Preparing Couples for a Marriage, Not Just a Wedding

While I believe God can use a difficult marriage to help us grow, I've come across couples of whom I've thought, "They should never have gotten married. Where was their pastor?" Premarital work is one of the most protective and vital things that a pastor can do. It shouldn't be rushed, and it needs to be about much more than preparing for a ceremony. This post chronicles what Lisa and I do with couples, what tools we use, and our philosophy behind spending so much time with each couple. I hope that those of you involved in premarital counseling will share some of your own tools and practices in the comments section.

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As pastors, our call isn’t to put on a great prelude to a party (i.e., a wedding). It’s to prepare engaged couples for marriage, a lifelong relationship. Too often, time constraints lead many of us to focus the bulk of our “preparation” on planning a ceremony.

Here’s how we can change that:

Take on Fewer Couples

Because I spend ten to twelve hours with every premarital couple, I limit the number of couples I’ll see and the number of weddings I perform. Joining two people for life is a very serious thing, with lifelong implications. For me, I don’t believe it’s responsible to promise my blessing without truly knowing the couple and testing their relationship. I’d rather do a great job with a few couples than a cursory job with many.

This is why I try to convince a couple not to sign up with Lisa and me! I tell them we’re willing to invest a significant amount of time, but only if they want to go deeper into their relationship, be tested, and then talk over issues that will help them grow.

Explain Your Agenda

The couple’s agenda is to get married. My agenda is to test the relationship and prepare them for life after the wedding. I explain this to couples at our very first meeting and invite them to go somewhere else if they want the common “two meetings and a ceremony” approach. The ten to twelve hours we spend are taken up going through Nine Essential Conversations Before You Say I Do and one or two sessions going through the results of the “Prepare and Enrich” test. By the fourth or fifth session, I’m usually not testing the relationship anymore as much as I’m helping them to prepare to join their lives together.

At the beginning, I ask the couple to make a pledge that they will contain all “ceremony discussion” to two or three days a week. Some couples make the upcoming wedding the center of their relationship for months at a time, but then, after the wedding is over, they’ve lost the main focus of their relationship. My job as a pastor is to help them maintain perspective: they’re preparing for a life together, not a one-day celebration.

Step Away When You Must

One of the most difficult tasks of pastoring for me is telling an engaged couple I’ve been working with that I’m not confident enough with their relationship to perform the service. They have two options: delay the wedding until the issues are addressed or find another pastor. Part of the job of pastoring is protecting the flock. I’m not going to knowingly marry a believer and a non-believer, for instance. Nor will I perform the service if I see likely signs of future abuse or unaddressed addictions that will devastate any marriage. I mention this possibility at the start so they know going in that my stepping back is always a possibility. This rarely happens, but it’s important to keep in mind.

Stress the Need for Honesty

I don’t insist that the couple share all their secrets with me (I’m not a licensed therapeutic counselor), but I do strongly encourage the couple to share their secrets (appropriately and with proper counsel and discretion) with each other. For instance, I have them share their credit reports with each other. If there aren’t any problems, there won’t be any hesitation. If there is any hesitation, that in itself is a problem and the future spouse needs to know about it. Lying to get someone to marry you is about the worst form of fraud a person could commit. It is generous to take on someone’s debts, bad habits, limitations, ill health, etc.—but the person taking on these things deserves to know before the commitment is made just what it is they are committing to.

Homework

Ten to twelve hours with a couple might seem like too much, but the more I do it, the more I realize it’s actually not enough. That’s why I also assign homework. I wrote a devotional for exactly this purpose: Preparing Your Heart For Marriage: Devotions for Engaged Couples. The first fifteen devotions address common issues that arise in counseling, including money, sex, and communication. The second portion of the devotional goes through the traditional statement of intent. The third portion goes through the traditional wedding vows, phrase by phrase. I know that on the couple’s wedding day the ceremony will go so fast that the vows they repeat will hardly even be heard, much less contemplated. But I want them to read the vows in advance, talk about them together, answer questions about what they mean, and pray about them together so that when they say them in the ceremony the words will be familiar friends rather than one-time acquaintances. Even if they choose not to use traditional vows, the language of the vows is powerful and a useful tool to prepare them for such a solemn commitment.

Other resources that frequently come up: if I can get a couple to take Dave Ramsey’s Financial Peace University somewhere, that’s very helpful. It’s practical and solid advice for newly married couples. For issues related to conflict, we often recommend Les and Leslie Parrott’s The Good Fight. There are a hundred different books I could recommend on a first anniversary, but these are two key ones to get them going.

Sex is Number Seven

The way Nine Conversations is set up, sex doesn’t come up until session 7. If I had to do it over again, I’d bring it up earlier, because this is the conversation that could require one of the engaged partners to seek out some licensed, therapeutic counseling, and they’ll need time for that.

For a couple who haven’t been sexually active, Lisa and I recommend that the couple read Getting Your Sex Life Off to a Great Start by Cliff and Joyce Penner. It’s practical and wise, and has held up well, in spite of being published decades ago. For the honeymoon, we recommend Married Sex by me and Debra Fileta.

A Blessing that Matters

A good start never guarantees a strong finish, but it always helps. My goal is that when I say those wonderful words, “I now pronounce you man and wife,” I can rest in the assurance that the couple has been warned, comforted, encouraged, instructed and prepared to make these vows with integrity and confidence.

In the comments section, I’d love to hear other takes from pastors and churches about what you’re doing for premarital couples.

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