Marriage Ministry
Six hours now for the decades after.
A six-session course for couples preparing to marry, ending with the ceremony itself.
A course. Six sessions of one hour each, a published curriculum, and exercises you work through together. You do not need a problem to bring.
This is education for a couple preparing to marry. It is not counseling, diagnosis, or treatment.
How it works
Every module runs in two movements. A short teaching piece that gives you a lens or a skill. Then an exercise where you use it on your own relationship, in the room, while someone is there to help. You leave each session having learned something and having practiced it together.
What is included
- Format
- Six sessions, 60 minutes each. Twelve modules, two per session.
- Where
- By video or in person.
- Assessment
- The Prepare and Enrich assessment, with a full debrief in Session One.
- Between sessions
- A workbook, assigned reading, and exercises to do at home.
- The finish
- Session Six ends with the first draft of your vows and a walk through the ceremony.
- Cost
- One fee covers the whole course, the assessment, and the materials. Ask us and we will tell you.
The six sessions
The course answers three questions in order. Why does conflict happen between two people who love each other? How does difference turn into a fight? And where does it show up?
Session One
Foundations and Vision
What you each think marriage is, and where that came from. Covenant rather than contract. Then your assessment results, read together, so the rest of the course is built around your actual relationship.
Session Two
Why Conflict Exists
Two whole families becoming one household. You map both, going back generations, and see what each of you was taught about love, money, and conflict. Difference is normal. Difference is not fault.
Session Three
The Cycle Underneath
What you fight about is rarely the real issue. You take one recurring argument, map what is said on the surface and what each of you feels underneath, and name your own cycle. Then you practice interrupting it.
Session Four
Where It Shows Up
Money, household labor, and the six pillars of intimacy. The flashpoints most couples hit first, worked as practice rather than theory.
Session Five
Protecting the Marriage
You write your own guardrails around friendships, devices, privacy, and time apart. Then the other half of the same work: the habits that keep a marriage worth protecting.
Session Six
Covenant, Vows, and Ceremony
A rule of life for your marriage, a plan for the flat seasons every marriage has, and the first full draft of your vows. The course ends where the wedding begins.
Where the material comes from
The curriculum draws on the research that has held up. Gottman on conflict and repair. Sue Johnson on the emotional cycle underneath a fight. Bowen on family systems. The Prepare and Enrich assessment, and the six pillars of intimacy. Alongside Keller and Köstenberger on the theology of marriage.
We use what is true wherever we find it, and we read all of it inside a Christian understanding of marriage as covenant.
If something bigger surfaces
It happens. A course like this opens conversations couples have been putting off, and sometimes one of them needs more than a curriculum.
If that is you, we will say so, and there is somewhere to go: pastoral counseling or clinical counseling, with the consent, disclosure, and privacy protections that counseling carries.
The wedding
If you would like the same person who walked you through the course to stand up with you on the day, we officiate. See wedding officiating.
They are separate services and you can book either on its own. Booked together they cost less than apart.
Who it is for
Engaged couples, couples considering engagement, and couples already married who want to do the work they skipped. Our beliefs shape what we teach. They never decide whom we serve.
The teaching is openly Christian and the vision of marriage is a covenant one. Read our Statement of Faith.