Just Between the Four of Us

Written by W. Terry Whalin

This article is courtesy of HomeLife.

When Jamie and Hope Mackey married almost two years ago, they knew they didn’t have all the answers. In their early 30s, each one felt pretty confident about doing life solo. But what did it mean to face life as a couple?

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Jamie, a youth minister in Fort Payne, Ala., and Hope had each been involved in discipling and mentoring students. They decided that they, too, could benefit from some “been there” kind of wisdom, so they asked a couple in their church to be their marriage mentors. Bob and Jill Johnston were close to their age but had been married 10 years and had a couple of children. Most of all, Jamie and Hope admired their marriage.

On the way to one of their early mentoring meetings, the Mackeys were struggling to communicate. They drove into the Johnstons’ driveway and sat in their car for almost an hour unsuccessfully trying to work through the issue when Hope said, “We ought to just tell Bob and Jill that we can’t meet tonight.”

“No,” Jamie said, “This is exactly why we have marriage mentors — to help us sort through this.” They went in. Bob and Jill, aware their friends had been in the driveway, asked how they could help.

“They listened to us, were vulnerable about their own struggles, and got down on their knees with us and prayed,” Hope recalls. “At 11:30 p.m., we looked at each other and knew we’d seen a miracle. We were so in touch with each other and the Lord. We knew things were going to be OK.”

The couples meet every other week for accountability and time together. While they sometimes play games or just hang out, often they delve into marriage talk.

As an unexpected bonus, the Johnstons have found that their own marriage has benefited. “I’d never heard about this concept of [marriage] mentoring,” Jill says, “yet we’ve discovered it helps us in our own marriage. About 75 percent of the time we simply listen; then the rest of the time we tell about one of our marriage experiences and how we dealt with it.”

Bob enjoys the Mackeys’ zeal for marriage. “You forget what you went through in those early days of a relationship. Mentoring helps remind us that we made it through, and some of those early struggles are easy now,” he says.

Couples helping couples also made a difference in the early marriage days of Drs. Les and Leslie Parrott, co-directors of the Center for Relationship Development (www.realrelationships.com). An older couple, Dennis and Lucy Guernsey became their informal mentors. “They cared and invested in us through their transparency and listening to us and asking questions,” Leslie says.

The Guernseys talked about a big fight in the early days of their marriage when Lucy took off her wedding ring, threw it in the gutter, and drove off while Dennis stood on the street. “We were amazed at this story from such a solid older couple. The experience was so hopeful,” she says. “If they can recover from that experience, then our challenges begin to look small.”

From their personal experience, the Parrotts began a marriage mentoring ministry in their church in Seattle. Before long, 200 to 300 newly married couples were connected with mentors.

How does it work?
Several marriage mentoring models exist, but each has one thing in common: a couple with some marriage wisdom walking alongside a couple with less experience. It doesn’t require a background in counseling or teaching.

Eric and Jennifer Garcia, co-founders of the Association of Marriage and Family Ministries, started a couple-to-couple mentoring ministry in their Scottsdale, Ariz., church. “We saw our culture — including the churches — as relationally bankrupt with a family disconnect,” Eric says. “There was a great outcry among couples for another couple to be their friend. Whether they are facing infertility or business and career changes or the fear of having a child, these couples needed someone to walk alongside them.”

Many marriage mentoring models pair newly married couples with more experienced couples, but the focus can be broader. The Garcias noticed, for example, that couples who were in a second marriage wanted to be with mentors who had successful second marriages; and couples with new teens wanted mentors who had successfully navigated those teen years.

Whether marriage mentoring is a formal ministry like the ones the Parrotts and the Garcias have designed or an informal set-up like the Mackeys and the Johnstons have created, there are six keys to making it work:

1. Connection. Whatever the stage of marriage, couples need someone they can connect with. The Parrotts say attraction is “the starting point in every effective mentoring relationship. … If either side is not genuinely interested in the other, true mentoring will never take place.”

2. Responsiveness. “The mentoree must be willing and ready to learn from the mentor,” the Parrotts write. “Without a responsive attitude and a receptive spirit … little genuine mentoring can occur.”

They emphasize that mentoring sessions aren’t for lectures, though; they’re for conversations. That means a mentor asks good questions and does a lot of listening, and most of the “teaching” comes through sharing stories.

3. Accountability. The Garcias also meet with an older couple who mentors them. “Our mentor couple keeps us in check to make sure we are on the right track,” Jennifer explains. “They are a lot of fun and also an example of how Eric and I want our marriage to be.”

The accountability goes both ways. While mentoring is relational ministry, not counseling, Eric says, “we want mentors to know when to involve professional counseling help but also to tell their mentoree couple that they will stand with them hand in hand through any difficulty.”

4. Transparency. The Parrotts emphasize that mentoring doesn’t require mentors with perfect marriages (there are none); instead, it requires a couple further along in the journey who’s willing to allow another couple to peer into their marriage.

5. Consistency. The Mackeys meet with their mentors every other week. The Parrotts’ model has newlywed couples meet with mentors three times a year (three months into the marriage, seven months into the marriage, and 12 months into the marriage). The Garcias’ model involves a commitment to meet four times a year, but most couples meet at least eight times a year.

Frequency isn’t as important as a commitment to meet on a regular basis. As Jennifer Garcia says, “It’s preventative. If every couple could have another mentor couple in their life, it would help their marriage.”

6. Prayer. Because successful marriages are centered around a relationship with God, successful mentoring happens when couples turn to God together.

If you think you could benefit from some wisdom in your marriage, seek out a couple who’s been there to walk alongside you. And if you have some wisdom to share, invest your time in a couple who’s now walking on the life-journey of marriage.

W. Terry Whalin is an author and editor living in Scottsdale, Ariz. His most recent book is Book Proposals That Sell. Learn more about it at www.bookproposals.ws.