The Marital Restoration Team (MRT)

The purpose of the Marital Restoration Team is to coordinate care and collaborate with couples who identify significant marital problems. The team does this by developing, coordinating, overseeing, and monitoring a plan for marital restoration.

Marital restoration is taking a relationship that is broken and making it functional. Marriage enrichment is taking a marriage that is functional and making it excellent. Marriage enrichment is the focus when the marriage is restored, not before.

Enrichment might include more common marital challenges (communication, intimacy, money, roles). Often, enrichment care like mentoring, counseling, and focused reading on an enrichment topic will lead to gradual but noticeable improvements. Restoration might include marital challenges from things like abuse or betrayal (i.e. emotional, financial, sexual). Addressing these kinds of situations utilizing enrichment care will often result in failure and frustration. Restoration challenges require the one who has used coercive control, committed an affair, or who has otherwise inflicted the greater impact on the relationship to seek specific personal changes, with God’s help, in an effort to restore the marriage before enrichment can begin. This means there are likely two separate tracks of care for each spouse.

This team’s focus is restoration, not enrichment.

In view of the holiness of marriage and it's great potential for Christ-exalting impact in our community on the one hand, and the sad reality of the ongoing presence of several dysfunctional, sin-riddled marriages in our midst on the other hand, the development of a team committed to understanding all the pieces that could impact the marriage has been developed called the Marital Restoration Team (MRT). As a team, we handle concerns about the moral-relational lives of our members in a way that is loving, consistent, and as effective as the couple’s level of cooperation will allow.

This team is composed of at least one Elder and both men and women who have experience working with troubled marriages. They meet once monthly to examine potential new cases and monitor progress or regress of ongoing cases. Their purpose is as follows.

In collaboration with the couple desiring help, the purpose of the team is:

• Receive referrals from SG/GG Leaders, NW Ministry Staff or Elders, or from couples that could self-identify.

• Collect information about the couple (interviews with couple or other relevant individuals (the the couple identifies), questionnaires, marital satisfaction inventory).

• Discuss and identify problems and potential solutions.

• Develop a comprehensive plan of care, which is then presented to the couple for modification and consent. The following are potential resources that could be part of the recovery plan offered to the couple.

  • Marriage Counseling

  • Individual Counseling

  • Mentoring

  • Psychological Evaluation and Psychiatric Care

  • Advocates (a friend couple who accompanies them for support and accountability)

  • Contact and Connection with an Elder

  • Fitting involvement of a Small Group/Grow Group Leader

  • Church Discipline (when warranted)

  • Focused Individual Discipleship, IE.

    • Understanding Marital Roles - Husband and Wife

    • Understanding Biblical Leadership

    • Financial Management with mutuality

    • Conflict Resolution

    • Communication

    • Retreats