| dc.description.abstract | The purpose of this research was to identify the predictors of Seventh-day
Adventist Church Members’ Attitude toward Giving and Trust: The case of East
Central Rwanda Conference. The research was prompted by the desire to understand
why fewer members return tithe and give offering and what can be done to increase
the attitude of members towards returning tithe and giving offerings. To achieve the
desired objective quantitative cross-sectional and causal study designs were used in
collecting data. The targeted population for this study was local church members in
the East Central Rwanda Conference of Rwanda Union Mission. There are
approximately 45 districts managed by East Central Rwanda Conference with about
136,442 registered church members. Since it is hard and extremely expensive to
include all the population, the researcher used a multi-stage cluster random sampling
to select the sample. First, the targeted population was grouped into clusters, whichare districts, and then randomly select 10 districts and thirdly, selected 3 churches
from each selected 10 districts, then further select 14 church members including
treasurers and elders in each 3 selected churches for the 10 districts. Hence, a total
number of 420 church members were sampled to participate in the study. Data was
collected using a researcher-constructed questionnaire and analyzed using descriptive
(mean and standard deviation, frequencies and percentages) and inferential statistics
(multi-regression and correlations) techniques computed using Statistical Package for
the Social Sciences (IBM SPSS 20). The findings of the study revealed that church
members’ level of commitment and their perception of church financial management
are very important to members’ attitude towards giving and their level of trust. Based
on the research findings the researcher recommends that members’ spiritual growth
and refocusing members’ commitment to the mission should be the highest priority of
the Church leaders. | en_US |
