Through my over 20 years of experience in teaching and administration in Christian higher education institutions in Kenya, two main challenges have become apparent. The first is the challenge of long-term financial sustainability of theological institutions. Students’ fees alone cannot sustain them, and donor funding is becoming very scarce to find.

The second challenge is providing a more holistic and hands-on pastoral training that equips pastors with income-generating skills to sustain them when serving in areas where local churches and communities do not have the resources and capacity to support them. There has been minimal to no deliberate attempt in traditional theological education to address this challenge. Most pastors in Kenya end up serving in cities that have only about 30% of the population and about 20% of the churches.

Kenya has only three urban centers that have attained city status – Nairobi, Mombasa and Kisumu. Three others that follow closely but are not yet there include Nakuru, Eldoret and Thika. Over 70% of the population of 50 million people live in the rural villages and suburban centers scattered across the country. That is where the majority of Kenyan churches are found, and about 80% of them are led by untrained pastors who often have only high-school formal education or lower.

In these villages the poverty rate is so high that a majority of the graduates with higher levels of education and training in our already-established theological institutions do not see the village as the place for a trained pastor. They rightly say that their theological education did not equip them with the skills needed to live and serve in such places, where churches cannot support them. They have been trained primarily for pulpit ministry, and with the expectation that their local churches would provide the necessary material support.