A Strategy to Improve Pastoral Leadership and Ministry in Selected Sections of Uganda Union Mission

Abstract

Uganda Union has had a challenge of receiving accurate and regular reports from its Mission Fields. When follow-up is made with the fields, the response received is that few or no reports had been obtained from the districts. It seems there are some factors responsible for this situation in the districts and perhaps local church officers are not adequately trained to meaningfully participate in local Church ministries and make activity reports to give to their pastors. There is need to do a study on this phenomenon so that the overall pastoral leadership and ministry in the districts would be improved. The purpose of this dissertation was to develop and implement a pastors’ professional growth program in order to help improve the overall pastoral leadership and ministry in Uganda Union. This intervention should be helpful in improving the performance of ministers including the training and reporting responsibilities. This study was a field based research project, and it is quantitative in nature. Three questionnaires were employed to collect data from the targeted respondents who were the district pastors organized into six groups of fifteen respondents per group. The first questionnaire was aimed at evaluating the ministerial qualities and duties of the respondents. The purpose of this instrument was to analyze the minister’s church leadership and management styles and input on key ministerial duties which significantly affect the quality of ministry in the local churches. This was aimed at assessing the strengths, weaknesses and gaps in the overall pastoral ministry in Uganda Union Mission. Furthermore, this tool also sought to assess the spirituality of the ministers involved in this study to find out if there were some spiritual factors among ministers affecting ministry. The second questionnaire was used to assess the qualities of local Church ministries from the perspective of the respondent ministers. This sought to find out if there were correlations with the findings from the first questionnaire. The third questionnaire was a ministers’ appraisal instrument filled by an administrator. This was used to find out the known competences, strengths and weaknesses of the participants of this study from an administrative perspective. It was deemed that this threefold survey would provide a fair picture of the quality of pastoral ministry and leadership at the time this study was carried out. The collected data was statically tabulated using the Microsoft Excel program. Descriptive and quantitative research methods were employed to analyze, and interpret the collected data to determine the intensity of opinions and levels of agreement among respondents to arrive at the indicative means. Findings indicated that pastoral ministry was underperforming in the areas of leadership and Church management, teaching and training, pastoral care and nurture and the area of evangelism and church growth. These findings point to inadequate professional performance among the respondents of this study. There is need to continue with annual evaluations and appraisals, hold regular ministers’ professional growth seminars and step up mentoring efforts to help the respondents of this study raise their performance levels in the process of improving the overall performance of the Church in Uganda Union Mission.