10th U6+ Consortium of African Universities International Conference

The argument of this paper is that one of the great missions of the church is to bring unity and peace among its membership and the larger society. Although conflicts are an inevitable and necessary feature that determine relationships within and between human communities, the church is not immune to conflicts. Deep-rooted internal conflicts inside the Seventh-day Adventist church in South East Kenya Field continue to ravage the integrity and unity of the church. Internal conflicts have led to violent confrontation among members compelling the church to resort to non-ecclesial approaches like court (litigation) process and the police to resolve and manage them. These non-ecclesial measures and agents do not properly understand the nature and organization of the church, thus dividing even more the membership of the church and disruptions of church operations. When it is done within the church, splits and creation of new churches are taken as a mechanism of intra-ecclesial conflict resolution. The study was guided by conflict transformation theory by Väyrynen (1991) and Lederach (1995). The used a phenomenological research design appropriate to describe the experiences of the phenomenon of intra-ecclesial conflicts as it manifests itself in various forms taking into account both individual and collective measures for transformation of those conflicts. The target population for the study was 280 respondents comprised of church 15 union leaders, 8 pastors, 33 deaconesses, 44 church elders, 180 church members. Censuses, purposive, and simple random sampling were used. The sample size was 162 respondents calculated from the target population using the Krejcie and Morgan (1970) sampling table. The study found out that intra-ecclesial conflicts of different kinds do exist in the church with 90 (92.8%) majorly caused by corruption, intolerance, and divisive church politics. The study concluded that the church at both levels (leadership and membership) to be proactive in transforming the existing conflicts that ravage the unity of the church.