Churches Act to Buttress the Family

With a third of “born-again” Christians reporting that they have gone through at least one divorce, Christian ministers, psychologists, and marriage and family counselors say churches need to be much more open and direct about dealing with their members’ relationships, mate selection, marriage preparation and marriage enhancement.

“Churches should take a leading role because they have a moral position in the importance of commitment people make to one another,” said James L. Furrow, professor of marital and family therapy at Fuller Theological Seminary’s School of Psychology.

Many church leaders had believed that active church members would have a lower divorce rate than others because of Christian teachings about the permanence of marriage. But that does not appear to be the case.

Several studies, including a recent survey by the Barna Research Group, which is well known for its church-related polls, have shown that religious Christians have divorce rates the same as the general population, with approximately one-third of adults having been through at least one divorce.

“We haven’t done a good job of helping people to know how to integrate their faith into every dimension of their life,” said pollster George Barna.

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‘Survival of Fittest’

“What we wind up with are people who know some of the principles and stories and platitudes, but when push comes to shove, it’s survival of the fittest.”

The Rev. Gordon Kirk, senior pastor of Lake Avenue Church in Pasadena, says his congregation took Barna’s “truth telling” to heart, and has initiated deliberate actions to counter what he sees as a divorce “crisis.”

Every couple that wishes to marry at Lake Avenue must take a 10-week premarital course. They are then matched with a mentor couple, who are available to work with them from the first marriage preparation class through the wedding and the first year of marriage. Couples also must take mandatory counseling, from six to 10 sessions.

To help increase “contentment in marriage and decrease divorce rates,” the church has also launched a joint program with Fuller Theological Seminary.

The project aims to use the church’s racially and ethnically diverse members as a “laboratory” to assess the effectiveness of counseling and similar programs.

Church leaders attribute the discrepancy between belief and behavior in Christian marriages to the pervasive influence of the culture of individualism, narcissism and consumerism.

“Tragically, the church is getting conformed to the mold of the world,” said the Rev. David W. Miller, senior pastor of the Church at the Rocky Peak in Chatsworth.

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Postmodern Age

“It’s part of the philosophical mood that underlies all of our basic media, our entertainment, our novels, our thought forms,” said David Augsburger, professor of pastoral care at Fuller and author of 20 books on marriage, human relations and pastoral counseling.

“We’ve moved into a postmodern age, where we respect each person’s frame of reference, and believe that universals -- like commitments that marriage is not to be broken -- are no longer binding.”

Yet, for religious couples, a faith that the marriage covenant is “not just between you and me, but it’s between you, me and God,” can be a resource to help through difficult times, said Furrow.

Other experts on marriage, however, say pastors are mistaken to believe that spiritual compatibility alone is enough to sustain a marriage, said Neil Clark Warren, a clinical psychologist and minister who has written eight books on marriage and relationships.

“In the church, they’re sick about all this marital decay, but they continue to addictively hold on to the idea [that ] if you just get spiritual compatibility right and you get chemistry right, that’s all you need,” said Warren.

“If you don’t get intelligence right, if you don’t get energy right, if you don’t get values right, if one of you is financially irresponsible, if one of you has an anger management problem -- any one of these can cause a major chaos in marriage,” he said.

Another problem that particularly affects couples in evangelical Christian churches is a tendency to bury marital difficulties out of fear or shame, Furrow said. Fellow church members often are surprised when these relationships end.

“A typical couple won’t go to therapy until it’s too late,” said Jack Orville Balswick, professor of sociology and family development at Fuller.