Practices of Pentecostal Assemblies of God Church Theology that Address Gender Based Violence (GBV) in Zambia: A Case Study of Bread of Life Main Pentecostal Church in Lusaka District
- April 8, 2021
- Posted by: RSIS
- Categories: IJRISS, Religion and Cultural Studies
International Journal of Research and Innovation in Social Science (IJRISS) | Volume V, Issue III, March 2021 | ISSN 2454–6186
Mutata Deborah Kamwengo and Oliver Magasu
Kwame Nkrumah University, Zambia
Abstract: The researcher sort to establish practices of the Pentecostal Assemblies of God church theology that address Gender Based Violence. The study was exploratory in terms of design. The study sample consisted of two (2) Pastors, two (2) church elders, four (4) church deacons, two (2) representatives from the Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia (EFZ)- a mother body of all Pentecostal churches in Zambia and ten (10) lay members from the church under study. Purposive and convenient sampling techniques for participants were used to sample participants from the population under study. The key finding of the study was that the church’s intervention in addressing Gender Based Violence (GBV) came through couples’ meetings, premarital and post-marital counselling, participation in campaigns against GBV and being an active voice against GBV. Based on the findings, this study recommends that the church should introduce awareness and rehabilitation programmes specially designed to help both perpetrator and the victim of GBV. Secondly, the researcher recommends that the Church should employ strategic plans to curb the vice by forming more support groups with the help of the government in order to address GBV. As a suggestion for future research, the study recommended that a study in the future be undertaken to determine the success and challenges of the Church’s anti-GBV activities.
Key Words: Gender Based Violence, Theology, Church
I. BACKGROUND AND CONTEXT
Gender Based Violence (GBV) is a common problem in many countries today, and it is on the upswing in Zambia (Musune, 2015). According to the World Bank (2018), 35 percent of women worldwide have experienced either physical or sexual intimate partner violence at some point in their lives. It is also estimated that of the 87,000 women who were intentionally killed in 2017 globally, more than half were killed by intimate partners, meaning 137 women across the world are killed by a member of their family every day and more than a third of the women killed in 2017 were killed by their intimate partner (UN Women, 2017).
