This series of messages provides teaching and insights into how an elder can approach premarital counseling and performing weddings. Part 2 of 3.
Provide an opportunity for the trainers and the hopeful couple to establish a friendship; discover the couple’s eligibility for marriage; determine the couple’s maturity and potential trouble spots.
“Give us your intended’s testimony” – have each one share the testimony of the other.
If they can identify a problem that needs to be addressed, it usually proves that they aren’t viewing each other through rose-colored glasses but rather through biblical or realistic lenses.
- Why do you think it is important to make it clear in the first session that you are not committing to perform the couple’s marriage or to have their marriage performed in your church?
- Consider what the speaker says about performing a wedding if a pregnancy is involved. What are your thoughts on this? Do you agree or disagree with the speaker? Why?
- Are there any questions that the speaker did not discuss that you think should be asked during the premarriage preparation program?
- Ask two or three married couples to look back on their premarital counseling. What questions do they wish they had been asked before they got married? What were some great questions that they were asked?
- Find two or three couples who got married when one was a believer and the other was not. Ask them what struggles or complications they experienced in their marriage. Make a list of what they say.