  Implications of the Raychaudhuri equation in focusing of geodesic congruences
are studied in the framework of scalar--tensor theory of gravity. Specifically,
we investigate the Brans--Dicke theory and Bekenstein's scalar field theory. In
both of these theories, we deal with a static spherically symmetric
distribution and a spatially homogeneous and isotropic cosmological model as
specific examples. We find that it is possible to violate the convergence
condition under reasonable physical assumptions. This leads to the possibility
of avoiding a singularity.
