Using The Internet To Help Prepare Pastors And Educate New Christians

One of the big challenges facing churches around the world is adequately preparing leaders and teachers and in countries like Mexico and other poorer countries where pastors are not “professionals” and have to work 2 or 3 jobs to support their families and ministries continuing your education is a nearly impossible task. As a pastor it is vitally important to continue your education and to learn as much as you can but for many pastors of small churches or pastors in churches around the world access to that kind of education is sparse.

So one of the projects that we are going to undertake while in Spain will be developing and launching the 7000 Project. The 7000 Project get’s its name from 1 Kings 19:18 where Elijah flees to Horeb because an evil queen had put a hit out on him, and he believed some bad information. Thinking he was the last living prophet he went out into the desert to die. The turning point in the drama is where God intervenes and ruins Elijah’s suicide attempt, gives him a little kick in the rear and set’s the record straight.

This story is important because it reminds us that even the greatest prophet suffered down times and felt discouraged. The rate of depression among ministers is now greater than that of their parishioners and many ministers feel ashamed and don’t seek help resulting in catastrophic consequences. Make no mistake about it, Elijah wanted to kill himself and I know there are many ministers and leaders out there that have felt the same way or currently feel that way.

The ministry is hard and lonely and if you don’t have a place to draw strength from it can wear you down. Elijah believed the lie that he was alone but when God revealed to him that 7000 still hadn’t bowed their knees to Baal that changed things and suddenly Elijah remembered that he was part of something bigger, and served a God who was bigger than his feelings and his circumstances.

The 7000 Project is a project that we are undertaking to help bring ministers together and to help them learn from one another and gather strength from one another through shared experiences and shared knowledge. The trick is making that connection and distributing that knowledge.

Since I started working developing websites and videos for clients I have had the opportunity to take on many challenging projects and learn a lot about new technology. I have had clients with major problems that had to be fixed and in the process of developing some pretty cutting edge stuff, and fixing or updating client’s technology I have built up a pretty useful little technology toolkit.

One of my biggest projects that took around a year all together to develop and implement was two video educational sites. This client was a great client and continues to be a great client so I am grateful for that, but working for them yielded a treasure trove of experiences and I developed some new techniques that would help in the 7000 Project.

As I was building this site I was constantly thinking “Why can’t we make a site like this for pastors and lay-leaders to help them further their education or gain new knowledge?”

The 7000 Project is a website where ministers and lay leaders can come together and connect with one another and share their common experiences and their knowledge. The element that I am most excited about is offering ministerial training and continuing education to ministers and lay leaders alike. We will be partnering with experienced ministers and Bible teachers to develop a training curriculum and collect educational materials like videos/audio and worksheets. We want to cover basic educational subjects like Biblical History, Surveys of the Old and New Testament, Eschatology, Hermeneutics etc. plus specialized topics like counseling, youth ministry and children’s ministry. We want to offer as much educational opportunities as we can pulling together the resources of ministers and teachers on the network.

We are living in a digital world and many pastors and churches are being left behind because they don’t have access to the kind of resources that bigger churches have like media ministers etc. to help them make inroads to the digital community. Another of the features of the 7000 Project will be technology training and resources to help bridge that gap. Churches who register on the site will be able to create websites and take advantage of the shared resources from the site to build up their online presence.

The 7000 Project will take a lot of work on our part to build the infrastructure to handle all the materials we want to make available in as many languages that we can make them available in, and we will need to make connections with Bible teachers and ministers to make the site work.

Please pray with us as this is a huge undertaking but we hope it will make a lasting difference in the lives of many pastors and lay-leaders. Right now the project is in the planning and development stage and we are looking for people who are interested in supporting the project and as it begins to materialize more we will provide you with more information.

If you would like to contribute to the project or join our development team please email Jeremy and let him know. We are looking for not only teachers but also technicians who can help us develop the site.