Charitable giving, growth and development of church: a case of Arua archdeaconry Madi West Nile Diocese

Abstract

This study focused on the charitable giving, growth and development of church, a case of Arua Archdeaconry. The research specifically focused on the factors influencing charitable giving, challenges faced by church leadership in promoting charitable giving, strategies in strengthening Charitable giving, its Literatures were based on the earlier stated objectives where the researcher used field research design (descriptive) and the data collection analysis was done by qualitative and quantitively methods. The researcher considered 150 (one hundred fifty) respondents comprising church leaders and other church members and he used both purposive and random sampling techniques for getting the respondents. The findings revealed that charitable giving in Arua archdeaconry takes several forms such as tithes, free will offering, thanks giving contributions and special collections. It also found out that most of the giving is local and community based, that is coming mainly from church members and local business owners. Charitable giving in Arua archdeaconry has been used mainly for infrastructure development, that is constructure and renovation of churches parish offices and clergy houses. Charitable giving has led to visible growth and development in Arua archdeaconry. The challenges in giving were low-income level, mistrust. The strategies for improving charitable giving included strengthening social economic improvement of members and enhancing Christian stewardship teaching. Therefore, the researcher recommended that, there is need for the church to provide regular financial report, The church should intensify teaching on principle of giving and initiate income generating projects.