Professional Dissertations DMin

Date of Award

2010

Document Type

Project Report

Degree Name

Doctor of Ministry

College

Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary

Program

Doctor of Ministry DMin

First Advisor

Ricardo Norton

Second Advisor

Victor Figueroa

Third Advisor

Eduard Schmidt

Abstract

Problem

Every church as a social group has the potential to grow and improve its spirituality, its cohesion, its commitment, its fidelity and its participation. The Gainesville Spanish Adventist Church is formed by members that have the ardent desire to improve in all these areas. This investigation aims to improve the spirituality of the congregation.

Methodology

The investigation began with the selection of 25 members of the Gainesville Spanish Church in Florida who were available to collaborate in the investigation in order to detect the spiritual deficiencies among church members. A questionnaire was used to discover the spiritual weaknesses and, based on the results, a program was then elaborated and applied to improve the spirituality of the members.

Results

The investigation reached the two basic objectives proposed in this thesis: first, to develop a program of spiritual improvement, and second, that, as a consequence of the first, we obtain major participation from the members in all church activities. The implementation of the program made it possible for the church to internalize and make the most value of improving the life of devotion and prayer, as well as developing the natural desire to participate in missionary work. Moreover, it was evident that the program produced changes in the church’s behavior and, among those, the increase of baptisms. The few people who had negative thoughts and attitudes towards the changes while the program was developing started integrating in the process and ended-up recognizing that they were mistaken, inasmuch as the positive results spoke for themselves. The evaluation survey reported spiritual improvement of the four areas in which the first survey had reflected deficiency; family worship, participation in missionary activity, lack of participation in the general activities of the church, and finally, neglect of the reading of the Bible.

Subject Area

Gainesville Spanish Seventh-day Adventist Church (Gainesville, Fla.); Seventh-day Adventists--Florida; Spiritual life--Seventh-day Adventists

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/512

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