Online Training for Emerging Nations
A brand new training initiative has been launched this year for Commission leaders outside the UK.
In a global church planting movement like Commission, it’s inevitable that there will be phases of growth that stretch leadership into new contexts, long before necessary supporting resources and infrastructure can be established and supplied. As an example consider church planting into new countries - leaders reach to start something new, to establish a work and test its viability before anyone else arrives on the scene or pledges to commit.
In fact, you find this pioneering spirit in every pocket of society and on every page of history - it’s the brave of the brave who take new ground, go out on a limb, launch a new product and tear up the playbook.
Now if you’ve done anything remotely entrepreneurial before, you’ll know that the excitement of ‘starting’ something is often closely followed by a reminder that this new initiative can’t stand on it’s own; it needs to be maintained and nurtured, grown and developed, and that sooner or later it will need more people and resources to carry it through.
The pioneering church planter in our context, having established a work, is faced with these challenges of supply and demand while they grow their new church, their ministry and their supporting leadership.
But as you’ll read in this article, these times of pressing can often reveal the ability to adapt - the resourcefulness to ‘work with what we’ve got’ and the inventiveness to create a new resource where there was none.
A challenge when developing overseas ministry
Naturally, an important part of this apostolic expansion - taking new ground - is the ability to hold the tension between the ‘now and the not yet’ - what we have in the present compared to what we need in the future for our program or ministry. A current example is the requirement for Commission church planting teams - groups that are often made up of new or less experienced leaders - to have access to ‘on the job’ theological and pastoral leadership training.
Our church planting teams based in the UK are well equipped, with convenient access to Commission’s centralised training programs through regional development hubs, peer-to-peer learning, mentorship and in-person lectures and courses. A case in point - Commission has recently started a training hub in Torquay, Devon for leaders in the southwest region who are further away from the central training base in Winchester.
However, when Commission plants or adopts churches in other nations - a core part of our remit as a family of churches – leaders in these contexts don’t have immediate access to the ‘in person’ UK training infrastructure, which brings the benefits of being part of a regular learning and development culture and being directly equipped by others who have gone before.
Understanding the needs of emerging contexts
Kevin Bartlett, based in Madrid after moving from the UK
There are few situations that give a real-life example of these growing pains better than Commission’s work into new nations over the last decade, especially in the south of Europe and parts of Africa and Asia. Recently I spoke to Kevin Bartlett, leader of Cristo Salvador church in Madrid together with Liz Blaber, Commission UK training manager, to find out more about the challenges he’s experienced when starting a new work in a somewhat decentralised position, and how they’ve used these resource gaps as opportunities to adapt for the better.
Kevin’s been leading a Commission church in Spain for 13 years, he tells me on our recent Zoom call, as he gave an account of the difficulties experienced when having only low-level resources in ‘emerging’ nations - countries that may not have strong, established networks of evangelical churches that demonstrate the values Commission and Newfrontiers hold so closely - being Word-rooted, Spirit-filled, grace-centred and actively charismatic.
Through relationships and geography, Kevin is surrounded by a large handful of leaders who are busy in these contexts planting churches, preaching, teaching, taking care of pastoral work and discipling other leaders - to the extent that, even if physical training materials were accessible to them, they’d barely have the time to teach themselves from textbooks to the point that they would be rendered sufficiently ‘trained’.
In fact, Kevin concludes, the needs of this cohort of leaders pioneering into Ghana, Mongolia, Portugal, Spain, Italy, the Philippines and even rural India, are possibly greater than other leaders who are not starting new churches, because their task is to lay the strong apostolic foundation for new congregations that others can build on in years to come. And it’s for this reason that Kevin has been leading the conversation about how Commission’s central training can be extended to nations outside the UK and made strategically available to leaders who would benefit from it the most. In short, proposing to contextualise the format of the UK training for global consumption, in order that leaders in other countries don’t have to wait for entirely new training bases to emerge in their region.
Adapting the approach with new tools
Despite the torrid time we all had in lockdown, it left one helpful legacy - connecting people all over the world for business, communication and learning through the means of a humble laptop. So shortly after the pandemic, with ‘Zoom calls’ firmly embedded into our weekly vocabulary, Liz and her UK training team set about to make Kevin’s proposal a reality. Adapting the format of a centralised training program for a remote context involved a number of steps, including:
Recording a full syllabus of material from Commission’s level 1 training (a year’s worth of sessions)
Identifying and testing a suitable digital training platform, and
Hosting these videos for the possibility of online learning.
Taking the baton, Kevin and the team then curated a course format to suit their emerging contexts, and were able to launch Commission’s ‘Theology for Life’ training pathway online in September 2024. A landmark achievement!
Commission’s new online training with a wide variety of nations represented.
“We’ve started with level 1 foundational theology for our international students because it’s a cohesive syllabus”, Liz tells me, referencing the course overview which is to teach ‘the core doctrines of the Christian faith as laid out in the Nicene Creed’.
Kevin agrees, and goes on to explain how they’ve adjusted the format of the UK course. “The course has a feed of people that have been invited through relationships, and led by facilitators who are known in the different countries represented”. These include Kevin himself, Chris Kilby, Eustace in Ghana and Ranjit in India.
“It’s a trial run”, he points out, “but we’ve made a great start”.
“It’s a 4 week programme that repeats every month; each month there’s a syllabus topic, everyone watches four training videos and reads the corresponding notes, usually one a week, and at the end of the month we meet on Zoom for two hours to discuss how we can apply what we’ve learned in our own contexts”.
“We need good theology because we have a mission!”
I went on to learn that these are fast-moving sessions that encourage a personal and practical dynamic. “There’s a devotional and an interview each month with one of the cohort, to cultivate relationships among the students not just theological discussion”, says Kevin, “because this training is about who we are, not just what we believe”.
The session then moves on to feedback on the questions from the videos and then break out groups in local languages to dig deeper in discussion.
“We always pose questions for missional application” Kevin continues, “because ultimately we want to preach Christ where he is not known. There’s a reason why we need good theology - it’s because we have a mission!”
Kevin’s priorities are refreshingly clear, and what’s admirable to me is the way in which Liz, who manages Commission training has clearly worked alongside Kevin to enable the structured training program to be adapted flexibly to meet the needs of his very specific and unique context - one that’s quite different to the UK.
Liz Blaber, Commission UK Training Manager
Fitted for the future
Not only that, but they seem to have pulled out all the technological stops to make this newly packaged, online training material both accessible and engaging to a remote audience.
“Students speak very highly of the platform,” Liz says about Pathwright. “The videos are filmed in front of a live audience so they’re not sterile. Video captions are generated and translated using AI, there are notes in English and Spanish and these are currently being translated into Italian and Tagalog”.
“Watch this space”, Kevin finishes with a touch of optimism. “We can’t say for definite that we’re doing it next year, but we have the ambition for it to grow.”
“It will be reviewed in 2025 with a view to opening it up into the USA, Canada and even Myanmar in future. We want to be in a position to have notes translated into any language necessary, and we’re also going to gather the emerging nations together to discuss how viable it is to launch our level 2 training in their contexts.”
We’d love to hear from you
If you’re reading this in a non-UK country and are interested in Commission’s online training for emerging nations (OTEN), we’d love to hear from you. You can visit our website to find out more about Commission’s training pathways and syllabuses, or contact Liz our training manager on training@commission.global.
