Marriage Savers: Creating Marriage Saver Congregations
And Community Marriage Policies
Two day Training
Presenters to include:
Mike & Harriet McManus - Marriage Preparation & Restoration
David & Claudia Arp, authors of 30+ books,
creators of "10 Great Dates" and "The Second Half of Marriage"
presented to 100,000 couples.
Rev. Jeffrey Meyers, Pastor of Christ Lutheran Church,
and Pastor LeRoy Sullivan of Bread of Life Ministries, whose Community
Marriage Policy reduced divorce rates 70% in Kansas City and 60%
in suburban Johnson County since 1996.
Dr. Ann Gries, Director of Marriage Builders in Evansville, IN
whose Community Marriage Policy reduced divorce rates by 20%
and raised marriage rates 19% since 1998..
Richard Albertson, Director LIve the LIfe Ministries, whose Community
Marriage POlicy reduced divorce rates 23% since 1999
Reduce the divorce rate, raise the rate of marriage, decrease co-habitation
and increase child well-being!
Academic research by The Institute for Research and Evaluation, (2004),
demonstrated that the divorce rate declined at twice the rate in
114 communities with a CMP, compared to demographically similar
communities. CMP Cities had an average decline in the divorce rate of
17.5% compared to a 9.4% drop in similar cities in each state. Co-habitation
rates also fell 13.2% in CMP cities compared to an increase of
19.2% in comparable cities. The estimate is that 50,000 marriages have
been saved in the first 114 CMP cities! By June 2006 there will be more than
200 CMPs signed. Marriages are being saved by the day. Your community
can be next and you can be the one to do it!
What Marriage Savers have done in thousands of congregations in hundreds
of cities can be done in your congregation and community. Attend this training and learn how!
Save marriages in your congregation and community.
1. Avoid a bad marriage before it begins by administering the FOCCUS premarital inventory
to give couples an objective view of their relational strengths and areas for growth.
Train marriage mentor couples to review the inventory and teach relationship skills
to build and sustain a healthy marriage. 18% of couples who go through this process
decide not to marry. Their scores are equal to those who marry and later divorce. So
couples breaking an engagement are avoiding a bad marriage before it begins Mike & Harriet
2. Give “marriage insurance” to the engaged - a 95% guarantee that their marriage
will go the distance. Trained mentor couples help couples talk through important
issues before they marry. Mike & Harriet
3. Enrich all existing marriages – learn effective ways to conduct marriage
strengthening seminars by using an inventory (you will learn how to use t
his for your own marriage and how to use with other couples).
David & Claudia
4. Restore four out of five troubled marriages with trained “back-from-the-brink couples”
(whose own marriages once nearly failed) to mentor couples currently in crisis.
The couple once on the brink of divorce due to addiction, abuse, adultery, etc, but that survived,
has wisdom for a couple in crisis. “We survived it. You can too.”
5. Reconcile the separated. In addition to mentoring, learn to use a self-guided
workbook course - Reconciling God's Way. This method heals more than half of
the separated. Joe & Michelle Williams
6. Help stepfamilies succeed by creating step-family education opportunities to
give couples with children from a previous marriage a place and a plan to learn
how to be successful parents and partners. Instead of losing 70% of stepparents to
divorce, this program saves four out of five remarriages, the mirror opposite.
Ron Deal
What is a Community Marriage Policy?
A cross-section of pastors from different denominations pledge to identify,
inspire, train and commission marriage mentor couples. Some work with
premarital couples, others do marriage enrichment, reconstruction of troubled
marriages, reconciliation of separated couples and others educate and
support stepfamilies. After a policy is signed Marriage Savers trains an
initial corps of Mentor Couples (and clergy) in a community - thousands of
Mentor Couples to date. Mike and Harriet will outline 10 steps to create a CMP.
Who Should Attend:
Therapists, clergy and anyone fed up with the destruction of divorce to couples and kids.
And, anyone interested in:
• radically reducing the divorce rate in your community
• raising the standard for Marriage
• reducing the divorce rate in your congregation to near zero
• learning to better help couples in crisis, separated or on the brink of divorce
Materials You will Receive:
• A Manual to Create a Marriage Savers Congregation
• FOCCUS Facilitator notebook
• Mentors Guide for FOCCUS
• REFOCCUS Marital Inventory
At a press conference to unveil the CMP research, “The Effectiveness of Community Marriage Policies”,
Diane Sollee, director of Smart Marriages, said that she came out of the, “therapy industry which
grew in power in the 60s 70s and 80s, when marriages were taken from congregations and the
community. At that time, she said, sophisticated clergy persons `knew’ that if a couple
was having trouble that they should refer them to the experts. This research [on] Community
Marriage Policy program with Marriage Savers Churches shows how important it is to put
marriages back into the churches and the communities who can take better care of them.”
Attend this institute, and leave inspired and equipped to create a Marriage Savers Congregation and begin to save
strengthen and save marriages in your community.
Join us for the Marriage Savers Banquet: Tues, July 2, 6:30pm, $39pp. Register for the Banquet
when you register for the institute and the conference.
Also, plan to join us for CMP roundtables! Friday morning, 7:30am.
Meet your colleagues from across the country. Network, brainstorm, encourage and learn from each other. Cooperate to canvass the conference for every morsel of information that will make our work more potent and efficient.
For more information contact Mike McManus
President, Marriage Saveres, Inc
301-469-5873
MichaelJMcManus@cs.com
http://www.marriagesavers.org
This institute is part of the week-long Smart Marriages conference.
Conference Details: download a conference brochure, Register ONLINE, hotel & travel information & discounts, etc.
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