Ubuntu Ecclesiology: Fostering Mental Health Resilience in Emerging Adulthood - Kevin Muriithi Ndereba

Summary:

This project has three main activities: 

1. To conduct a research project on youth mental health resilience in African Christian congregations from different Christian traditions. 
2. To build a small research team on psychology engaged (mental health) theological reflection. I will do this by training and supporting a team of 3 postgraduate research students. 
3. To run a public engagement event as a capstone end of project cycle event, disseminating the research findings and facilitate network-building for psychologists, theologians, practitioners and the public. 

This project explores the factors in Christian congregations that enhance psychological resilience in faith communities. Young people are a key demographic in Africa. Faith communities bring together religious, cultural and social threads in a way that other social institutions do not, and can thus either hinder or promote youth resilience. The project focuses on resilience due to the multi-pronged and negative impacts of the COVID pandemic across psychosocial, economic, political and spiritual domains. Further, resilience studies while common in the global North are understudied in the global South, where mental health challenges adversely affect the well-being of young people. This study fills this gap by exploring the factors that will enhance resilience of young people. The project outcomes include visibility of science (psychology) engaged projects in the African context, changed attitudes of church leaders concerning science (psychology) and theology through conducting a pre-event and post-event survey and increased and positive engagement between academia and practitioners through future events/engagements. 

While relational approaches have been proposed in youth ministry, these proposals do not take an empirical approach in assessing the social relationships necessary for effective work with young people. Such proposals are not grounded within a psychological science perspective that would provide evidence for such a claim. Psychosocial, economic, political and spiritual stressors emerging from the COVID pandemic provide an opportunity for validating the need for this relational approach. To do this, this project proposes the measuring of resilience among emerging adults (19-29 years old) in diverse African congregations. This exploratory research project asks the following question: do spiritual and communal practices foster increased resilience in emerging adulthood?  

To answer this question, this project will explore the following three objectives: 

RO 1: To assess levels of resilience among emerging adults in congregations  

RO 2: To examine the role of spiritual and communal practices in fostering resilience 

RO 3: To propose interventions for church leaders and adults working with emerging adults in congregations  

This will be conducted through conversation with African philosophical and theological resources on the church from a social relationship perspective, and empirically grounded in a mixed-methods approach analysing data from both emerging adults and their church leaders. The project aims to run one public engagement event targeting theologians, psychologists and church leaders, develop a summarised intervention report for religious practitioners, an academic article for a journal, a blogpost/podcast for the Psychology Cross-Training Program (PCTP) website or OJKC – Protestant Theological University, Research Centre for Youth, Church and Culture and one conference presentation at the PCTP capstone event or other discipline-specific conference such as IAPT (International Academy of Practical Theology) or IAPR (International Association for the Psychology of Religion).