Professional Dissertations DMin

Date of Award

2019

Document Type

Project Report

Degree Name

Doctor of Ministry

College

Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary

Program

Doctor of Ministry DMin

First Advisor

Moses Taiwo

Second Advisor

Vaughan Grant

Third Advisor

Johnson Cesar

Abstract

Problem

During my pastoral experience at Nyagiki, I observed that although HIV/AIDS was a big threat in the church and society, many of the church leaders were not involved in addressing this crisis. There were no intentional church training programs to warn the members about its danger. The church did not make a budget of time or money to address this pandemic. The root problem that caused this situation was lack of health information literacy on HIV/AIDS to equip these leaders with knowledge and skills to deal with this crisis.

Method

The Doctor of Ministry Research Project was conducted at Nyagiki Seventh-day Adventist Church between March 2016 and August 2017 (18 months). There were 24 adult participants—18 women and 6 men—who were effectively trained on how to care for people living with HIV/AIDS in their communities. The 24 participants formed four groups and were assigned a specific church territory to visit. On the last Saturday of each month, the participants met in their focus groups to discuss progress made and then send reports to the researcher.

Results

The report from the participants indicate that there was a total of 246 general visits made and a total of 40 visits made to people living with HIV/AIDS. In the last month of the project, the participants were involved in speaking at a one-week camp meeting which was held in their community. Two participants spoke each day at this event to represent each of the four focus groups. On Friday of the camp-meeting (one day before completion) a graduation ceremony was conducted, and certificates of recognition were issued to the participants. The researcher was the chief speaker at this camp-meeting and 29 people responded to the altar call. --

Conclusions

Nyagiki Seventh-day Adventist Church has indicated increased church attendance and the leaders have planned to build a bigger church facility. People who came to the camp-meeting from other churches in the community made requests to have similar research projects conducted in their churches. Consequently, I recommend continued interaction with Nyagiki and the surrounding community to keep the fire burning.

Subject Area

Social work with HIV-positive persons; AIDS (Disease)--Patients; Laity--Kenya--Seventh-day Adventists--Training of; Nyagiki Seventh-day Adventist Church (Kenya)

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/dmin/732/

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