One fellow pastor texted me about the support or sponsor for theological study of church members wanting to be trained as pastors. I half-joked and said they should pray to God and asked help from God directly instead of men or church authorities. I know not all men have the same measure of faith like myself who had never asked for man's help but God moved in miraculous ways to provide me from BTheol to PhD. I am a dreamer. I dreamed about setting a scholarship fund that all church members could apply including pastors' kids. Pastors' kids need ministry and often they suffer much because of their parents' calling to serve God with little financial reward. It breaks my heart when a pastor told me that his Form 3 son asked him how he would manage when he reached Form 5 on his father's meagre salary of a few hundred ringgit a month.
I will set up a Fund of at least half a million Ringgit to top up pastors' salaries to the minimum wage as a start and revise the salary scale for pastors with seniority so that they could serve with hope and not stuck on a very average pay for decades without pay rise. Elders and candidates for eldership will need to go through training in theology with two courses per year, one face to face and the other, via Zoom. If they completed 10 courses, they can renew their eldership certificate every five years and these course will go on as I believe in life long learning especially for leaders of the Church. If we learn two books of the Bible every year, it will take us 33 years. And we can repeat our courses as after a few years we need to be refreshed just as I study all the time even on books like John's Gospel and Romans that I have read 10 or 20 commentaries for the Gospel of John and Paul's magisterial letter.
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