Mark your calendars!

Our church in Shorewood Illinois is going to run another 9 week study of Fall In Love Stay In Love beginning on Wednesday January 20th, 2010 at 7:00pm. My wife and I will be leading.

Contact me via email (addy in my sig line below) for details, directions or a link to the church's website.

We will also be running a biweekly small group study based on material from Family Life (Dennis Rainey) called "Home Builders." This will be handled in a small group setting in several homes of members of the congregation with various facilitators and the plan is for the groups to move from home to home for the meetings. There will be more than one group and might be different nights and times available.

We are also planning a group (with group discount) trip to the Family Life Weekend to Remember in Oakbrook, Illinois this spring.

If you know anyone you think would benefit from any of these things refer them to my email or contact me for more details.

And the rest of you pray for this next round to go even better than the first...

Mark

Hi Mark

Is this something you took on yourself or do you work with MB?

I'm interested in doing something like this in our community.

Thanks!

No, I don't work for MB. I'm just a cell phone and two-way radio guy. We recognized a need within our church and community and set about trying to build a marriage ministry. Drop me an email and I'll send you my breakdown of the book. I selected FILSIL because it includes everything in one book that you need to implement Marriage Builders including the questionnaires.

Teaching is easy for me as the result of doing it as a Sunday school teacher for many years. Having studied MB for a while and seeing how it worked in our marriage led me to begin with it rather than a lot of other stuff that's out there right now. Our pastor is heading up the Home Builders stuff and I am handling the MB end of things. We're looking at what we are going to do going forward, but it is sure to include a bunch of small groups.

Round 1 went really well. We even had a get together a couple of weeks ago with the group that went through it the first time. If this time goes as well as the first, we're all set...



Mark

Fabulous idea. Kudos to you for undertaking this program. I am sure it will touch many lives.

Bump^

Are you going to start over on HNHN, or continue on from where you left off? Is this the same group, or a new group?

New group studying FILSIL again. The first group is planning a get-together for this Friday (Jan 1).

We also have 4 spin-off groups that are being facilitated by those in the first group that will focus primarily on the [i]Home Builders[i] material and will include couples that were not part of the first group or second group of FILSIL couples.

Bump^^

Bump for the mid-week crowd...

Bump for the weekend warriors...

One week till we start this next round of Fall In Love stay In Love. Books will be available if you don't have one. If you have a copy and plan to attend, read the first three chapters.

Email me if you need more information.

Last bump for this.

We'll be kicking this thing off on Wednesday night at 7pm CST.

Email me for directions if you'd like to attend.

I still have few books left as well.

Mark

Bumping again because of the time lost the last couple of days.

Email me for directions or the link for the church website.

We start in less than 24 hours!

Mark

Okay, Mark, tell us what is different from this round of classes, the mix of those from the first class and newcomers, and how it is going.

Retread,

We had an ice storm of sorts on Wednesday night which kept some folks home for the evening.

One couple that came REALLY needs to learn this stuff. I have known him for about 3 years and have been trying to get him to look at MB the whole time I have known him.

They both put their cell phones on vibrate and the entire hour and a half they were in the room with us one or the other was looking to see who was calling. He's in Conflict; she's in Withdrawal and they each carry so much resentment that I'm surprised they even made the effort to make it. (They were late and arrived in separate vehicles.)

The one thing that is already different, other than being a smaller group so far is that my wife told her story of how we have come back from the brink using MB concepts. It was week two when prompted by questions in the first class, but she basically volunteered the info this time in the very first meeting.

My wife and I are also meeting with a couple we know. They can't make Wednesday nights, so we are basically doing the FILSIL book with them at another time.

The Friday night groups that are meeting in homes of members that are studying the Home Builders material kicked off last week and we have about 20 people at a "Grace Based Parenting" seminar this weekend. Our first time MB class is planning a February get together/reunion.

Good stuff is happening in Shorewood, Illinois...

God is GOOD!

Mark

I got some photos of the ice from rural Iowa. Yikes! Deer frozen solid, and every strand of barbed wire as thick as your little finger with ice. It reminded me of an ice storm we had when I was about 13 that lasted 7 days, followed by a day of snow. We were without power for most of the time. When it came on, we ran water into buckets and jars, then took a bath really fast in case it went off again. And we ran all the troughs full of water for the livestock, about 200 head of cattle and 8 horses, that we had driven up to the barn so we could keep them fed.

