Creating a Gospel-Centered Marriage (GCM) is a five-part series that serves as flexible curriculum for mentoring engaged couples and for marital enrichment within a church’s small group ministry. GCM provides marriage preparation and marriage enrichment content. (If a couple is in significant marital distress, they need marriage restoration-level care, which is more than GCM provides.)
In case you are unfamiliar with the categories of marriage preparation, marriage enrichment, and marriage restoration, here is a brief synopsis of each:
- Marriage Preparation helps engaged couples prepare for the new experience of marriage. It covers much of the same content that is covered in marriage enrichment material, but from the perspective of a couple looking ahead to marriage. GCM is designed to foster marriage preparation through mentoring relationships.
- Marriage Enrichment helps relatively healthy couples experience more fulfillment and joy in their marriages. Having couples with relatively healthy marriages work through “marital maintenance” material is the equivalent of someone who is relatively healthy joining the gym, improving their eating habits, and getting regular medical checkups. GCM is a marriage enrichment curriculum that couples can study in small groups (or under whatever name a church has for its primary discipleship groups).
- Marriage Restoration helps couples in crisis get to a healthy place. Marital crises might include infidelity, destructive communication patterns, or a spouse who is battling addiction. Restoration-level care requires the helper to have greater skill and training than GCM equips mentors or small group leaders to provide. However, GCM can serve as an aftercare resource once marriage restoration-level work has been adequately completed.
This video provides a brief overview of GCM.
* If your church runs GCM and wants to use this video help promote that ministry, you can download a version of this video here (without The Summit Church link at the end) and edit the end of the video with your church’s website.
If you do a web search for “how to add titles in iMovie” (or whatever software you use), and you will find several options for movie editing software to update this video for your church.
* * If your church wants guidance on launching ministries like GCM at your church, that is what Mobilizing Church-Based Counseling was written to equip you to do.