Rockaway Clergy Aim To Slash Divorce Rate 50%
At 11 am Thursday, January 29th at the Rockaway Township library a good number of pastors from Rockaway Township and Rockaway Boroughrepresenting two Catholic churches, an Assembly of God church, Christ Church, Christian Fellowship Church of God, and Sts. Peter and Paul Orthodox Church- will become New Jersey’s 8th Marriage Builder Community. Thiswill increase the ever-growing number of Community Marriage Policy’s across America’s averaging 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 thedivorce rate is now down 57%. In fact, seven cities such as Austin and El Paso, Kansas City, Modesto, CA and Salem, OR 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 ourpresent 50% divorce rate,” says Len Deo, President of the New Jersey FamilyPolicy Council, which is sponsoring the event. “We plan to create Marriage Builder Community Initiatives all across New Jersey, because they have been proven tonot only reduce the divorce rate – but also the cohabitation rate and increasethe 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 withhis wife, Harriet, the organization which has helped 10,000 clergy organizeCommunity Marriage Policies in 43 states.
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.“Pollster George
Barna reports that 39% of Protestants have divorced compared to 37% of atheists and agnostics.”
However, in the Rockaway 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 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 havevirtually eliminated divorce. Two examples: Killearn United Methodist inTallahassee with 3,000 members, has prepared 200 couples for marriage since1999 losing none to divorce, and worked with 30 troubled marriages, losing onlya 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 mentorcouples 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% todivorce by having mentor couples give the inventory and talk though key issues.
- Strengthen existing marriages in everychurch 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 step families to be successful by creating Step family 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.
