Fun fact: Did you know the original colors of the traffic light were red (stop), white (go), and green (caution)?
We all know a traffic light or signal when we see one. Typically, we have a love/hate relationship with the traffic light. We don’t like to be stuck at lights. Plus, it always seems like we get red or yellow when we’re in a rush.
A traffic light can be defined as a set of automatically operated colored lights—typically red, amber, and green—for controlling traffic at road junctions and crosswalks. Green means go, red means stop, and yellow/amber means slow down because a red light is coming.
In fact, the red light indicates that danger is on the other side of the light. A red light beckons us to stop so we can avoid danger (i.e., a car speeding the opposite direction that could harm us if we keep moving forward).
How is a pre-married ministry like a traffic light?
Years ago in our pre-married class at Watermark (called Merge), I started to use the image of a traffic light to help couples discern next steps in their relationship. While in our class, the green, yellow, and red lights have nothing to do with automobile traffic, they do provide a helpful guide for ministry leaders and mentor couples.
As you lead pre-married couples, this simple analogy helps guide them to think about moving forward towards engagement or marriage, hitting the pause/slow down button, or encouraging couples to end their relationship.
Green means “go”
This means you’re excited about a couple moving forward towards engagement or marriage. Friends and family support and cheer the couple on as they move forward in their relationship.
No, this doesn’t mean the couple is perfect. But it does mean they’re making good decisions in their relationship. You’d be honored to officiate or attend this wedding ceremony!
Yellow means “slow down”
Trouble is coming in the opposite direction and couples need to be cautious about moving forward. For a pre-married couple, a yellow light doesn’t mean they need to break-up, but it does mean they should slow down and process things at a deeper level.
The typical “yellow light” couple has some questions they need to answer before they either move forward toward engagement and marriage or before they hit the eject button.
Red means “stop”
Danger is coming, hit the eject button, and get out while you still can! For the pre-married couple who gets a red light, this means there are some major barriers in place that should lead them to break up. This might be because they’re unequally yoked, which is when a Christian marries a non-Christian.
The Bible doesn’t tell us who we should marry, but it’s very clear a Christian shouldn’t marry a non-believer (See 2 Corinthians 6:14). Or maybe there’s some major dysfunction in their relationship (i.e., infidelity, unaddressed addictions or unhealthy pre-married sexual activity). Or perhaps the couple can’t learn how to communicate and resolve conflict.
Other people around the “red light” couple are begging and pleading for them to break-up. It’s not because they don’t want the couple to be happy, but rather because they love them and don’t want them to sign up for a life of misery together or a future divorce.
Unfortunately, in my experience, too many couples in the red zone keep going forward. This happens because the couple doesn’t want to hear what others say, or because others are too afraid to share their concerns.
I wrote it as a biblical, practical, and authentic guide to help couples take the next best step in their relationship. I pray couples would read Ready or Knot? and break-up. I also pray the money they spent on the book would spare them much pain and hurt in the future.
I also wrote Ready or Knot? to help “green light” couples move forward toward marriage with confidence. Too many couples move towards marriage with excess levels of fear and anxiety. While the decision is a big one, Ready or Knot? can help a couple say “I do” with joy and confidence in the Lord.
As you counsel pre-married couples, where do you think they land?
Are they green? Let’s hear those wedding bells.
Are they yellow? What can we do to help them figure out the next step?
Are they red? Let’s help them end things so they don’t end up living in misery or getting divorced. The break-up is the best possible result for some couples.
Scott Kedersha is the director of marriage ministry at Watermark Community Church, where he has served on the marriage team for more than 12 years where they seek to prepare nearlyweds, establish newlyweds, and enrich and restore all marriages. His first book, Ready or Knot: 12 Conversations Every Couple Needs to Have before Marriage came out with Baker Books on February 2019. Scott lives in the Dallas area with his wife and four sons. Learn more at www.scottkedersha.com.
Can you believe that 2018 is almost over already? It feels like it just started. As we wind down this year, it’s a good time to look back at some of what we’ve done over the past 365 days.
