Building a Safe & Strong Marriage

Building a Safe & Strong Marriage is a Christian marriage enrichment course created to help couples in nurturing their marriage, across five easy sessions. The course gives couples a chance to stop and focus on their marriage and how to make it better.  

Building a Safe & Strong Marriage is the culmination of 15 years teaching by Keith & Sarah Condie, who Co-Direct the Mental Health and Pastoral Care Institute.  This biblically-based course uses the tenets of the Bible, combined with current marriage research to help couples think through how to make their marriage better. This course will benefit any marriage, even if participants don’t share the Christian faith commitment.

Building a Safe & Strong Marriage provides an easy means of supporting and strengthening marriages in your church, organisation and beyond.  Invest in marriages by including the course in your church or organisation’s annual program.  And why not offer the course to those outside the church as a means of serving the local community.    

Since the course was launched in early 2019, over 3,000 couples have taken part in this course that was hosted in a church in their local community.  The course has been run in big churches, small churches, city churches, rural churches, across Australia and in other parts of the world including Hong Kong, Singapore, the UK and Slovenia.

Ingredients

To replicate this project your church will need:

• At least two facilitators committed to supporting marriages
• Purchase course resources – five session videos, Facilitator Manual and participant workbooks – two for each couple
• Download promotional material

Method:

Steps to run this project:

1. Find a couple willing to facilitate the Building a Safe & Strong Marriage course – please note, detailed instructions are provided in the Facilitator Manual, including the script for facilitating the course
2. Get the facilitators to watch Building a Safe & Strong Marriage and be familiar with the content of the course
3. Schedule the five-week course in your churches calendar
4. Promote course using the promotional material which you can find here: https://mentalhealthinstitute.org.au/building-a-safe-strong-marriage/
5. Purchase the participant workbooks – two for each couple at least two weeks before running the course https://mentalhealthinstitute.org.au/shop/
6. Encourage facilitators to plan each weekly session – including sound, technology support, hospitality, room set up.  They may need additional volunteer support
7. Get in touch with the Mental Health & Pastoral Care Institute if you have questions or need additional help or support:mentalhealthinstitute@mac.edu.au

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