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

Abstract

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 ison 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 ofNarok 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.Keywords:Pastoral Marital Counselling, Marital Conflicts, ChristiansI.IntroductionMarriage was designed to be an institution where couples share life and assist one another to go through the challenges of life. By marrying publicly, the couple is seeking the endorsement, and more importantly, the support of family, community, and friends in the union. This support is particularly critical in times of disagreement or difficulty. However, despite these public weddings more and more couples are seeking to get out of the marriage institution (Karanja, 2010). The church is a significant player in most Christian weddings and therefore has an obligation to keep the couples together. Based on the data available, it is clear the divorce rate among Christians is significantly lower than the general population. People who sincerely follow a traditional religious faith, be it Christian or other, have a divorce rate much lower than the general population. That means strong faith can make a significant difference is religious commitment and practice (Stanton, 2011). Couples who attend church weekly without failure practice serious religious beliefs, praying and reading their religious materials, enjoy significantly lower divorce rates as compared to the general public, according to Bradle (2010), a sociologist at the University of Connecticut. On the other hand, those that identify themselves as Christians but rarely attend church, have been