Hopefully you’ll find some time amidst the craziness of the holiday season to reflect. Perhaps recapping some of the best blog posts we published during 2018 might help.
We publish a new post for church leaders working with marriages every week—Thursday mornings to be exact. That more than 50 blog posts every year. Here are the top 10 articles we shared in 2018.
We’ll also be sharing some of our top 10 couples posts and top podcast episodes of the year. Hopefully some of these resources have been helpful to you. And looking forward to sharing even more in 2019!
Robert Carnes is the editor on the MarriedPeople team. He’s worked in marketing and communications for a number of churches and nonprofits. Robert lives in Atlanta with his wife, Victoria.
Do you work in marriage ministry? Do you live in Atlanta or Southern California? Then you might want to join us for one of our two upcoming Marriage Ministry Gatherings.
Working in ministry can be a lonely endeavor, especially when you work as a field as small as marriage ministry. We try to help cultivate community with things like our webinars and Facebook group. But digital connections only go so far.
Sometimes you just have to meet with people face to face and relate to them in person.
Married People exists to help your church help marriages. We provide resources, training, and community to church leaders who work with marriages and families.
At MarriedPeople, we’re all about providing couples less content, more often. Rather than dumping a year’s worth of marriage content on them during an annual retreat or sermon series, we’d prefer to share practical advice for their marriage on a consistent basis.
That’s because married couples are busy. They’ve got so many things vying for their attention. For that reason, their marriage sometimes gets put on the back burner. Without meaning to, they grow disconnected from their spouse and allow their marriage to weaken.
A Practical, Consistent Resource
That’s one of the reasons we create MarriedPeople Monthly—a monthly email with simple, fun tips on how to stay connected in marriage. And we’ve built this resource so that churches can customize the content and send directly to local couples.
Even if you can’t pull of a huge marriage event, or organize a marriage small group study, we have confidence that your church can send out an email newsletter to married couples. Since we do most of the hard work already, all you’ve got to do is collect email addresses and click send once a month.
New and Improved
We’ve used the current framework for MarriedPeople Monthly for about the past two years. It’s included sections like Plugged In and The Spice that provide easy to understand advice for couples. But we knew that we could make it even better.
That’s why we’ve rebuilt MP Monthly from scratch. It’s organized around how modern-day couples want to get their information—whether that’s by reading a blog, watching a video, or listening to a podcast episode together.
How It’s Organized
Here are the six new sections of the newly redesigned MarriedPeople Monthly, which launches this month (September 2018). We encourage couples to pick only a few to focus on each month.
Read This: A link to a relevant blog post, or other online resource
Listen To This: A recent episode of the MarriedPeople Podcast
Watch This: A fun and engaging video couples can watch together
Text This: A fill-in-the blank sentence to complete and text to a spouse
Ask This: A thought-provoking discussion question to start a conversation
Do This: A practical action step couples can take to improve their marriage
How to Get MP Monthly
MarriedPeople Monthly comes as a part of our church partnerships—a year-long subscription with the Annual Plan and six months worth with a Starter Pack. You can also purchase a year’s worth of MP Monthly separately from our online store.
What all do you get every month with a subscription? If you’ve used MP Monthly in the past, you may be familiar with some of these files. But several have also be updated to match the new look.
An HTML file of the email
A link to the MailChimp template
Word document with all of the content
JPG and GIF files of all images
Shareable social media plan and graphics
PDF instructions for how to use the email
MP Monthly logo
Does your church use MP Monthly? How else do you connect with local married couples?
Married People exists to help your church help marriages. We provide resources, training, and community to church leaders who work with marriages and families.
I thought I’d write a different kind of post. I’d like to sketch out what I think a church with a strong marriage ministry would look like, and then I’d invite you to share your thoughts, in the hope that this could be a resource page or a springboard for discussion for churches that want to be more intentional about supporting the marriages.
