Training Head & Heart At Trinity Fellowship Pastors College, Ethiopia

A key part of our strategy in planting and strengthening churches around the world, is to see men trained at our Sovereign Grace Churches Pastors Colleges. For Africa, this means Trinity Fellowship Pastors College in Addis Ababa in Ethiopia. The following is a very encouraging update from Josh Pannell, Dean of Trinity Fellowship Pastors College…

In the Lord’s kindness, we saw our third pastors college class graduate recently—a day which also marked our five-year anniversary as a college (it’s hard to believe those words as I type them!)

Since I started the pastors college back in 2021, our mission has been to give our men a “pastoral education” that seeks to train both the “head” and the “heart,” or, as Paul said, that pays close attention to both “life” and “doctrine” (1 Timothy 4:16), precisely because a pastor must be a man who both proclaims the gospel with accuracy while also living a life which adorns the beauty and transforming power of the gospel for those to whom he ministers.

In the Lord’s kindness, we’ve seen that mission continue—and even grow and mature!

This year, 9 men went through our program. They studied the doctrines of Scripture, God, man, sin, salvation, Christ, the Holy Spirit, the Church, and the “last things.” They took classes on the Torah, Old Testament Historical Books, Old Testament Wisdom and Poetry, the Prophets, the Gospels, Pauline Epistles, the General Epistles, and Revelation. They took classes on pastoral ministry (2 of them!), pastoral counseling (3 of those!), marriage, parenting, leading congregational singing, preaching (3 of those!), and more!

Not to mention, I taught them Greek throughout the year, and I even ended the year by teaching a class that read through 1 John in Greek while also studying assurance of salvation in 1 John. 

One of my favorite classes I taught this year was on the pastoral qualifications. Every Tuesday morning throughout the year, we set aside 30 minutes for me to teach on a single qualification and call the men to the next step of faithfulness in their pursuit of holiness. That slow pace allowed us to cover several of the qualifications twice! It was such a sweet joy to see each of these men grow, not only in their theology, but also in their holiness as Christ further formed in each of them. 

“All in all, they completed 42 one-week block classes, each consisting of roughly 25 hours of classroom instruction, read approximately 12,600 pages, and wrote 420 pages for their regular classes, and they also completed a 30-page thesis paper that they worked on throughout the year. 

They also attended weekly community groups, monthly men’s groups, monthly groups for the wives to meet and discuss the joys and difficulties of being a pastor’s wife, monthly marriage groups, regular one-on-one discipleship meetings with Trinity Fellowship pastors, came to both my house and Michael Granger’s house several times for college events, along with several other informal discipleship contexts over the year.

It was a full year, indeed, and it was quite a joy to see each of them grow.

Our class this year was quite diverse! 5 of our students were Ethiopian and came from Trinity Fellowship Church. One came all the way from Pakistan and represented a growing number of churches interested in partnering with us. And a special joy was having three men from Nairobi, Kenya (one country south of us), all of whom hailed from Sovereign Grace Church of Nairobi, a church we helped plant back in 2024 when we sent Brian Kiama (a 2022 pastors college graduate) and his family to plant the church. In the Lord’s kindness, SGC Nairobi continues to grow, and their sending three of their members at such a young age is a kind reminder from the Lord that he will build his church, and the gates of hell will certainly not prevail against it!

Of the five Ethiopians the Lord gave us as students this past year, we’re happy to say that we believe three of them are ready to move into our pastoral residency program for 2026-2027. Please pray for them as they move from the “classroom” to the “counseling room” this coming year, and please pray for us as we continue training them for future pastoral ministry.