Steps for Your Church

                                                           - Edward Everett Hale

 

We’ve all heard the startling statistics of divorce. Almost anyone can tell you that “half of all marriages end in divorce.” We’re almost immune to the numbers. It gets a little closer to home when you ask an average congregation to raise their hands if they have had someone in their family or a close friend suffer a divorce. Nearly every hand goes up. We all know something needs to be done, but for the most part we haven’t known what to do. Or worse, we think very little or nothing can be done.

 

But something can be done.

Sitting in churches on Sunday mornings across the country are couples with life and marriage experience, but who underestimate the value of that experience. In today’s world, anyone happily married after ten or more years is an anomaly. And young people getting married in today’s world generally can’t even envision being married that long! We call these couples the “sleeping giant” in the church. And we believe it is time to awaken this sleeping giant and enable them to seize an opportunity that has been too long neglected.

 

Are you ready? Even though you may quiver in your shoes at the thought of trying to get a marriage mentoring ministry started, we want you to know: you CAN do it…with persistence and prayer. Here are some ideas to get you started:

 

1. If you haven’t already…buy The Complete Guide to Marriage Mentoring. We know, we know. You’ve heard it before: “Just buy the book.” We worked really hard to make this the most readable, comprehensive, practical book possible – a book that anyone can pick up and put right to use.

 

2. Determine the area of greatest need: Preparing, Maximizing, or Repairing. Interview leaders. Survey the congregation. Pray. If you face needs in all three areas, then pick one to get started. We’ve heard from too many people who ambitiously tried to start all three and quickly got overwhelmed and/or burned out. Also realize that where you get started will be influenced by who comes to you as mentor couples. Placing couples in the area that aligns with their passion and experience is key.

 

3. Lay the groundwork. Determine how mentoring will fit into the existing ministry structure of the church. Do you already have a premarital program? Do you already do marriage events (or promote outside events)? Do you have a small group ministry? How will mentoring interact with these? We’ve found that marriage mentoring can function wonderfully as a stand-alone ministry or as a compliment to existing small group or classroom based activities. On our Download Center, we have an example of how the mentoring ministry might be organized to compliment small groups.

 

4. Explore relationship and personality instruments and use them as part of your mentoring process. Different churches use different instruments. Some common relationship instruments are PREPARE/ENRICH and FOCCUS/REFOCCUS. A commonly used personality profile is Marriage Insights. These can not only be used with mentorees, but also are great for evaluating potential mentor couples.

 

5. Build your mentor team. Recruit them, enlist them, evaluate them, and train them. Our Download Center has some sample questionnaires to help with this. Also, in the first quarter of 2006, we anticipate releasing a DVD training kit to simplify the training process.

 

6. Promote the ministry to your congregation.

 

7. Link mentor couples and mentoree couples. Realize, this is an art form! Create a form for the mentoree couples to fill out (we have a sample in the Download Center). Use this to match couples by geography, need, background, common interests, etc. The more work you do to carefully match people, the higher likelihood of a fruitful relationship. Also realize (and communicate) that not all matches will work! That is o.k. and normal. Let the couples know that either can discontinue the relationship after the first 1-2 meetings for any reason, no questions asked. Then you can re-match them with another couple. But after 2 meetings, they need to follow through on their commitment.

 

8. Evaluate and improve. Create ways for both the mentor couples and the mentoree couples to give you feedback (again, samples in the Download Center).

 

9. Nurture your mentor team. Create periodic events to get them together. Use these times to thank them, encourage them, give them on-going training, and, probably most importantly, let them share with each other.