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There comes a point where we need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they are falling in. ~ Desmond Tutu
That’s a brilliant quote. I increasingly feel this way about the condition of marriages in the church. I’m all for helping those who are being carried by the current towards the waterfall called divorce. But it would sure be nice to find a way to have fewer folks in the river in the first place.
Lori and I have done premarital counselling a few times. There are some issues we always bring up, but our approach is individual because neither people nor marriages are one-size-fits-all. We’ve never had a couple I thought was going to fail, but I would certainly speak up if we did. And we always make ourselves available after the marriage as needed.
In 1986 virtually all the Protestant, Catholic, and Greek Orthodox churches in Modesto, California, along with the only Jewish temple in the city, agreed to not marry any couple who did not wait at least four months and go through mandatory premarital counselling. You could get a justice of the peace to marry you, but if you wanted a church wedding you pretty much had to get premarital counselling. This resulted in some couples deciding not to marry, fewer calls for help shortly after marriage, and a drop in divorces.
We know how to reduce divorces, and we have proof it works. But we don’t do it.
If you’re on staff at your church, please push for a “no premarital, no wedding” policy. In fact, if you’re not on staff, please push for this. If you know anyone even thinking about getting married, please be a bulldog about them getting good premarital counselling. And if you have kids, please make sure they understand from a very young age that premarital counselling is expected.
We know why people are falling in. Let’s put up a fence already!
A post worth reading:
Dr. Corey | Acceptance without compromise ◄ “There’s a place for us to seek to understand and accept each other even as we passionately disagree and challenge each other toward our better. “
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Hmm. My then-fiancé and I actually did go through mandatory premarital counseling at our church. It was terrible. Our counselor actually recommended we don’t get married, and went so far as to go to the pastor to try to stop our wedding. 😳 she had some pretty arbitrary rules such as if an engaged couple had three or more big fights, they probably weren’t compatible. Stuff like that. Honestly, it was horrible counseling and neither of us got anything out of it. How do you know at age 21 what your parenting style will be, what you want your sex life to look like (we were virgins) and how you will spend your money (we didn’t have any)? We DID get married and yeah, have had our ups and downs. We went back to counseling (a different person) around 12-14 years of marriage and saw him for over two years, and it helped. Recently started seeing another therapist to deal with some tune-up issues we couldn’t deal with ourselves. So i am a fan of counseling. I just don’t think all counseling is equal, and in my experience, most churches aren’t equipped to handle serious marriage issues and don’t do premarital counseling well. Paul, I’m sure you and Lori are the exception :-)
@Tory – Bad premarital is probably worse than nothing. But there are a lot of resources out there, so it’s possible to do it well.
As a pastor, I have had that policy for almost 20 years now. I even had several couples decide not to get married when in the pre-martial counseling. I tell our congregation and the couples I counsel that we spend 1 whole year planning for a 1 day event, but we spend not time preparing for the rest of our lives together.
I give the policy a big Amen although I have also seen that it gives couples an excuse to co-habitate instead of marring – yes church couples. It is amazing how many teachers we must dismiss from employent because they decide to co-habitate.
We used to have a excellent pastor at our church and he used the premarital counseling rule. Some of the congregation didn’t like it, they said it was he job to marry couples. But, he refused to simply marry people without some counseling first. He gave each couple of questionnaire to take home and each took it separately. I think there were 4 basic categories and it had about 100 questions. There were not right answers, they would compare afterwards and see how they lined up.
There were a couple of people that didn’t get married after the counseling, they discovered they were too much different. There were questions like how many kids you want, where do you want to live (close to parents or not), home responsiblities, sex, work etc.