven days of training. With the exception of John, none of us had met all the others personally before. We bonded deeply, meeting every day as a team along with many individual conversations and mentoring encounters.
2. The three-day Basic POP training retreat focused one day on the Introduction to the Pastored Life (IPL), the cornerstone seminar of the POP movement; a second day on training the 43 participants to be instructors of the IPL and a third day on starting and strengthening a discipling or POP movement. The participants commented repeatedly on the simplicity, the depth and the cross-cultural applicability of the training.
3. The three-day Advanced POP training retreat focused one full day on training in two foundational POP roles: being a leader-facilitator of a POP group and being a POP mentor to a leader-facilitator. The two days were framed by Mt 9:35-10:14: transforming ministry crises into ministry opportunities… through discipling.
4. Features of the training week:

• Worship: African worship: a capella, wonderfully lively and multi-linguistic.
• Small pastoral groups allowed discussion/practice of POP principles and methods.
• Demonstrations of key roles and techniques preceded practice of the same.
• Evaluation: demonstrations and practice were always evaluated for further growth.
• Discipling and multiplication was the DNA underlying everything.
• Participants’ recapitulation of each session preceded the next.
• English and French. We worked with translation or in two separate language groups.
• Marriage and the family. While not an explicit focus of the retreat, a majority of participants indicated challenges in this area and received substantive help.

5. Follow-up. The participants have four significant follow-up projects:

1. Individual meeting with God to elaborate an individual growth project.
2. Starting a POP group with pastors and spouses, and applying the same pastoral and discipling principles to their church leadership team.
3. Reproducing the IPL multiple times in each of their countries or regions in the next months.
4. Establishing a national, regional or denominational POP movement with a core group that models POP and multiplies POP mentors and POP leader-facilitators.

6. The future:

1. The five-member West African POP Leadership team will meet monthly by Skype and for two 2.5 day retreats (February and July, 2017). The four West African leaders will be mentored individually every other month.
2. Four monthly follow-up meetings to the IPL. Dave will train three instructors from each of the four regions to do these February 22-25, 2017. Sat the 25^th will be in a central church in Accra for all the POP pastors and spouses and those interested in POP. These will be reproduced in each region over the next four months.
3. A 50 hour Healthy Pastors’ Retreat (July 10-12) will be followed by a training day for instructors from the four regions to reproduce this in their regions. Sessions will focus on health personally, as disciples and disciplers, as pastors, marriages, pastoral teams, churches and pastoral groups each with self-evaluation.