In Africa everything is tribal.  You reside in your tribe’s villages, you marry inside your tribe – never outside, and attend church within your tribe. People are loyal to the tribe because without the tribe you are truly alone.  Tribal identity trumps everything, including God. Some tribes historically are enemies, so every tribe needs to be educated in separate facilities.  

Uganda is the toughest country to unify because of its tribal diversity.  Uganda has 56 tribes, 42 languages, and 28 kings who reside in the country.  With a population of 43 million, ten million live in cities larger than 2,000 residents, while the remainder live in rural villages.  Uncounted in these numbers are the 1.5 million refugees living inside its borders because of past wars.  With these demographics RPC choose Uganda to develop the Rural Pastor Coalition strategy.  

Looking reflectively at the Western church’s past mission efforts, we would have to admit they have failed bringing the gospel of Jesus Christ to Africa beyond minor beachheads in the large cities.  For three reasons, Western culture negates the foreign mission field. First, Christian worship is seen as a foreign transplant.   Second, money is seen to solve all problems.  Third, the Christian life becomes a clone of Western culture diminishing a tribe’s originality.  

We realized that only Africa can solve Africa’s problems.  Western ideas of time management, productivity, metric measurements, and technology dispersals cannot be applied to evangelism.  If only Africans can solve Africa’s problems, they still need our help to do that, with our hands off the dials, knobs, and levers that the Western world so dearly wants to control.

In 2021, Michael Tyrrel asked his Central and Western African contact, Godfrey Saazi, who was a Ugandan pastor, several questions: If you were in charge of a seminary that taught students how to be pastors, what would you teach them?  What don’t they need to know?  How do you do it at the least cost possible without short-changing the education process?  How do you impress upon these students that it’s up to them, not rich Westerners to advance evangelism in their country?  It took Michael and Godfrey a year to develop the Plan to educate Rural Students into Pastors.