Global Advance Equips Pastoral Leaders in Africa
Global Advance hopes to have kingdom impact this month as it ministers in Africa. President Jonathan Shibley says they have three teams headed to Senegal, Cameroon and Kenya.
It’s not a small effort, Shibley notes. “We’ve got a chance to equip over 1,000 pastoral leaders from numerous denominations that will come together to fulfill the Great Commission—to take the gospel to the unreached and to be a solution provider to the problems that plague their nations.”
The organization, founded by Jonathan Shibley’s dad, David Shibley, has been training pastors and church leaders for 21 years. According to its website, global initiatives include conference training, roundtable training events, one-on-one mentoring, church-based Bible school training and distribution of Global Advance print resources.
This month Global Advance will be conducting indigenous pastoral training. “Who better than the boots on the ground in these countries to address the issue of poverty and human trafficking and these types of things,” Jonathan Shibley explains.
The ministry organization is working with people who are already leaders. Shibley says Global Advance will be “equipping them with practical tools and helps, putting vision in their hearts, putting tools in their hands to take the Gospel forward to reach the unreached, planting new churches among the unreached, and being salt and light within the community itself.”
The goal is to help pastors who are thirsty spiritually. “So many of them get weighed down with the burdens of life and just living within a broken infrastructure and culture,” Shibley explains. “So we want to go breathe life back into them so they can raise up and multiply other leaders who are going to take the gospel forward.”
Although Kenya has received a lot of attention over the decades, Shibley says it is important to keep Kenya stable “or the sake of sub-Saharan Africa because it really is [true that] as Kenya goes, so goes the rest of Africa.”
He has been excited to see Kenyan believers focus on reaching out to Somalia, a country that is about 99.5 percent Muslim and known as being extremely dangerous for Christians.
