Marriage Ministry Crash Course: Our Year-Round Approach To Calendaring

By Ryan Gernand

We adopted the MarriedPeople strategy a couple of years ago at our church near San Antonio, TX and boy were we excited. In our excitement at the beginning, we thought, “Man,we really want our couples to get this great content and experience these amazing experiences NOW, and not LATER!”

I began to sit down and figure out how we could hold a small group experience, larger group experience and date nights in a span of a couple of months. However, after some pondering, and some great conversation, we realized that we have done that already. We had done a four to six week marriage series once a year. We have taken the fireman with the fire hose approach, and we knew we needed to do more. The marriages in our church and community needed more.

After that revelation, we realized that the best approach was to take a year-round approach instead. We needed to be better at not just giving marriages a ton of content in a brief amount of time and saying good luck, but keeping it constantly and consistently in front of them.

At the beginning of each year, we sit down as a team here at Grace and calendar out our year (as best we can!). This helps us see a broad view of the different touch points we have with families and marriages. Based on our small group structure (three yearly semesters), we know that we can provide MarriedPeople groups two semesters a year (spring and summer semesters). From there we decide on where we would like our quarterly date nights to fall and place those on the calendar. The hope is that these are always preceded by a larger group experience in the context of our Sunday Morning Service where we can use that as a vehicle to promote the date night experience coming up.

Finally we calendar out the days that we are going to send the E-ZINE and do that on a monthly basis. This approach gives us approximately 30 touch points for married couples throughout the year; a much broader stroke than a 4-6 week series on Sunday morning!

It has been 2 ½ years now and we continue to learn and evolve our process. Having this process though helps us plan, and helps our couples plan for what’s upcoming.

(Note: Got a question about calendaring your marriage strategy? Join our MarriedPeople Leaders Facebook Group—it’s free—and interact with other leaders like Ryan Gernand who have either been there, or are in the process right now of putting a team together, or just starting the journey.)

 

Ryan Gernand is the Family Pastor at Grace Community Church in Universal City, TX where he oversees Early Childhood, Elementary and Student areas, along with the church’s ministry to Married Couples and Parents.

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