Friday Flashback: The Power Of The Group

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Earlier this week I was at a meeting of church planters, and I heard two things that I think are true of marriages:

“A church is not mature if it is not connected to other churches.”

“We should not have different corporate and personal values.”

Based on that, two hard questions:

• Do you and your wife have relationships with other couples? Not you and the husband and her and the wife, but the four of you as a group. These relationships give strength to marriages. You gain accountability and positive peer pressure and provide the same for the other couple. Ideally, you have such relationships with couples with marriages both more and less mature/strong than your marriage.
• Do you and your wife have different values in private than you have when you are with others? Do you agree with certain things in the group, but then act differently in private? I see only one excuse for this and that is a “weaker brother” issue. However, the weaker brother should affect our actions, not our words. If we agree to something we don’t live, we’re lying. If you need to lie about what happens in private, something is wrong. 

Those of us who are following Jesus find ourselves in a minority. Even in the supposedly Christian nation of the USA, the majority are not making a real effort to follow Jesus. This means that the peer pressure of the world around us pushes us in unhealthy ways, including things that are harmful to our marriages. To fight the drift that can come from living among those who follow something else, we need to surround ourselves with those who are going the same way we’re going.

[This post first appeared Dec 11, 2011.]

A post worth reading:

Hot, Holy & Humorous | One Way Churches Could Really Help Marriages ◄ Yes and amen.

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