Amazon link to the McManuses' book
here.
Mentoring Program May Save a Bad Marriage
Before It Begins
By Maggie Gallagher
March 25, 2008
In America today, cohabitation has become a
social norm. Why? In large part because young people
are so fearful of divorce. Living together has
become an accepted solution to the problem of
figuring out whether a relationship can last for
life.
Mike and Harriet McManus have a vision: America's
churches can offer better answers to a generation of
young people torn between the relentless human need
to trust in love and the reality that 50 years of
high divorce rates make it hard to hope.
But religious communities, rather than offering
hope, have more or less accommodated to the young
people's anxieties by passively tolerating
cohabitation, say Mike and Harriet in their new
book, "Living
Together: Myths, Risks and Answers." The
McManuses are clear about one thing: We owe the next
generation more than moral lectures or confused
silence, and we owe them practical help in building
successful marriages.
This is particularly true, Mike and Harriet point
out, for Christians, who are called not only to
"flee fornication" but to model for the world and
for each other the unbreakable love between Christ
and his church. But when Christian marriages fail at
about the same rate as worldly marriages, Christian
communities are failing in their main mission to
model God's love.
The practical consequences of marital failure is
that churches lose a lot of the next generation as
well. Forty percent of married parents attend church
weekly compared to only about a quarter of parents
who are not married. Divorce and unmarried
childbearing not only hurt children and adults, they
interrupt the intergenerational transmission of
faith.
Cohabitation certainly does not reduce the risk of
divorce and probably increases it. "You can't
practice permanence," as Mike told one young man.
People who cohabit often slide into less-than-ideal
marriages because breaking up is harder to do if you
are already sharing bed and board. If cohabitation
doesn't work as a way of preventing divorce and bad
marriages, what does?
The McManuses are not academics -- the greatest
strength of their testimony lies in 20 years of
experience in providing extremely practical help to
engaged couples, first in their Bethesda, Md.,
congregation, and eventually in many other
communities through the marriage mentoring and
community marriage policies they detail on
MarriageSavers.org.
What the McManuses do is something quite different
from most ministers, who either exclude cohabiting
couples or ignore their cohabitation. The McManus'
church offers all couples -- including cohabiting
ones -- a free, extensive marriage-preparation
course given by experienced, married mentor couples
who teach not only the religious significance of
marriage but the practical skills for conflict
resolution, even though their church will not marry
cohabiting couples. The message sent? We care about
your relationship, and we will help you build a
better one.
One of the things that the mentor couples do is to
review the results from a "premarital inventory" --
a questionnaire that identifies potential strengths
and weaknesses when participants rate statements
such as "At times I am concerned about the silent
treatment I get from my future spouse," and "I am
concerned that my future spouse spends money
foolishly." Couples who identify the problems in
their relationship can decide to learn how to handle
disagreements in better ways, or (sometimes) decide
not to marry at all.
Of 229 couples that the McManuses mentored who
married, just seven have divorced or separated.
Almost one-fifth of the couples they mentored
premaritally decided on their own to break the
engagements, which Mike and Harriet consider equally
important.
Marriage is not just one of many issues for pastors
and congregations; it is a test of our capacity to
reflect God's love in the world. Rebuilding the next
generation's faith in love, the McManuses say, needs
to become a more urgent priority.
