What Your Ministry Really Needs: Marriage: Built to Last

I used to think I was perfect- until I got married. Okay so not exactly perfect, but close.

And it’s hard to believe in December, my husband and I will be celebrating our four year anniversary. It’s truly a gift from God. I respect and love my husband more than on the day I committed my life to his. He’s my best friend and soul-mate, and I couldn’t live with without him. But I’d be lying if I told you that our marriage isn’t hard work. And that it doesn’t require living intentionally and loving biblically… which is the tag line of our new marriage series.

Well for a while now at Bluefish TV, we’ve been creating a small group bible study series called Marriage: Built to Last. We got the kit back from the manufacturer last week and as a writer on the production team, I’m blown away by how well the real-life stories, biblical teaching, and funny spots have come together.

I’ve connected a few marriage stories to our producers to shoot, assisted in writing host copy, written an article to help small group leaders, and edited an article that our Senior Producer Brian Mosley wrote called Together. The majority of my work on the series was editing the Marriage: Built to Last Leader’s Guide and Workbook.

What I love most about what our team has produced is the stories from real-life couples. They are transparent to the core and share about real life issues like expectations, communication, conflict, and sex and intimacy. I also say “to the core,” meaning that these couples get down to the dirty, uglier details of their marriage. Some of them expose their pride, anger, pornography, past baggage, affairs, control issues, spending habits, unhappiness and more.

I’ve never really seen such brutal honesty and I have no doubt that their authenticity will help spark life-changing discussion among married couples that will even put some on the road to completely restoring their marriage.

Here’s a little sneak peak into the six session titles that pastor and author Chip Ingram teaches on: 1. Adjusting to Expectations 2. Learning to Communicate Clearly 3. Breaking Down Walls 4. Resolving Conflict 5. Restoring Sex & Intimacy 6. Striving for a Christ-centered Marriage.

When all is said and done, we’ll have over 13,000 Leader’s Guides and over 80,000 workbooks floating around for this series. At this point, we only hope that all the work that’s been put into this series will have an amazing impact on marriages all over the country. And that most of all, couples will live out what God says about building a marriage that will last a lifetime.

How would you say marriages are doing in your ministry? What excites you about potentially using a resource like this?