PERCEPTIONS ON THE EFFECTIVENESS OF PASTORAL MARITAL COUNSELLING IN ADDRESSING MARITAL CONFLICTS AMONG CHRISTIANS IN CENTRAL DIVISION, NAROK COUNTY

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Patrick Ngige
James Kimani

Abstract

Many churches have tried to ensure that the institution of marriage remains strong by establishing marital pastoral counseling programmes. Marital pastoral counselling is offered by pastors who may either be professionally trained or not. The trend of broken marriages is on the rise despite the existence of these programs. The purpose of this study was to determine whether marital pastoral counselling was effective in addressing conflicts among Christians in relationships. The study used the descriptive survey research design with a sample size of 81 Christians and 10 pastors. The Christians from each church station surveyed, had attended counselling at least once on issues related to marital challenges. Purposive and stratified sampling methods were used to select 10 churches. Couples and counsellors from the 10 churches selected were involved in filing questionnaires and responding to interview questions. During piloting, questionnaires were administered to 10 respondents in the similar target population. The calculated Cronbach alpha from the pilot study was 0.80 for the pastors' questionnaire and 0.78 for the married couples, which is within the accepted reliability limit of at least 0.7. The Statistical Package for Social Science (SPSS) version 17.0 for Windows was used for data analysis. Descriptive statistics which included means and percentages were used to present the findings. The research established that marital pastoral counselling is effective in the Central Division of Narok County despite the inadequate training of pastors in this field. The study concluded that despite inadequate training, pastors in the Division were able to offer effective counseling. This could be attributed to years of handling marital pastoral counseling. Their success was therefore not based on training but experience.

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