The Need
Training Pastors is essential kingdom ministry!
Consider the following statistics:
– 90% of our students have no formal pastor training
– 97% of our students are bi-vocational pastors
– 80% of our students have no access to pastor training
There are approximately 850 million protestant and evangelical Christians in the world. The average church size around the world is approximately 60 people. If only half of these people belonged to a church, there would be over 7 million churches in the world. GSGC indicates there are 250,000 formally trained pastors in the world. This would indicate that only 3.5% of the world’s churches have a formally trained pastor. If informal institutes like P2P train twice that number, it would mean that 90% of the world’s pastors would still remain untrained.
According to the Global Training Network, 6.3 billion, of the 7.3 billion people on earth, live in the Majority World, which is the geographic area of Africa, Asia, Latin America, and Oceania. Today, at least 75% of the world’s Christians are non-Western, living in the Majority World. However, 80% of Majority World pastors have no formal biblical training.
According to Training Leaders International, even if every Christian training institution in the world operated at 120%, less than 10% of the world’s pastors would be trained. 174,000 people become Christians every day, and 50,000 new churches open their doors every year.
The CSGC (Center for the study of Global Christianity and Cordon-Conwell Theological Seminary) estimates that there is a total of 5 million pastors/priests in all Christian traditions worldwide (Catholics, Orthodox, Protestants, and Independents, including bi-vocational). Of these, we estimate that 5% (250,000) are likely to have formal theological training (undergraduate Bible degrees or Master’s degrees). This is based on incomplete responses in survey results from colleges and seminaries in our Global Survey on Theological Education. Roughly 70% of these pastors are in Independent congregations. Independent pastors, in particular, have little theological training, even in the West.
Because of this lack of training, many pastors struggle with basic ministry skills. The following list highlights typical challenges pastors and church leaders frequently encounter:
- Biblical Understanding
- Theological Integrity
- Heresy
- Cults
- Animism and Spiritism
- Legalism
- Hyper-Pentecostalism
- Institutionalism/Catholicism
- Evangelism
- Discipleship
- Missions/Starting Churches
- Leading their Congregations
- Preaching Biblical Messages
- Historical Perspective
- Confidence
- Discouragement