A Strong Marriage Ministry Leverages Marriage Mentors
Pastors should not be the main focus of a marriage ministry. A pastor may not be gifted at counseling, which is OK. After all, Pastors were hired to primarily lead and preach. There are limited pastors at each church. They can’t do all the work.
A strong marriage ministry involves couples from the congregation. If a church is going to support marriages, it needs to find a way to forge relationships where couples can talk about important issues. I believe is the best vehicle for this is mentorship.
A mentor couple should be a couple whose marriage is strong and has been married at least ten years.
Marriage mentors are often better equipped for pre-marital counseling than pastors, who may not have the time. It’s often better to talk to a couple than just a pastor.
Mentors should be trained on how to ask questions that encourage discussion. Most breakthroughs come because the couple is able to talk through issues.
Mentors are not counsellors. The role of a mentor is not to help couples solve problems but instead to raise important issues for discussion and to guide conversations and prayers. If counseling is necessary, the couple should then be referred elsewhere.
Mentors do not need to have all the answers; they need to be equipped to ask the right questions.
The church should set up a system where it’s easy to get a mentor couple if you need one.
Choose Marriage Mentors Based on Relationships, Not Past
We have a tendency to promote leadership that looks one way—Christians their whole life; always chose well; never rebelled; still married to their first spouse.
However, the strongest marriages are not necessarily those that fit the “ideal” Christian mold. If congregation members are to relate to marriage mentors, then there should be some diversity in faith journeys among the mentors. While all should have solid marriages now, it’s OK if some people were not born in the church, and became Christians after a difficult faith journey.
It’s even best if some marriage mentors are blended families. Let’s have the marriage mentors resemble the congregation, rather than assuming that those who “look” the most Christian automatically have the strongest marriages.
A Strong Marriage Ministry Flows From an Authenticity Culture
The culture of a church is passed on, top down. At the church my daughters attend, the senior pastor is very open about some of the mental health battles his family has faced, so the church family can pray for them.
At the last song of the service, those who need extra prayer are always encouraged to come up to the front, without judgment. It’s never seen as a sign of weakness. People will not open up to marriage mentors unless the church does not punish those who admit failings. If churches want to rescue marriages, then people need a safe place to admit when they have problems. If they don’t have that, no one says anything until the marriage implodes.
The more we deal with the messiness of life, the more people can admit problems when things do get messy. If no one can dare admit an issue without appearing strange, then no amount of marriage programs will accomplish much.
Leaders Must Have Strong Marriages Themselves
It’s a biblical principle that one shouldn’t serve on church leadership unless one has strong family relationships at home. If the church wants to send a message that marriage is important, then, it must choose leaders that have good marriages. Even if those couples do not directly take part in marriage mentorship, the leadership of the church must still model good marriages.
Leader couples should always speak well of each other
The couples should have no whisperings of impropriety
The couple should support one another in their giftings, rather than the wife seen as simply an appendage or servant of her husband.
There must be a “team” feel to every ministry couple.
The latter point is especially important. In churches where women are seen more as servants of their husbands, the divorce rate is far higher than in churches where marriage is seen as more teamwork. Researchers have concluded that this is because women don’t feel entitled to speak up about marriage problems when they first occur, because they believe that to identify issues would be seen as unsubmissive. After years of dysfunctional behaviour, the wives often throw in the towel.
If leaders demonstrate grace and care for one another in a team framework, then church members are more likely to feel free to raise issues when they crop up, rather than letting them fester.
A Church That Supports Marriage Does Not Overburden Those Who are Married
Frankly, those who are involved in church as leaders are often burned out with no time for their families. If the leaders don’t have strong marriages, then they can’t support other people’s marriages. Too many ministries in churches require too much of people in their 30s and 40s.
A church that values marriage will:
Ensure that no one is expected to be at church activities more than one night a week
Examine their ministries to make sure that they aren’t “make work” or “make busy” events. Choose only events that feed the community and that reach those outside the church. Lower the scope and expectations of some of those events
Encourage those in their 50s and 60s to do more of the child care, Sunday school, and nursery ministry to give parents a break
Host more adult mixer activities, like board game nights or movie nights, rather than always dividing by gender so that couples can do more things together
A Strong Marriage Ministry Supports Couples
Sometimes churches shy away from offering couples’ events because we don’t want single people to feel left out. Yet marriage is the bedrock of families and the community. It is not taking away from single people to sometimes offer something for couples.
