The Problem: After 4 years of church planting missions in Costa Rica, we have found the largest barrier to planting new churches is the development of new leaders. Pastors who work a full time job and pastor a church have very little time to mentor and train new leaders, to plant new churches. The “bi-vocational pastor” represents over 80% of evangelical pastors in Costa Rica – in all of Latin America, for that matter.

 Our Solution:  We have adopted a pastor training strategy that has been used with huge success in Africa and India called Training Centers for Church Planters (TCCP). In July, we brought in trainers for TCCP and held a 4 day training for the President and 4 pastors from the AIBC (“Association of Costa Rican Biblical Churches”, in English) who are now the Leadership Council for the development of the pastors training school in CR. They are reviewing all the curriculum from TCCP and developing their own class schedule for training pastors, for new churches to be planted in 2017. 

The Goal for 2017:  In regards to pastors’ training, our goal will be to have our first training class begin in January of 2017. We are planning for 25-30 pastors and additional trainers to be in the first training class which will run for 20 weeks, 6 hours per week (3 hours, two nights a week). With this first training we should create an additional 15 pastors that will start new churches, which we will support with summer mission teams to provide greater outreach into their communities, develop new small groups and additional ministry support to plant their new churches in their communities.

• Bring pastoral candidates to regional training locations
• Provide new training materials - this course requires each student to work through five manuals which cover topics like bible study methods, sermon preparations, cell group ministry, making disciples, spiritual warfare, church multiplication, etc.
• Help with travel expenses for pastor candidates who must travel and stay overnight for classes
• For the overhead expenses for the first year of putting on the training schools, which will be shared in a graduated percentage with the AIBC in future years, until they handle all the expenses
• For start up funds for each graduating pastor to begin his new church and the outreach to the community where it is founded