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How to serve marriages in your church
It would be impossible to list all the books, retreats, programs, and ministries that exist to serve married couples in the church. It’s appropriate and good that we emphasize this area of care. But the sheer number of options can become overwhelming, and choosing how to best help marriages in each situation takes wisdom and discernment.
Rather than point you to specific resources, we want to share some overarching principles we’ve discovered about marriage ministry as a whole. Keeping these in mind can help guide you through the specifics of serving your church’s unique needs.
1. Raise the value of marriage
It’s much easier to offer a program than it is to change a culture. Unfortunately, in many churches, marriage is not very highly esteemed. Some of this is an unintentional byproduct of an understandable reluctance to make single people and divorcees uncomfortable; we shy away from praising marriage because we don’t want to rub salt in any wounds. But marriage is admirable and praiseworthy, and we lose something when we don’t acknowledge that. Before you ever introduce a formal marriage ministry, consider how your church can better honor marriage (Hebrews 13:4) and hold it in high regard.
Raising the value of marriage in your church takes intentionality. It takes the whole staff agreeing to make it a priority. It means talking about marriage from the pulpit. It means not just celebrating the couples who make it through marital crises, but also the ones who have been quietly and faithfully married well. One church, for example, has all the married couples stand on Valentine’s Day and then works backward by number of years to find and applaud the couple who has been married the longest. Small gestures like these add up and communicate the message that marriage is valuable.
2. Serve all stages
Marriage enrichment resources often target extremes—couples on the brink of divorce or starry-eyed newlyweds who can’t get enough of each other. In truth, though, most marriages are somewhere between the two. It’s important to invest in young married couples and in struggling marriages, of course, but putting all your energy into outliers leaves the vast majority of couples in your congregation without a place to go.
Is there a place in your marriage ministry for someone who's been married for eight years and settled into a joyless but functional routine? What about the couple in their 70s who both remarried after their spouses passed away? Couples with young children? Couples trying to survive an affair? If you have the ability to tailor separate events and ministries to each demographic, great! But if more than one main marriage ministry isn’t realistic for your church, make sure the one you choose is beneficial for couples in all stages of marriage.
3. Serve in small groups
Couples counseling tends to be the church’s go-to solution for struggling marriages. While this personal attention can certainly be beneficial for a couple, it can be resource-intensive for pastors whose time is already in great demand. Another approach is to consider serving a group of couples rather than a single couple.
Surprisingly, the effort required to shepherd a group of couples is not significantly more than one couple. While ministry isn’t an assembly line, time and energy are resources that have to be stewarded like any other. It's worth weighing the benefits of meeting with individual couples against the efficiency of meeting with groups.
Serving couples in groups instead of one on one also prepares them to live openly in community with other believers. When you normalize transparency and authenticity in these groups, it indirectly begins to shift the culture of the church as a whole. Once couples have had a taste of radical authenticity, it’s hard to go back to surface-level relationships.
4. Focus on discipleship
Marriage ministry is, first and foremost, discipleship. If the focus becomes anything but the Gospel of Christ—even if it’s a good thing, like communication, parenting, or preventing infidelity—the ministry has lost its way. Every resource, lesson, and activity must flow from the saving truth that God loves us so sacrificially that he gave his own son to rescue us from death, allowing us to be restored to a relationship with him. This is our urgent message. This is why marriage matters. It’s why anything matters.
It’s your job to be able to give an account to the elders of how you’re investing in the body spiritually. That’s true no matter what demographic you serve, from marriages to students. The best marriage ministry ideas in the world won’t have the teeth to make a real difference unless they are chiefly concerned with growing people as followers of Christ.
These four principles, among others, helped shape Watermark’s Re|engage Ministry. By no means is it the end-all, be-all of marriage ministry. There are faithful people doing amazing work for God all over the world through any number of programs. But if you’re thinking of starting your own marriage ministry, re|engage exists so that you don’t have to reinvent the wheel. It’s a biblically-based, discipleship-focused turn-key marriage ministry solution that utilizes lay leaders and small groups to bless marriages in every state—from those that just need to be reinvigorated to those needing complete resurrection.
Reach out to resources@watermark.org if we can help you with anything. We would love to hear from you.
