Predictors of Seventh-Day Adventist Church members’ attitude towards giving and trust: a case of East Central Rwanda Conference

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.