Thank you for your interest and participation in our Home-Base Mentoring program. We have developed this program over the course of 15 years of pastoral ministry through CapChurch in Vancouver, Canada. There are now over 30 churches involved in this consortium ministry in the Vancouver area as well as other cities across Canada and the United States. The program has also been used in other parts of the world including Switzerland, the Philippines and Australia.
There are several components to this ministry:
- The training of marriage mentors in your church community to coach couples within your churches who are to be married and coach couples within your churches who have recently been married (5 years or less).
- Reaching out to your broader neighbourhood and community to influence marriages and families in the gospel and to attract them to your church.
- Providing quarterly prayer, encouragement and instruction for your couple mentors alongside Home-Base mentors from other Christian churches.
- Providing ongoing supervision and support (this can be done through email, telephone and our website – see below) for mentoring couples and church leaders with complicated marriage issues.
- Coordinating marriage and family life resources so that your church can be strengthened by other churches just as you strengthen them.
For those of you who attended our training in Tallinn and Tartu, you will have access to material sthat we have prepared for you. In these materials will find a brief description of the program as well as a statement of a biblical view of marriage that we ask churches to understand and “substantially” accept. Reading through these materials ought to give you a sufficient understanding of how we have used Home-Base Mentoring.
However, simply reading the materials cannot give you a feel for how effective the ministry really is. Did you know that over 90-95% of premarital couples who have participated in the home-base mentoring program are still married and report quality marriages? This is after 30 years of ministry experience!
Matt and Lea Edminster would like to meet with you and your church leaders to respond to questions and to show you some of the inside tracks of the ministry. Consulting together is really is the best way to understand what we do and build for long-term success in the marriage ministry through your church.
Please check out the Abielu Mentorluse Selts website for more information about the program. You will also be able to find some of the MEI (Marriage Expectation Inventory) on the site to give you an idea of the kind of questions that form the template of the couple-to-couple mentoring.
Thanks for considering this and we hope to hear from you soon!
Dr Paddy Ducklow
www.TheDucklows.ca
