How this one pastor and his wife used Focus on the Family resources to help struggling marriages

When Michael and his wife, Judy, moved from an established church where people had been raised in Christian families – sometimes for generations – to a church plant where half the congregation was new to faith, they quickly saw that many of the couples needed guidance.

“Roughly half of our church congregation was made of individuals who didn't know the gospel before and have come to know Christ through the gospel in the last five to 10 years,” Michael says. “As we were ministering to and discipling these men and women, and they were talking about some of the issues that they were struggling with in their marriages, we noticed that a lot of these people have no idea what a godly marriage should look like because they haven’t had that example before. So, I thought, we could head off a lot of issues if we did a group study on what a godly marriage should look like.”

Michael already knew Focus on the Family Canada’s resources were trusted to be scripturally sound, so he didn’t have to look far when it came to finding a small group study. He called Focus on the Family Canada’s team for recommendations and was pointed to the Sacred Marriage study.

Michael and Judy invited a group of couples to their home – helping them arrange babysitting and working around everyone’s schedules – to go over all six sessions.

“It took a couple of weeks for the walls to start coming down, but by the third or fourth week, people were being much more real,” he recalls. “One member said that she never, ever heard from a pastor that they struggled, or they doubted, or they had fights in their marriage. We've always tried to set an example of the fact that that we are not perfect, that we don't have it all figured out, and that we're working through this too, but by God's grace, we're getting there and we're sharing with you the things that we've learned.

Even on more sensitive topics like sexual intimacy in marriage, Michael and Judy were encouraged by the couples’ willingness to share. “Everyone commented on the fact that they really enjoyed the discussion part of it,” he says. “It's one thing to go through the study together as husband and wife, the two of you – and there's some good to that – but when they got together with other couples, they realized, Oh my, we're not the only ones struggling with that!”

By setting an example that they didn’t have all the answers, and they didn’t have a perfect relationship – even as a pastoral couple – Michael and Judy could point these new Christians to God’s grace in the context of their marriage.

“It gives hope,” he explains. “There are ways to work through this. God has good in mind for our marriage relationships.”

Michael recalls one couple in particular who made him question if they found the study beneficial. “The wife specifically had mentioned the fact that she finds it very hard to open up and share where she's at and the husband was definitely the verbal one between the two of them,” Michael says. “And then when I asked for post-study feedback, Judy and I were both blown away in terms of how much they gleaned from it and the fact that they were telling us uninitiated. In the months that followed, when they ran into issues, they actually went back to the books all on their own and realized that there was good stuff there.”