The Pastoral Role Of Chaplaincy In The Secondary Schools
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Date
2003
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Publisher
Tangaza University College
Abstract
The greatest wealth of the world is the youth. The bright future depends on
them and the Church assumes her pastoral and missionary commitment of
continually proclaiming a message of hope and liberation for the young.
The period of youth is the key stage in the life of every person. In African
context, it is a time of preparation for adults' role and a time of decision-making in
the community where he or she is rooted. The community expects from him/her to
lead a better life in their social, moral and spiritual commitment.
Youth is the period of uncertainty. Young people are neither children nor
adults. They seem to behave like children and in some other times they behave like
adults. Adolescence is a period of ambition and high ideals. It is a time of coming
alive to oneself, to peers to wider world of nature. It is a period of excitement,
confusion and chaotic times. In order to establish their better world, they need
guidance especially during their critical years of adolescence when most of these
young people are away from home and they are in the institutions of learning and
most of them in the secondary schools. In Kenya, secondary education constitutes four years of schooling and enrols
children of between ages 14 and 17. The latest statistical data published in 2002 by
the Ministry of Education, showed that a total of 700,538 boys and girls were in
school in 1998 and enrolment has been going up every year.
The education of the youth must not merely focus on the intellectual aspects
but it must be acquisition of values and discovery of truth and develop them as
integrated persons being the future leaders of the church and the nation. The church
looks forward with an expectation of hope and that they may live up to their
Christian values.
Youth ministry is a Church mission. It is her pastoral role to reach out and
become involved in the lives of the youth especially to those in secondary schools.
Young people find themselves at the influence of secular forces turning on through
rock music, drugs, sex and freer relationship. Youth ministry in the school or
campus ministry provide an opportunity to share, a time and a place for the youth to
express their feelings, their experiences and thoughts and allowing them to grow in
inter-personal relationship, increasing their feeling of self-worth, helping them to
their search for identity as persons, their meaning and their search for God. Through
the pastoral care of the Church it offers them valid avenues to form them as
authentic Christians by encountering Christ and become witnesses of Christian faith.
Description
Keywords
Pastoral Role, Chaplaincy, Secondary Schools