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New Creation Ministries (NCM) is a Rwandese non-profit organization which was begun in 1992.  The ministry's mission statement is to help the Rwandese church function as the Body of Christ.  NCM’s purpose is to develop ministries that strengthen and enable the Rwandese church to be Jesus’ voice, hands, and feet to the people of Rwanda.  In Kinyarwanda the ministry is called Umuryango uharanira guhindura abantu ibyaremwe bishya muri Yesu Kristo, which means, A ministry which strives to transform lives into new creations in Christ (taken from 2 Corinthians 5:17).

A well-respected Rwandan church leader said, “Rwandan churches don't need money!  What they need are leaders who have truly been made new in Jesus Christ.”

Rwanda’s thousand hills are covered with churches planted and led by Rwandese pastors.  But, most of the pastors of these churches have no training at all, having barely finished a primary school education.  This makes for a weak churches and shallow spiritual lives.  This, then, begs the question: How can people be discipled and built up when their leaders have never been properly equipped themselves?  Seeing this need, Gary Scheer and Faustin Ntamushobora, founded New Creation Ministries with the goal of discipling church leaders. 

NCM first developed a program for discipling non-pastoral leaders for the church called the Lay Training Institute (LTI).  Many of those who graduated from the LTI were asked by their denominations to become pastors because of the solid training they had received – it was more training than most of the pastors had at that time.  At the beginning of 1994 we had thirty-five students and four full-time profession staff.  We were looking for land to build a training center.  But, of course, everything came to a screeching halt when the genocide ravished Rwanda later that year.

The war in Rwanda that culminated in the genocide of 1994 had tremendous effects on NCM’s ministry.  Of the forty-five students and board members within NCM at the time, fifteen were killed, and nineteen fled the country as refugees.  In 1995 when the Bennett and Scheer families (working with WorldVenture) returned to Rwanda there were just eleven former students remaining in Rwanda.  From that low point, it has been a long rebuilding process.  It wasn’t until 1999 that NCM felt that there was suitable stability to justify resuming the process of looking for land to build a training center. 

In 2000, NCM was began the Pastoral Training School (PTS).  It was established to train the significant number of uneducated Rwandan pastors (again, ninety percent of all Rwandan pastors have no education beyond primary school).  The PTS is unique in Rwanda.  No one else is offering training to these pastors and enabling them to continue to serve their churches while they study.  The PTS sent out its first graduating class of seventeen pastors in 2003.

In 2005, at NCM’s annual leadership prayer retreat, God sharpened NCM’s vision.   That vision is to develop a variety of ministries aimed at enabling and empowering the churches in Rwanda to function as the Body of Christ. 

Today NCM has once again a full-time professional staff of four people.  We have our own training center located on five acres of land in Rwanda’s capitol city, Kigali.  Over sixty pastors from twelve different church denominations are currently studying in the PTS.  We are known as a unique training organization that combines classroom teaching, practical field work, lots of discussion and problem solving, and personal relationships with the students.  People say that students finish school at NCM not just with a diploma, but with a changed life.

NCM is driven by the vision of enabling and empowering the churches in Rwanda through training and discipleship.