Part One

Dr Peter Cotterell

The Church in Ethiopia has grown.Year after year, Dr Peter Cottroll decade after decade, the Church has expanded, the number of Christians has increased and the number of Ministers, Pastors, Evangelists, has increased as well. For example, the Kale Heywet Church alone has 4,006 churches! Sadly, the number of Ministers pastors and Evangelists has not kept up with the needs of the churches, and many churches don't have a trained pastor.

Of course there are Bible Colleges and Bible Schools, places where teachers and pastors for the churches can be trained, but there aren't enough of them and there aren't enough teachers to staff them. We have to rely quite a lot on the ``ferenj'' to do the teaching, but many of them don't know the history and culture of Ethiopia, and some only know English. We need Ethiopian teachers!

So: send Ethiopian men and women abroad to be trained in the Seminaries and Bible Colleges of America and Europe. Well, this has been done, but there are three big problems: sending someone abroad is very expensive. The plane fare alone will be more than 10,000 birr, and if the course is a long one it will be only fair for the student to come back to Ethiopia at least once, to visit friends, family, church. So that means 20,000 birr! And then the cost of living is so high abroad: Maybe 100,000birr each year for food and housing. There are the College fees to pay: at least another 30,000 birr it all adds up to a lot of money.

The second problem is that usually the courses being offered aren't really relevant to us in Ethiopia. Our pastors and evangelists need to understand the churches of Ethiopia and the culture of Ethiopia, and Ethiopian Traditional Religion, not the problems of the churches in America and Europe.

The third problem is that so many of those who are sent don't come back to Ethiopia. They find the attractions of the developed world too great, the struggles of life in Ethiopia too difficult. So they are lost to us. and they add to the huge numbers of pastors and teachers already there in the developed world. Yohannes (not his real name) went off to England to study, four years ago. A Christian Trust gave him a scholarship to help him train for ministry in Ethiopia. He got his BA degree. Got his MA degree. And then came the bad news. He's not coming back to Ethiopia. He's decided to settle in Canada. All that money, four years of study, all meant to benefit Ethiopia, and now.. well, wasted on Canada.

Back in 1996 the then Principal of the Mekane Yesus Seminary, Dr Eshetu Abate, and the Principal of the Evangelical Theological College, Dr Steve Strauss, began discussing their vision of a new Seminary in Addis Ababa, a seminary that would be owned by all the churches, not just one, a seminary, that would be able to give Masters' degrees, perhaps even Doctorates. They brought Ato Assayehegne Berhie, General Secretary of the Evangelical Churches Fellowship of Ethiopia, into their discussions. They agreed: Ethiopia needed a post- graduate Seminary.

The important issue was the That is a term that is used in national development. If you allow people with money to start a business then they can give work to their managers and their truck drivers, and their secretaries, and then the managers and the rest can buy food and so give work to the shopkeepers, and perhaps the shop keepers can buy a car and give work to the people at the gas station and the garages. Work, salaries, wages all, trickle down from the top. The Trickle-Down Effect. In education we have the same idea, but it is teachers who ``trickle down''. Teachers who have graduated from the seminary teach in the Bible College, those who have graduated from Bible College teach in the Bible Schools and those who have graduated from the Bible Schools teach in the District Bible Schools.

Just one problem: we had no seminary and so nothing was trickling down !

Some people think that having a properly trained pastor or Minister isn't important. But it is because we don't have trained pastors that we have so much false teaching in the churches. Sometimes the wrong teaching is merely silly. The Bible says ``Beware of dogs' and so believers should not own a dog (Philippians 3:2)'' the goats are to be sent away into the eternal fire, prepared for the devil and his angels' and so Christians can have sheep but not goats (Matthew 25:41). But some errors are very important indeed: the ``Jesus only'' teaching, which denies the doctrine of the Holy Trinity, for example, and the teaching that speaking in tongues is a sure sign of the filling of the Spirit (so, are the Qalichas, the ``Witch Doctors'' who nearly all speak in tongues, filled with the Spirit?) .And does Matthew 18: 19 mean that if two Christians want something then God has to give it to them?

Well. The three Christian leaders called a meeting of all the church leaders, at a hotel in Addis Ababa, and they all agreed that Ethiopia should have. the Ethiopian Graduate School of Theology (EGST). In January 1998 the first students started their studies for the degree of Master of Theology (MTH) in Systematic Theology. In September 1998 the second group of students will start their course in Church History: learning about the history of Ethiopia's churches. How Christianity first came to Ethiopia through Frumentius and Edestu, how the very first conversions in all history from Islam to Christianity came about, How the Evangelical Church Mekane Yesus and the Kale Heywet Church began, How missionaries came from Sweden and Switzerland, from Norway and New Zealand, from England and America and Canada and many other countries. And how God planted His church here in Ethiopia. The entrance requirement is a degree in theology with a GPA of 2.75 And good English. The MTh course can be taken full time, in three years, or part time, and then it might take four or five years. In the year 2000 we will be offering the Mdiv degree, for those who have a degree, but NOT in theology. And in the year 2002 we hope to accept our first PhD candidates !

The EGST fees are very low, only Ethbirr 1,200 for each year. By keeping the fees low we train more Ethiopian leaders. In fact we can train SEVENTEEN Ethiopian leaders here at EGST for the same cost as ONE sent abroad (and remember: often that ONE never comes back to Ethiopia). PRAY for EGST! And we are asking the churches to support EGST . Why not give ONE COLLECTION EACH YEAR FROM YOUR CHURCH? That would enable us to give more scholarships to more students to provide more Pastors, Ministers, Evangelists.

Write to us! EGST, PO Box 5829, Addis Ababa.

Taken from Berhan e-mail fellowship article