It sounds like you have a whole new group. Are the members of the first group continuing on with the concepts on their own, or in another class? It would be hard for me to do that in a class with my friends. But, then again, I can't even get my wife to pick up the book.

Retread,

Our "ice storm" was pretty benign IMO. My wife and I both drove there, her from home after getting off work and me straight from work. The roads were slick but not impassible. You just have to remember that as traction falls off, nothing can happen instantly. (Slip angle drops to near zero for the racing and engineering fans) I once had a tricked out Mustang GT as my daily driver. It taught me all sorts of stuff about doing things gradually.

The old group is getting together about once per month so far and some of them are attending the "Home Builders" groups, one couple leading one in their home. The last night I gave my "Nike" speech (Just DO it...) and some folks have told others that the class might have saved their marriage. We all see each other a time or two per week anyway, so we chat about stuff all the time.

One of the things that makes doing this thing with friends easier for me is that I pretty much stuck with Dr Harley's stuff. We brought up some other things along the way and discussed the concepts in pretty great detail but this wasn't an infidelity recovery group, simply couples wanting to learn how to improve their marriages. I also have been a leader in this church since 1992 going back to our founder and through two subsequent pastors. I also did a share of the preaching for almost three years and still preach every once in a while. So a lot of these people know me as a teacher.

Now there are few couples that I'd like to kidnap and force to attend the class...

We'll see what the turnout is this week. If people get too far behind it gets hard to catch up without slowing down the rest. Since I have nine weeks, I pretty much have to stick with my schedule.

Mark

Mark,

How did Marriage Builders get introduced to your church?

My church has been doing very little "mission work" to its own. A few of us have finally persisted in putting together a financial and career counseling group for church members and anyone else who wants to join.

I want to introduce Marriage Builders in my church. For all I know, there may be other members of the congregation who are familiar with Dr. Harley, and even trying to implement the principles in their lives.

I was thinking of donating the books to the church library, and then maybe the DVD courses, so I thought I would ask you, and anyone else, if they had experience doing this in their church.

Retread,

Our pastor was at least marginally familiar with the work of Dr Harley. He and I had been discussing starting a marriage ministry for some time and for some reason we could never get down to the nuts and bolts of how to do it.

Then early last fall we had a sudden surge in marriages in crisis. It became a priority for all of us in leadership and I suggested Dr Harley's materials. Rather than buy the DVD or CD series, I took on the task of figuring out how to teach through Fall In Love Stay In Love in the time we had available to us. I picked FILSIL because it is really the whole MB program in one book.

My intent was to teach MB to a group of folks who would then transfer that knowledge to others, and that seems to be something that is happening. We had such a great time in the first group that the people who attended the first class get together once per month for some sort of social event, usually at the home of one of the couples. We have some couples who now attend the church after becoming aware of us first through the class and at least two couples now attend together though the husbands did not attend before coming to the class.

One of the couples in the current class is attending for the second time and they are a great help in explaining the stuff to the others. I think they should do their own class next. They read here, so they can think about it...

When we got ready to do the class we bought books in bulk and made them available. We sold more books than we had couples attending the class. We promoted the class for a few weeks with announcements and short messages about the class. I also produced a 1 minute video commercial spot that we ran as part of the general announcements for three weeks in a row.

Another church may have me come do the whole class for some of their folks next and we're looking at a two weekend sort of seminar format version as a possibility. I'm thinking about 4 hours on two Saturday mornings, either two in a row or every other weekend. Not sure on this yet, but we're kicking it around.

Why not go to your pastor and ask to do a class based on FILSIL. It's really just guiding people through the book, filling out the ENQ, LBQ and PHQ at the appropriate time and asking questions to get them to think about what they have read.

Easy for me since I taught Sunday school for years, have done a bit of preaching in my time and have access to the pastor by virtue of being one of the Elders of our church.

If you want to do a class yourself for your church, I'll do whatever I can to help you out. Let me know what you need and I'll try to get it to you.

Mark

Hi mark,

If you do the 2 weekend thing, let me know. I have some North Suburb friends who would probably attend--although they are also thinking of attending an MB weekend, so... that could be a factor.

Anyway, let me know! :-)