Marriages and Families

Developing a Vision and Strategies
for Marriage Ministry

This page intends to help you articulate a vision statement, define your target group and plan your strategies.

The following suggestions are simply illustrations to get you started.  You should not just copy them, but rather think about your own vision, target group, and strategies.

Vision

The Alliance Ministry (substitute your own name) exists to offer couples:

• Understanding of God’s perspective of marriage and family
• Renewal in their marriages, freeing them from weights and barriers
• Long-term friendships with other couples which can provide mutual support across the years
• Practical tools for keeping their marriages healthy and for helping other couples.

Target Group

• Couples who are in a strong phase, who desire to deepen their own relationship and learn how they can help other couples
• Couples who are going through a more difficult phase and wish to overcome it.

If you decide to include both types of couples, you should plan to have separate groups for each.  That way each group can be focused toward what will be most helpful to the needs of all of its members and there will more likely be openness and transparency within the group.

A couple with chronic and serious problems can sabotage a group, especially if the couple is hostile to each other.  This couple will probably need professional therapy, pastoral counseling, restoration ministry and/or financial counseling.  It may still be possible for the couple to participate in a mentoring group if, at the same time, they are being cared for in a more intensive individualized way through other resources.

The target group can change as the ministry develops.  It could be best to develop a core of mature and healthy couples interested in mentoring others.  The ministry will likely begin within the church but can be used for outreach to new couples, unmarried partners who are living together, non-Christian couples and couples from other churches interested in knowing and extending this model of marriage ministry to their own churches.

Strategies

To fulfill your vision in relation to your target group, we suggest the following:

• Modules: Organize the topics you think are important into independent semester-long modules, so that couples who wish to participate may begin with any module.  A structure of four modules could be repeated in a two-year cycle.  If your ministry takes off and you have enough mentor couples, after the first two-year cycle, you could consider running two modules simultaneously (1 with 3, and 2 with 4).  That way new couples coming in can more easily do the series in sequence.

A suggestion:
Module 1 – Communication (establishing the mentoring approach and modeling transparency)
Module 2 – Marriage Foundations–Basic Skills
Module 3 – Celebrating our Differences!
Module 4 – Marriage Projects

We give further information on these modules, including possible resources, in the link at the bottom of this page: Implementing the Project.

• Mentoring: The ministry is based on mentoring groups.

• Retreats and special events:  One day retreats and special events should break up the routine of weekly meetings, adding deeper relational and celebration times. 

Return to the initial page on healthy marriages and families or go to Implementing the Project.