pat loughery

I don’t think I’ve written about this before, but one of the things we’re doing this year is sponsoring and facilitating a marriage workshop for the members of our community. I’ve been interested in doing this for a while, but picking the materials, using the right facility, meeting people, etc. takes a while.

I spent a couple of hours on the phone a while ago with Roger Schoeniger, the pastor of the Anchorage Vineyard. A friend of mine had told me that Roger was really into marriage training and inner healing prayer (which seems like a perfectly reasonable combination to me). And since the Lord’s strongly guiding us into seeing everything in our world relationally (faith, culture, community, evangelism, prayer, …), well, marriage seemed like a good place to start.

Roger pointed me towards the work by PREP Inc., which I’ve ordered and studied for a while now. I like that it’s a blend of faith-based training with good, solid sociology of marriage material. Its tools are real and effective; they’re similar to what Shannon and I have learned in marriage counseling when we’ve gone.

So we’ve been advertising this for a month or so now, ads in the newspaper, flyers up at the local businesses and libraries and post offices, I slapped together a quick webpage when we got surprised that a newspaper ad got published that we thought had missed a deadline, etc.

Today was the scheduled start. As of this afternoon, we had zero signups. None. Zilch.

That’s no fun.

So we made other plans, cancelled childcare plans and figured we’d advertise again in a month. And today we have heard from 3 couples who are signed up (plus ourselves). So we’re going to postpone our start by a week, and start with at least 4 couples next Wed. Two couples from our church, two couples who saw ads somewhere and whom we have never met.

That’s encouraging. And exciting.