Marriage Savers president Mike McManus recently announced that a faith community in Albuquerque, New Mexico, has become the 200th in America to sign a "Community Marriage Policy," thereby committing to reduce their city's divorce and cohabitation rates by making marriage a priority in their congregations.
However, McManus notes, while the commitment of dozens of pastors and priests in Albuquerque is encouraging, it will not mean much if that commitment is not supported by training. What Marriage Savers does, he explains, "is teach couples how to create interventions that work at every stage of marriage to help couples be successful."
By training couples in the techniques and principles that lead to a successful relationship, the ministry spokesman contends, church leaders can practically eliminate divorce within their congregations. And, he adds, the divorce rate of an entire metropolitan area can be dramatically reduced "if you have enough churches doing this in a whole city."
McManus co-founded Marriage Savers with his wife Harriet, who also works with him in presenting the ministry's weekend seminars, training ministers, spouses and engaged couples how to build healthy marriages.
During these Friday and Saturday sessions, he notes, "my wife and I will train both clergy and couples in healthy marriages to become mentor couples, to help other couples either prepare for a lifelong marriage, to enrich existing ones, or to save troubled ones, or to help stepfamilies be successful."
The Christian marriage expert says this training program has a proven success rate, and he points to Austin, Texas, for example. "The divorce rate of Austin is now down 50 percent," Marriage Savers' president notes. "The average drop is less than that -- it's about 17.5 percent over seven years," he admits. "But still, that's significant, and it's happened in more than 100 cities, according to an independent study of our work."
The churches of Albuquerque are to be commended for their decision to make building strong, lifelong marriages a priority in their city, McManus says. He is confident their commitment will help to slash the area's divorce and cohabitation rates and make for stronger, healthier families.
McManus adds that he and his wife will also be addressing the New Mexico legislature to call for replacing the state's "no-fault" divorce law with a more equitable statute providing "mutual consent" divorce.
Mary Rettig, a regular contributor to AgapePress, is a reporter for American Family Radio News, which can be heard online.
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