The journey to marriage: an essential teaching opportunity for the church

Steve M Stewart

Etd

The journey to marriage: an essential teaching opportunity for the church

Public Deposited

MLA citation style (9th ed.)

Steve M Stewart. The Journey to Marriage: an Essential Teaching Opportunity for the Church. Columbia Theological Seminary. rim.ir.atla.com/concern/etds/1a14800f-5652-436b-a764-3e1ecdbe0ea5.

APA citation style (7th ed.)

S. M. Stewart. The journey to marriage: an essential teaching opportunity for the church. https://rim.ir.atla.com/concern/etds/1a14800f-5652-436b-a764-3e1ecdbe0ea5

Chicago citation style (CMOS 17, author-date)

Steve M Stewart. The Journey to Marriage: an Essential Teaching Opportunity for the Church. Columbia Theological Seminary. https://rim.ir.atla.com/concern/etds/1a14800f-5652-436b-a764-3e1ecdbe0ea5.

Note: These citations are programmatically generated and may be incomplete.

Creator

Steve M Stewart

Rights Statement

In Copyright

Abstract

Maintaining healthy marriages has always been a critical issue for churches, because of the high divorce rates. The general feeling is that many marriages fail, because people get married without understanding the impact this relationship will have on their lives. The Church has a vital role to play in helping to raise he awareness of what marriage entails. It has a unique opportunity to prepare couples for married life. The theology of marriage is explored and the role of the Church to help make healthy marriages. Responses from questionnaires and interviews were used to examine the necessity of premarital counseling. The author focuses on showing the necessity of premarital counseling and why the Church must consider it a tremendous theological teaching moment to help people prepare for Christian marriage. This project follows the path of a proactive assignment. It takes a quantitative and a qualitative case study approach process. This path is followed to achieve a relevant research methodology in order to enable the work to be of relevance to the ministry of the researcher. The author found that even though premarital counseling, can by no means be regarded as the sole factor to guarantee successful marriage, that there is a general agreement that there is need for helpful preparation of couples. Regardless of the outcome of the marriage, He feels it to be of eminent importance for the church to journey with people to their marriages. In that way all couples are made aware of the challenges that come with marriage. Pastors and other counselors must make use of all teaching opportunities available to them to make people aware of theological issues involved in the different aspects of life. This is why the author suggests structured policies on premarital counseling for his Church, which is the Evangelical Lutheran Church in Suriname (Evangelisch Lutherse Kerk in Suriname) so that there is uniformity in guiding all members, and all Christians who will read this project. The author finds journeying with couples to their marriages indeed to be a wonderful teaching opportunity.

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