study of youth programmes in the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Kenya Itierio congregation

Abstract

The purpose of this study was to test the relationship between the lack of sound leadership including a good youth policy document and the good performance of the church's youth programmes. The researcher anticipated that his perception that, the programmes are not performing as expected and therefore would be able to provide useful suggestions to establish a means of accessing and improving programmes performance Youth and their leaders passed information about what was happening in the congregation to the researcher. Information collected was about the programmes and their performance .The researcher had formulated open-ended and closed-ended questionnaires, which helped in a simple systematic way to collect data and eventually analyse and categorize it. Various tables were used to give summaries of data collected. After completing the exercise of collecting, analysing and tabulating data, interpretation and discussions were made on the same. The findings of the study indicated the following; 1. Female youth were many in the church. 2. Camp meeting ranked first among the most preferred programmes. 3. Participation from the youth was expected especially in those programmes that promoted their spiritual life. 4 .Poor leadership and lack of a youth policy document among other perceived causes were pointed out to be major contributory factors for the poor performance of the programmes in the church. 5. Improving leadership related areas and allowing God to intervene in the congregation's work would help programmes perform effectively and have an impact on the participants. The researcher also suggested the following; 1. That the congregation authority need to understand all youth with a view of providing relevant programmes that will meet their needs. 2. That the youth should be well equipped to study the bible on their own and as groups with zest so that they can improve their devotional lives. 3. That programmes that emphasize the physical development should be included among the list of activities offered in the church 4. That the administration should look into issues of leadership, good youth policy document among others in order to improve and make the programmes be effective and efficient in accomplishing their goals. 5. The congregation in liaison with other congregations should work to review the church-wide constitution particularly the article that stipulate that youth are those between ages 13 and 21 .