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2007-10-02 issue:

Lessons from premarital counseling

A Grace and Truth column

by Ron W. Adams

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When I first became a pastor, I rarely got invited to officiate at weddings. Every good Mennonite, it seemed, had a cousin or aunt who was a pastor. She was asked to officiate at the wedding. I was asked to provide the premarital counseling.



The first few times, I approached the task believing it was my job to help couples solve whatever problems they had and so make them ready for marriage. I was the expert who had the training they lacked and so was in a position to get them ready for life together.
To a certain extent, that was true. Not so much the expert part. I had no list of hidden secrets passed down through the generations, no inside track on making relationships work over time.
But along the way I had picked up a few common-sense notions of how relationships work best. From that limited repertoire, I worked with couples toward greater awareness of the issues potentially awaiting them and the tools they’d need to face them. Now I realize that mostly what I did was listen and reflect with them, repeating what they already knew to be true.

Things have changed over the years. Now I’m asked more frequently to officiate at weddings. While some of my pastor friends have grown weary of all the extra time and pressure weddings involve, I still enjoy them. I’m nourished watching people join themselves in this way and in the context of worship with the gathered community.

Marilou, my wife, and I now do the counseling together, a wonderful gift from Marilou to me and to the couples with whom we meet. Having male and female present on both ends of the conversation provides a safer, more welcoming environment. And our different takes on our marriage inevitably enrich the session. I recommend the practice of inviting a colleague of the opposite sex to share the work of counseling.

I have also changed my expectations about premarital counseling. I no longer assume our efforts will result in some brilliant new insight. Instead, premarital counseling serves as a place to name what is already known. Points of difference, areas in which communication is difficult, the various baggage being lugged into the relationship, are laid on the table and gently explored.

Where gifts are evident, we name them, reinforcing their existence and their potential for good. Where points of tension remain, we name them too, encouraging the couple to keep working at them and seek help from the community.

Nowadays we are much more modest about what premarital counseling can and ought to do. What may be most important is simply providing the couple with a safe place in which to open their most cherished relationship to the loving, prayerful care of others. Ideally, premarital counseling is just the first step in what will become a lifelong practice of couples seeking the care and counsel of sisters and brothers in Christ.

Marriage, like the rest of life in Christ, is a communal happening. That’s easy to remember on the wedding day, with friends and family gathered around to worship and celebrate with the couple. It’s harder to remember a month, a year or 10 years later, when most of us have learned to keep such things private.

If I have one wish for every couple with whom we’ve counseled, it is that they replicate the vulnerability expressed in premarital counseling throughout their marriage, leaning on their sisters and brothers as they live and love together. And I pray for the rest of us that when they do, we will be ready to welcome them in and listen.

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