WHIPPANY: At 10 am Thursday, October 23 at St. Ann Church in Parsippany group of local pastors who represent three Catholic churches, an Assembly of God church, Parsippany Christian, Chinese Christian Missionary Alliance, and Community Life Chapel - will become New Jersey’s 7th Marriage Builder Community.   This will increase the ever-growing number of Community Marriage Policy’s across America which average 250. The clergy’s ambitious goal is to slash the divorce rate by 50% in a decade.

The first Community Marriage Policy® was signed in 1986 in Modesto, Cal., where the divorce rate is now down 57%.  In fact, seven cities such as Austin and El Paso, Kansas City, Modesto, CA and Salem, Oregon slashed the divorce rate by 50% in only six years. 

“We believe marriage is at the heart of stable families, and we are certain that we can
do a much better job than our present 50% divorce rate,” says Len Deo, President of the New Jersey Family Policy Council, which is sponsoring the event.  “We plan to create Marriage Builder Community Initiatives all across New Jersey, because they have been proven to not only reduce the divorce rate – but also the cohabitation rate and increase the satisfaction of marriages across the life span,” adds Jennifer Bolds, Marriage Builder Coordinator.

“No statewide organization has set such an ambitious goal,” says Mike McManus,
co-founder of Marriage Savers with his wife, Harriet, the organization which has helped 10,000 clergy organize Community Marriage Policies in 43 states. 

The average decline in divorce of the first 114 cities with Community Marriage Policies is 17.5% over seven years, according to a major study by the Institute for Research and Evaluation. “The [average] results are important,” even though they are modest, said Dr. Stan Weed, President of the Institute for Research & Evaluation. “There’s wide variation in program implementation, the proportion of congregations is often small, yet the reported data is county-wide.  Serious training of mentor couples began in 1998. Under these conditions, finding a significant program effect is actually pretty surprising.”

The study estimated that 50,000 marriages were saved in the 114 cities through 2001.  With
five more years and 93 more CMP cities, perhaps 75,000 to 100,000 divorces have been averted.

 How does a Community Marriage Policy® cut the divorce rate?   Clergy agree to reforms
in the way they do marriages. The core reform is to train mentor couples who help other couples be successful. "At present most churches are wedding factories," asserts McManus.   However, in the Parsippany Marriage Builders Community Initiative, clergy are pledging across church lines that there

will be no more quickie weddings. Instead there will be serious marriage preparation which includes a number of premarital mentoring sessions providing spiritual guidance and the use of a premarital inventory, to be thoroughly reviewed with the couple by a married mentor couple.  That is so rigorous it prompts a tenth of couples in weak relationships, to break their engagement.  “Studies show those couples have the same scores as those who marry and later divorce.  So they are avoiding a bad marriage before it begins!” McManus asserts. In his church, Fourth Presbyterian of Bethesda, 54 out of 302 couples broke up before the wedding from 1992-2000, but of those who married, only 7 divorced in a decade -- a 97% success rate.

 Marriage Therapist and Pastor, Jennifer Bolds will train mature married couples to serve as Mentors on Saturday, October 25 to prepare, enrich or restore marriages. A couple who survived adultery has credibility to say to one in current crisis over infidelity: “We made it. You can too.”

 Some churches have virtually eliminated divorce. Two examples: Killearn United Methodist in Tallahassee with 3,000 members, has prepared 200 couples for marriage since 1999 losing none to divorce, and worked with 30 troubled marriages, losing only a few. Bread of Life, an African-American church of 150 in Kansas City, KS has had only one divorce in six years. How? They recruited and trained mature mentor couples to help other couples achieve six great goals:

• Avoid a bad marriage before it begins by requiring a premarital inventory
• Give "marriage insurance" to the engaged, losing less than 5% to divorce by  having mentor couples give the inventory and talk though key issues
• Strengthen existing marriages in every church by organizing an annual retreat
• Save 80%-90% of marriages headed toward divorce by training couples whose  marriages once nearly failed to mentor those now in crisis.
• Reconcile more than half of the separated with a course, "Reconciling God s Way."
• Enable 80% of stepfamilies to be successful by creating Stepfamily Support Groups

 The Mentor Training will give couples 10 foundational skills to equip them to come alongside another couple.  Whether a couple is preparing for marriage, has found themselves in some sort of crisis or is just simply stuck in a rut, our goal is to help build a `safety net under every marriage. 

Click Here to see Covenant

Click Here to see the signing

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