Availability and Affordability

For the past 15 years, I have had the amazing privilege of traveling to various parts of the world to equip pastors and church leaders for the important task of studying and proclaiming God’s Word. It is a rewarding ministry with innumerable blessings, and I rejoice in knowing that God continues to call and equip others to join in this important work. But I also know that this kind of training ministry has some unique challenges. It took me several years of mostly ineffective ministry to identify and rectify some of the obstacles I confronted along the way.

So, with my own experience in mind, I would like to help others prepare for (and perhaps altogether avoid) the difficulties that are typical in global, cross-cultural training of pastors. In the next several blog articles, I am going to lay out some important questions that I hope will be useful for evaluating the materials and processes to be used in cross-cultural training of pastors.

Are the Resources Available?

This is, admittedly, a pretty obvious question to ask in preparation for cross cultural work. But, you may be astonished to find how few of the resources we utilize in the States are available in other languages. You probably have a dozen solid options that you have used here to cultivate local church leaders. However, most of those options are simply not available in other languages. Furthermore, the places where pastoral training is needed most are also the places where the fewest tools have been translated. Those two things tend to go hand-in-hand. Therefore, the first thing that must be determined is which resources are available in the target language?

Another aspect of availability that should be considered is that of long-term availability in foreign fields. When I began training pastors in Central America, I was blessed to have found a curriculum already translated into Spanish. But I soon discovered that there were other hurdles to jump. The material I was using was not available at any local bookstore in town – not even for special order. The only way the books could be obtained was to order them directly from a ministry in the States. This lack of local availability created a “bottleneck” effect on the resources. How could I hope for pastors to duplicate the training in their local churches if they could not obtain the materials? Was it practical to expect them to order through me each time they advanced to another book or added another person to their group? Might they lose momentum if they had to wait multiple weeks until a shipment arrived? What would happen to the training once I was no longer around to facilitate the orders? These questions and others sent me looking for some alternative that did not have such dependency on materials being shipped and distributed to local pastors. I wanted something that was readily and continually available so that the training could be sustained for many years after I was gone.  

Are the Resources Affordable?

Although availability and affordability are often closely related, they do not always go hand in hand. There are a few teaching/training tools that have been published into multiple several languages and have achieved wide-spread distribution in some parts of the globe. However, such publications generally contain copyright protections that essentially require the materials to be repeatedly purchased from the publishers. Once the expenses of publishing, shipping and retailing are calculated, the cost of the materials is often too high to be reasonably sustained by poor, rural churches and churches in developing nations. Although a few publishers or ministries use donor funds to help lower the cost of resources in poorer regions, the issue of affordability is probably best resolved with materials that do not have strict limitations on copies being made and distributed as needed.[1]

Once you have identified useful materials that are both available and affordable, you have crossed two of the most daunting obstacles of cross-cultural training. There are several more that I will point out in the next few articles, but you will be off to a great start!

[1] For example, the Word Partners (wordpartners.org) materials that MissioSERVE utilizes in most of our training workshops is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License, which allows for copying, redistribution, and even remix of the materials as needed (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/).