Professional Dissertations DMin

Date of Award

2015

Document Type

Project Report

Degree Name

Doctor of Ministry

College

Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary

Program

Doctor of Ministry DMin

First Advisor

Kenly Hall

Second Advisor

Boubakar Sanou

Third Advisor

Kelvin Onongha

Abstract

Problem

The Seventh-day Adventist Church in Kenya has the highest membership in the East Central African Division (ECD) with an average of one pastor for 1,136 members. Not only is the membership high and increasing, but each pastor has an average of seven churches (as of 2013) (General Conference of Seventh-day Adventists, 2003-2013). The majority of the membership is comprised of youth (13-17 years) and young adults (18-30 years). Even though youth and young adults comprise the majority of the membership, there is minimal level of active participation and low commitments from them in the life of the church, especially in biblical preaching. The majority of youth and young adults find the area of preaching irrelevant, biblically unfaithful, or culturally inappropriate to them. Also, there is the scarce availability of pastors, a lack of resources to employ more pastors, and the increasing number of members who have left the task of preaching and nurturing congregations through sound contextualized biblical preaching to untrained lay preachers. The youth and young adults need to be actively involved in the life of the church, they need to be taught and hear the gospel in a way that is relevant to them in their own context through contextualized biblical preaching by equipped and trained preachers. There is therefore a need for a program and training manual to remedy this situation.

Method

A program will be developed using the Logical Framework Analysis and Gantt chart, which enables the researcher to communicate a project’s objectives vividly and simply. After securing the support of church leaders and the help of local pastors, a pilot team of young adult lay preachers will be selected. The criteria for selecting the pilot team will be based on church attendance, commitment to church activities, public speaking skills, vocation, language spoken, age, literacy, and ethnocentric sensitivity. The young adult lay preachers will be trained and equipped on how to preach relevant contextualized biblical sermons and will conduct three weeks of evangelistic campaigns in ten churches. Training will be done in four areas that are critical in effective preaching: the message, the members (audience), the method, and the messenger.

Project Purpose

The purpose of the project is to develop and implement a contextualized biblical preaching program for young adult lay preachers in Kenya.

Project Expectations

After a successful implementation of the program, it is expected that at least 50% of youth and young adults will remain and be actively involved in the life and activities of the church. The program will be replicated in two churches within three years and an evaluation will be conducted once every semester in the first year of implementation and once every two semesters from the second year.

Subject Area

Lay preaching--Kenya, Preaching--Study and teaching

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/dmin/285

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