Three Sample Hope-Based Marriage Ministry Models for the Local Church:
Many churches try their best to support marriages, but find that attending to marriage problems end up taking the largest portion of their time and attention, by default turning most of their marriage ministry into one that is crisis-driven. Ted Lowe with the Orange marriage ministry, Married People, graphs it like this:
For pastors looking for proactive models that are also hope-based, there are many out there that are working well. Here are three such examples worth examining.
The weeknight worship service and small group model (like Celebrate Recovery)
Interview with John McGee, Director of Re|Engage and Marriage Ministries, Watermark Community Church, Dallas, Texas
Website: marriagehelp.org
The heart of our Re-Engage ministry is hope, rooted in Jesus Christ. In terms of the functional model, it is similar to Celebrate Recovery but marriage-centric. There is a large group time of worship followed by either a testimony from a couple or a time of teaching, and then small group discussion. The couples work through the curriculum in the small groups that are led by lay couples.
The foundational components of the ministry are: the message of hope, and the community nature of the curriculum. We like to say ‘You never want to bet against hope.’ Some of the couples might have a thousand reasons why they ‘should’ get divorced, but when they come to know a greater hope in Jesus Christ, they experience a greater hope in their marriage as well. In re|engage, as testimonies and stories are shared, the couples start to believe, ‘we can make it.’ They come thinking ‘We’re the only ones who have ever experienced this,’ but come to see they are not alone and haven’t crossed any line they can’t come back from.
The community nature of the curriculum is key as well. If divorce is contagious, then surely positive marriage must be as well. Research says if you hang out with a people who have a high degree of divorce you tend to go that direction and if you hang out with people who say ‘you can make it’ your marriage tends to get better. There is magnetism to that. People are drawn to hope. More than 50% of the people who come to Re-engage on Wednesday nights are not members of our church and often don’t any have church experience.
The Less-Content-More-Often Model: Larger Group Experiences, Small Groups, and Individual Couples
Interview with Ted Lowe, Director of MarriedPeople, a division of The reThink Group, Inc., Cumming, GA.
Website: MarriedPeople.org
Most churches know they need to help marriages, they’re just not sure how. Church leaders—including senior pastors—will find time to help couples in crisis, but that means they are mostly reacting. And that also means they don’t feel like they really have a marriage strategy. So we have worked with many churches to develop a strategy that is proactive and easy for the staff to implement—and it is also not just wife-friendly but husband-friendly, which is important.
Instead of doing a few big, in-depth sermons on marriage each year, and then focusing on couples in crisis in between, the MarriedPeople Strategy is based around a church giving couples less content, but more often, and opportunities to do stuff together. About 12 to 24 doable, experiential touch points every year, mixed and matched between a few large group times, small groups and individual things the couples can do.
The larger group experiences are things like one-night events, weekend worship services, or weekend retreats. Something powerful happens when couples gather with other couples. The small group experiences are key because that’s where couples connect with other couples, share their lives, and get great marriage content. The individual couple experiences are things like date night ideas, couple-to-couple mentoring and even using assessment tools.
We have a lot of the content for the church to use, on video and so on, if they want. The key, though, is giving a church a plug-and-play strategy they can easily tailor to their church. And we’ve found that all this not only helps prevent couples from getting into crisis in the first place, it helps them experience the marriage God designed them to have.
The Small-groups model
Interview with Donald Smith, Director of Care Groups, North Point Community Church, Alpharetta, GA
Website: northpoint.org/care/thrive
We used to have a marriage ministry that was primarily for couples on life support. Then we realized: we need a marriage enrichment ministry that targets ALL married couples. We created Thrive, which is for every married couple in our church, and now the other churches that are using this model.
It is a short-term 11-week small group for married couples, that a church can either use as part of their existing small-groups infrastructure, or as a separate offering. It that touches on ten topics that we think are vital for building healthy marriages. Topics like communication, conflict, forgiveness, intimacy, and the effect your past has on your marriage.
The key is getting couples to communicate and we use both mid-week questions for the husband and wife to talk about together, questions that only they know the answers to, and different questions for the group meetings. It’s funny how often someone will come in to their group and say “We had a four-hour discussion about our questions last night.” Good, that means you’re talking! And the leaders are specifically trained with some specific facilitation skills and marriage topic training to be able to facilitate the Thrive groups.
For people who aren’t in a small group already, this is a great way to get someone there; after they go through Thrive, they can stay plugged in. At Northpoint, we have the community group model and we want all married folks to be in a married-people community group for two years.