Online Chaplaincy
My name is Stephan Fleming and I have online chaplaincy ministry aspirations. I am Irish but living in Yorkshire in the UK at the moment. My parents came here when I was a young boy aged eleven as my father had just left the British army and at that time politically it was not possible to return to Ireland (The Good Friday agreement has now made it possible to reunite with my family).
I attend our local church. It only has a small congregation but it is growing all the time. The church is called Mosaic and is a joint Methodist and Pioneer project in a poor area of our town.
In my life, I have never really fit in or felt welcome in this country due to the prejudice against the Irish. I remember the signs in the guest house windows proudly saying ‘No Blacks, No Dogs, No Irish’ (Well it was the 1970s). As a child, I had to make a conscious effort to develop a local accent and be invisible to avert the bullying (from adults, not other children as they hadn’t learned to be prejudiced yet). The signs are gone now but every now and then the nice mask people wear does slip (it is amusing watching them try to justify their comments when they find out I am Irish).
Things do usually turn out right in the end, even after they sometimes start out by seemingly going horribly wrong.
No matter how dark things get I always find that prayer helps and I have learned to overcome much and even reached the stage where I can start planning for the future.
I recently decided to buy a house. I found one online in the area I was looking for. It was a good price because the house was in need of some work. I went for it, provided the agent with proof of funding and paid my deposit and secured the services of a lawyer to look after my interests in the transaction. Weeks turned into months and the sale dragged on and on. I kept ringing and emailing the agent and then the bombshell that the person renting the house wouldn’t move out even though it was not their house. After much worry and prayer, another house in the same area became available for a similar price out of nowhere. It was double the size and on the main street rather than the first one which was a bit out of the way. I got my deposit back and bid successfully on the other house. My bid was accepted and things flew by and before I knew it I owned the house. It is obvious to me now that God didn’t want me to live in the first one. Never underestimate the power of prayer.
My dream is to seek out other misfits and broken people just like me and with God’s help, I am sure that we can piece together again the broken pieces of ourselves.
I really consider myself fortunate to have been led to Christian Leaders Institute website and hope to learn a lot. I think my aspirations are growing more towards online chaplaincy as I think there is a real need in this cyber world.
Learn about ordained minister study programs at Christian Leaders Alliance.
Ministry Training Recommendation
Thousands of students have been taking free ministry training classes at Christian Leaders Institute. Read how Christian Leaders Institute is helping Peter Mahase as a Christian leader. In his testimony, Peter gives a beautiful ministry training recommendation for CLI:
I was born in Lesotho. That is where most of my development has been, both in terms of academic and professional work. I was born in 1987, and I am the last born among my three siblings.
From a young age, I always had a zeal for the things of God but never gave my life to Christ. My father is a pastor, so I got exposure to a number of things in the ministry, such as Christian literature. I only got saved in 2002 at the age of 15 as a result of a strong urge from God to come to Him and a sense of urgency to serve Him. I got saved and moved straight into serving the Lord in evangelism. Note that there was no discipleship: I carried all the knowledge I had from my early ages, from books, sermons etc, into the ministry, building on a weak foundation. I quickly led a revival in my high school at the time, which brought more than 30% of the school to Christ in a period of two years. That was my take-off into ministry.
I have always loved serving the Lord but never saw myself as a pastor until 2011, when the pastor who I was seconding at the varsity (National University of Lesotho) church I was in had to leave, and I had to take over. This is where my role as a church leader started. I have since been serving here, given the blessing of my church, the Apostolic Faith Mission church in Lesotho. My title is Assembly Leader, not Pastor until I am ordained.
I have a Bachelor of Science degree in Electronics from the National University of Lesotho. Since I got my degree, I have worked for Econet Telecom Lesotho. By the time I left in 2016 to respond to the call of the Lord and focus on ministry, I was a Network Quality Management Engineer. Leaving was a tough decision for a man who just got married in 2015, but I had to obey, and my wife was in full support.
In 2017, I made a decision to step down from ministry until I am better equipped to handle the Word and leading in the church. This decision was confusing and hard to grasp, to me and everyone around me. I believe God really wanted to use me but saw that for the work to be done, I would need proper training, lest I continue building on a weak foundation. A very humbling move from God, I must say, but I took it. I stepped down from all my ministry activity, including my leadership in my church, speaking engagements, Christian events business and the like to get proper ministry training and mentoring.
