Parish Marriage enrichment

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Couples, what types of events (presentations, talks, groups, anything) are available to you in your local parishes. Would like to hear of those you would enjoy and attend and those you would run and hide from.

My wife and I have been active in Worldwide Marriage Encounter for many, many years. We are looking for some ideas we can start at our parish level to bring together couples and enhance their Sacrament.

Thanks to all.
 
The “Beloved” series on FORMED.ORG is excellent. It is available at just about every parish in our Diocese!

The standard WWME and Retrouvaille weekends happen, but, for many families childcare and cost make away weekends prohibitive. This is why BELOVED is great, it can be done in a group on on your own!
 
Thank you. I don’t know much about Retrouvaille beyond that it is for troubles marriages often where trust has left the relationship. I commend the couples that are involved in that.

Have you viewed or participated in the series you mentioned?

Thanks again.
 
My wife and I go to a couples night once a month with a short talk related to marriage and family life given by a priest and a get together after. I think it’s a great chance to develop spiritually as a couple and meet other Catholic couples.
Also I think something exclusively for men/women is a good idea. I always love to chat with other Catholic husbands.
 
Marriage Renewal Seminar
Marriage Enrichment Experience
Healing and Transformation Seminar for married couples.
 
The pre-cana that my fiance and I went to is not technically offered at my parish, but is offered at several through out the diocese. Our instructors said that they have had several married couples participate and we enjoyed the program so much we would like to try to do it every 3 years or so. Although we consider our communication with each other to be our strength, we had a friend watch our kids for us and we took the whole weekend to ourselves and checked in on topics we already discussed to make sure we were on the same page, get some new ideas for implementing, and we were introduced to a few new topics that we talked deeply about. Then we spent time just being a couple without the kiddos around. It was great!

The program was called “joy filled marriage.”
 
I am the FORMED admin for our parish, I’ve viewed that and much more of the content.
 
Wonderful. I will make sure to review it. I still have personal access, but the parish stopped supporting it for all the parishioners.
 
Something our parish has that sort of functions as a gateway drug to other marriage enrichment programs is 12 Great Dates for Catholic Couples. The second Friday of every month you drop your kids off at the childcare ministry, watch a brief video and then go on a date anywhere you want as long as you are back to get your kids by 9. No commitment of showing up each month only to reserve childcare if you are.

The videos are usually a DVD series or clips someone has found on Formed. When they are struggling to find a marriage one, maybe a gospel reflection. There is a page of discussion questions you leave with for your date.

It pulls in couples who may have otherwise had trouble establishing regular date nights because of sitters (that was totally us). So it enriches the marriage that way. It also serves as a time to promote all the other upcoming or ongoing enrichment opportunies.

A couple who doesn’t normally do stuff like that can get a little taste of what its like through the video and discussion and decide hey that was great, let’s do even more things for our marriage!
 
I think that the program where my wife’s a member was called GIFT…?

We didn’t go to that program at all, but attend what was to be a pretty popular speaker for the parents. If you bring in guest speakers, I’d recommend reviewing the content of their speeches.

The guest speaker we had filled 30 of about 45 mins with inside jokes and ribs at non-Catholics. With me being a NC and my wife Catholic, it got to the point where we about left.
 
Thank you @TC3033 and all others. At this point we are just talking to our priest about what we can do for married couples. It will most likely be the two of us, with maybe the priest on one or two occasions. We have two small churches and would present the topic once a month at each parish. Optimistically there might be three couples at each to start, but you don’t know until you try.

We have ideas, but presenting what we think is important is a little myopic. That’s why I appreciate all the comments and suggestions, especially if anyone did NOT have a good experience.
 
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