The heart of our ministry is to establish financially self-sufficient, indigenously owned and operated training centers/seminaries in the language and culture of the local people. We work with national believers to develop a regionally sensitive curriculum in their language, develop future professors from among them, and then work to share the educational results internationally throughout our interconnected global system. Key to the MINTS missionary aspect is the requirement of the centers to multiply in their region, language, and sphere of influence.

Need

One of the biggest needs in the Christian faith is the need for trained, motivated and educated leaders. For example in 2000 there were 2,000,000 third world pastors and less than 5% (100,000), had any Bible training at all. From 1960 to 1980 the church grew from 25 million to 425 million, a 17 fold increase. (From the Billy Graham Center for Evangelism.) For years the answer has been to bring leaders to the USA for training….but 60% remain here and all are trained in a language and culture that does not easily transfer to their homeland. There is a need for quality, degree level, and biblically based ministry training in the language, culture, and homeland of the indigenous believer. We equip them to lead churches, plant churches, do mercy ministry and to duplicate the training with other believers in a way that can be recognized by denominations and governments.

Who

We work with indigenous leaders who are already motivated to develop their own people and are seeking both a short term and long term structure for accomplishing it. It is also our desire to work with people group movements and assist the mass training of leaders for ministry in areas where the faith is growing over 100% per year. We have recently developed formats for doing this but have not implemented them yet.

MINTS Solution

We do this by

· Starting with existing national resources, both human and material

· Providing curriculum, and by using nationals to write curriculum with our professors

· Teaching their teachers and involving future professors from the beginning giving them ownership and leadership responsibilities.

· Teaching a different philosophy of education, i.e., a view to take the education out to the people, to make new schools, and to raise up new instructors rather than having the school be the central hub where people gather to listen to visiting scholars. We make the student not the institution the focus. We encourage them to not own buildings but to go out to the field, and use churches and other available spaces for training the people.

· The nationals can charge a small tuition but all the funds stay in the country under their jurisdiction and none comes to the USA or MINTS. Half is to be used locally to develop their study center and the other half to start new centers when they are ready.

· We provide degrees programs. Certificate, AA, BA, MA, MDiv, DMin, and PhD all in Theological Studies. Degrees with academic standards from a US based institution are of great value in the church in emerging nations by giving quality training and credibility.