The Pokot Worldview as an Impediment to the Spread of Christianity among the Pokot People (Published)
Christian missionaries established the first mission work among the Pokot people of West Pokot County in 1931 when the Anglican Bible Churchman’s Missionary Society (BCMS) set up a mission centre at Kacheliba. They, however, encountered a lot of resistance and non- response from the Pokot people. To date, the bulk of the Pokot people are still conservative to their traditional lifestyle and reluctant to open up to change and new ideas. This paper examines the Pokot worldview as a challenge to the spread of Christianity among the Pokot people. In so doing, the author seeks to establish ways through which evangelization could be done to make the Pokot people embrace change in order to utilize development opportunities that come with it. A descriptive design was employed for the study. Purposive, snowball and random sampling methods were used to select the respondents. The study was guided by the structural functionalism theory by David Merton of 1910. Descriptive analysis was used to analyze the collected data which was obtained through questionnaires and oral interviews. The study established that the Pokot community is much acculturated and the people are strongly bound together by their tribal customs; majority of whom prefer their traditional lifestyle to modernity.
Keywords: Acculturation, Christianity, Pokot community, Pokot worldview