That is where Christian Leaders Institute came in. It came in highly recommended by my mentor as a free yet high-quality Christian ministry education and now I offer a ministry training recommendation to CLI as well. Since I had left my job, I had no funds to get my education, and I had also stepped down from ministry, meaning there was no ministry support for me to pay for any tuition, hence CLI was very relevant to my situation.
One of the major challenges in my country at the moment is many people preaching “the gospel” without proper ministry training. This exposes people to incorrect doctrine and twisted theology, making them follow a false god of our imaginations, instead of the God of the Bible. This is the thing that God was calling me out of when he asked me to step down from ministry. That is why I give a ministry training recommendation to CLI for its sound doctrine and Biblical teaching. Since beginning my training with CLI, the picture of God is becoming clearer with more study of Scripture, not from human ideas. The Lord is teaching me to take charge of my life with him before I rush to teach other people. He is teaching me to pastor my family before I can pastor a church. It is amazing how the Bible interaction part of the Getting Started class fits into this. My prayer is that my involvement in ministry training through CLI will not only help me in my calling but would encourage others as well.
My vision is bringing scores of young people (in Lesotho and beyond) to Christ and to make them radical Christians in their spheres of influence. This is where my ministry focus actually is. I am excited to continue with this call as I continue to get training. It has been an encouragement to see many young people readily receive the message, and many actually go on to be effective ambassadors for Christ.
My request for prayer would that I may be faithful to the course and become an effective steward of the Lord’s calling. The young generation really needs Godly mentors, and I am intent on being one, by God’s grace.
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Conference Center Ministry
Read below about Brianna’s desire to use her training with CLI to bless the people she encounters at her job in a conference center ministry:
My name is Brianna Iler. I am currently living in Cannon Beach, Oregon, United States. I work at a Christian Conference Center here where retreats or conferences of believers will come for a week or weekend to be refreshed, renewed, learn, and be encouraged from the other believers they are around. We get to serve them and bless them while they are here before they head back out to their various jobs and ministries of their own. It’s enjoyable ministry work, but many people that I work with are hurting and lonely. So another girl and I have been praying about our conference center ministry and how we can be ministering, not just to the guests who come through, but also to the staff who need prayer and friendship.
I grew up in a church and accumulated a lot of head knowledge over the years, but it was not until I was 20 that I made the heart change and truly gave my life over to Christ. I was attending Arrowhead Bible College, a yearlong program, and it was like drinking from a firehose. There was so much information and I was just so ready for it. I realized I had a lot of head knowledge but I didn’t really know God, and I wanted to more than anything else.
My ministry dream is to follow God for the rest of my life. I am at a place in my life where I don’t know what God has in store for me. He is teaching me patience to follow him without knowing what is ahead, and I want to be ready and equipped to serve him with everything that I am wherever I am and in whatever I am doing. There will always be ministry in my life if I am willing to listen to God and let him speak through me.
This class at Christian Leaders Institute has really strengthened my ministry dream. I was tired when I began it, thinking I’d just plug away at it and see how it went. I knew that I should continue learning always, and God has used the information I’ve learned to spark the desire for learning even more and to encourage me to continue so that I am always ready when he calls.
Studying the Bible itself has given me so much more confidence that I am living my life in the way Christ said to and there always seems to be more I can pull from it. I want to learn how to study God’s word deeper, to get more from it and understand it better than I do now. After I became a believer, I had to rethink everything I did. I would search the Bible to find what it says about how to be living. God helped me turn completely around and walk the other way.
CLI is the first place I have found where I can be where I am, working in ministry and not making enough money for school, but still get schooling, still be preparing to better help those I am around and work with. Every other place I have looked at is a full-time commitment. I appreciate so much that I can keep learning at CLI, as I am able to take it wherever God calls me and continue learning even now.
Pray for guidance as to how we can be reaching out and getting to know people better, as well as how we can be building a Christ-centered community for God’s glory to strengthen us all in our service and ministry to the guests.
Learn about minister ordination at Christian Leaders Alliance.