A Strong Marriage Ministry Addresses the Tough Topics
What is it that tends to rip apart marriages? Money and sex. Yet few churches address either very well from the pulpit.
Before we blame pastors for this, let me say that I don’t think much of this should be addressed from the pulpit. There are children and teens in church; single people; divorced people.
While sex can be addressed in general ways, you can’t get nitty gritty on a Sunday morning. There is a time and place, and that is neither the time, nor the place, for anything that explicit.
With the money issue, too, what people really need is practical help on managing debt and using credit cards. Those sorts of things aren’t handled well from the pulpit, either. You need a workshop. What I would suggest is that the church go out of its way to make resources available on tough topics, remembering that if the church doesn’t address them, the world will fill the void.
Encourage Bible study groups to do a study on a tough topic
Encourage membership to sites like Covenant Eyes, which allows accountability and filtering for computers, phones and tablets to help prevent porn addictions
Share through social media, Pinterest boards, men’s and women’s Facebook pages, or newsletter lists great articles about sex, marriage, money, and other issues
Host financial planning seminars and good financial management seminars. Have debt counsellors available for couples who need help
A Strong Marriage Ministry Is Focused on Wholeness, Not Marriage
Finally, a strong marriage ministry is focused on God’s heart for us—that we all be transformed into the likeness of His Son. A strong marriage ministry is not focused on making sure that all marriages stay intact.
That may seem like a loaded statement. But where I see churches err most often is that they are so scared that a marriage will fall apart that they fail to call people to wholeness.
Churches must be able to identify toxic things that will destroy a marriage—porn use, addictions, emotional, verbal, physical, or sexual abuse. When these issues pop up, the emphasis must be on healing these issues, not healing the marriage. True relational healing can only happen once the underlying toxic things have been properly dealt with. But we’re often too scared to deal with toxic issues because they’re so huge and they threaten the marriage. Instead we try to paper over them.
Churches must be better at supporting those in difficult marriages and calling sinners to repentance. Not every marriage problem is a communication problem. Yet we often treat them as such—telling people to learn each other’s love language or to learn to talk more. Some problems are caused by a huge sin, and those problems are often one-sided. Not every marriage issue has two parties at blame.
Until churches can start calling a spade a spade and calling people to something more, while supporting the hurting spouse, no marriage ministry will ever be effective because you will be undermining the authenticity of your witness.
How Strong is Your Marriage Ministry?
If you’re talking about this article as a leadership community, here are some questions to ask. Rate each question on a scale of 1-5, which will give your church a score out of 75. This may provide some insight on where your efforts should first focus as you grow a strong marriage ministry.
Does our church have “marriage mentors”?
Do the couples that we believe have strong marriages all fit that “ideal Christian” mold? Could we be missing some strong marriages because we have preconceived notions of what a strong marriage will look like?
Is the weight of marriage ministry resting primarily on our pastor?
Do those struggling with pornography in our church have an obvious, well-advertised place to get help?
If a couple needed marriage help, or a person wanted an accountability partner, is there an easy way to access that help?
Looking at our church leadership, including the board(s), paid staff, and ministry coordinators, how overburdened are they? How are their marriages?
Is teamwork a hallmark of the marriages among our church leadership?
Do leaders in our church regularly speak well of their spouses and encourage their spouses’ spiritual giftings?
Looking at those aged 25-45 in our church, how much of the practical, hands on responsibility for ministries falls on their shoulders? How much falls on those aged 45-65? Is this a healthy balance?
Do we have a culture where people can safely admit that they are struggling without judgment?
Does our church handle sex in a healthy way? Do our small groups, couples’ ministries, or single-sex study groups feel comfortable talking about it?
If couples are having major debt issues, do they know where to go for help?
Have we had low-cost, affordable marriage events (either couple events or single-sex teaching events) at our church in the last year?
Do we have a network of trained Christian counsellors to whom we can refer couples in trouble?
Do we regularly refer couples who are dealing with toxic issues, rather than trying to deal with issues of that magnitude when we may not be trained for it?
What works at your church with marriage ministry? What doesn’t? Let’s help each other!
For a downloadable guide of these criteria, along with an assessment tool to see how your church ranks on marriage ministry, head over to Sheila’s original post.
Sheila Wray Gregoire has been married for 25 years and happily married for 20! She loves traveling around North America with her hubby in their RV, giving her signature “Girl Talk” about sex and marriage. She’s written eight books about sex and marriage.
We love featuring the work of many different experts and thought leaders on marriage. Want to contribute to our blog? Email admin@marriedpeople.org to find out more.
I’ve been working in marriage ministry for a few years now. Actually, it’s over fifteen. And I’ve been married for over twenty years. In that time, I’ve learned a few things about how churches can help couples improve their marriage.
Studies show that people think of marriage ministry as preachy, outdated, and overly feminine. We’ve lost our relevance in people’s lives. But there are some shifts happening in some ministries that are changing how they approach marriage ministry.
3 Approaches that Fall Short
Before we get into the ways to improve how your church approaches marriage, let’s take a quick look at the trends that do not work.
The Hands Off Approach: Many churches do little to help marriages because of the pace of ministry or because they don’t feel a need.
The Topical Approach: Some churches view marriage as a topic to be covered, so they address it through various “one-offs”—a sermon series, a study, an event or a book. They treat marriage ministry like a task on a to-do list.
The Reactionary Approach: Other churches spend time and resources on marriage, but they focus solely on couples in crisis—in essence, waiting until marriages are in trouble before offering help, rather than taking a proactive approach that could help couples avoid crises in the first place.
A Proactive, Strategic Approach
A proactive approach—a strategy—is more effective than a topical or reactionary approach. Changing from one of these historical marriage ministry approaches to a proactive approach requires some paradigm shifts.
From an intervention to intervention and prevention : Intervention is emotional and the results are measurable. Prevention is neither—but is far superior.
From isolation to relationship : Technology makes people feel more isolated than ever before. A strategy ministry places a priority on building community and authentic relationships. Not just between couples, but with others that we can learn and grow from.
From information to experience : As a society, we’re suffering from information overload. As a result, people value experience more than another content dump. That’s why it’s important to give people less content, more often.
From feminine to feminine and masculine: Too many marriage ministries are geared almost exclusively at women. They’re overly harsh on men, who stop listening as a result. We can improve more marriages if we appeal to both men and women.
From general to focused: Sharing an overly general message doesn’t resonate with people. Getting specific with examples and practical applications makes a message relevant to couples. They want to hear authentic stories they can understand and use in their marriage.
From programs to process: Marriage retreats are great—but they give couples a year’s worth of resources in a weekend. That’s a lot to process and they often forget what they learned after a week. Why not give them bite-sized pieces of advice spread out through an entire year? Help them process and progress gradually.
How Our Strategy is Proactive
Because marriage is a process, the MarriedPeople strategy is designed to encourage and empower couples on a consistent basis—no matter where they are in their marriages.
This shift is what makes MarriedPeople a proactive approach, not a topical or reactionary one. Our strategy leverages three environments to reach couples:
Individual Couple Experiences: date nights and monthly emails to help couples connect
Small Group Experiences: community, accountability, and faith building
Larger Group Experiences: vision casting, outreach, and inspiration
Ted Lowe is a speaker and the director of MarriedPeople, the marriage division at Orange. Ted is the author of two books—one for marriage ministry leaders (Married People: How Your Church Can Build Marriages That Last) and one for married couples (Your Best US: Marriage Is Easier Than You Think). He served for almost 10 years as the director of MarriedLife at North Point Community Church. He lives near Atlanta, Georgia, with his four favorite people: his wife, Nancie, and their three children.
