Got a good marriage?  You can help others achieve the same

    VANCOUVER, Wash. – How many times have you listened to somone in despair over his or her marriage relationship and wished you could help?
If you have a healthy marriage, MarriageTeam, a new Vancouver-based ministry, invites you and your spouse to become a “coach couple.”
    Six sessions of training begins next month, running from Sept. 22 through Oct. 10, at Laurelwood Baptist Church, 500 N.E. 172nd Ave., in Vancouver. The sessions Sept. 22 and 26 and Oct. 3 are from 6:30 to 9 p.m. and those on two Saturdays, Sept. 23 and 30, are 8:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.
    MarriageTeam is a non-profit agency founded in Clark County with the expressed purpose of empowering couples for winning marriages.    MarriageTeam-trained couple coaches work with pre-marital and married couples to give them the skills to be a winning team.
   “It is just like in sports,” said Alan Ray, who co-founded MarriageTeam with his wife, Autumn. “If the players don’t know the plays there will be a lot of turnovers and ultimately the team will lose. In marriage, the loss rate translates into a divorce rate, where no one is the winner, especially the children.”
    Coaching is based on individualized training that focuses on communication, anger management, conflict resolution, and problem-solving skills. It uses a combination of a proven relationship inventory, practical exercises and a “two on two relationship” that fosters growth and positive change, the Rays say.
    MarriageTeam has its roots as a ministry at Laurelwood Baptist in 2001. By 2006 the ministry, with its volunteer couple coaches, had touched some 50 couples and saw some pretty dramatic results.
    One wife commented, “We’d been in counseling for a year and a half and were still on the brink of divorce. I didn’t expect anything to change, but felt obligated to try because these people seemed to care. It saved our marriage.”
    In another case, the teenage son of another couple publicly offered at Thanksgiving his thanks to the church and the coaching program for “giving me my family back.”
    In a coach training situation, one participant commented that “it (the coaching) zeroed in on our own personal problems. We received more in that short time (20 minutes) than we did from several weeks with a professional counselor.” Another couple echoed similar results, saying they received more from the coaching than from several months of counseling.
    According to the Rays, numerous studies have documented the benefit of couple coaching, which is the same as mentoring. Since 1995, South Hills Church of Christ in Abilene, Texas, has offered a premarital mentoring program based on the popular Prepare/Enrich relationship assessment tool.    About 320 premarital couples were mentored by 35 different married couples. Only four of the 320 couples have divorced – a success rate of 99 percent – and between 15 and 20 percent of the couples (about 60 couples) canceled their wedding plans.
    The Rays also noted that another positive outcome of the mentoring was that the mentor couple marriages also improved in the process of working with pre-marital couples.
    Married 36 years, the Rays have led marriage enrichment weekends as well as taught numerous marriage and parenting classes.
    Al Ray is retired from the U.S. Air Force and in his last assignment led the ROTC program at the University of Portland. He is currently the training and organizational development manager for Multnomah County. He has a bachelor’s in mechanical engineering and a master’s degree in counseling and human development.
    Autumn Ray is a graduate of Excelsior College with a degree that focuses on social work. She manages the Multnomah County community justice volunteer program and is a past president of the Northern Oregon Volunteer Administrators Association.
    During the past five years, the Rays trained more than 60 couples representing 13 different churches to be coaches.
   “In many cases, coaching programs did not survive for a variety of reasons, which made us think that a centrally managed program that was open to the community would have the resources necessary to provide quality couple coaching,” said Autumn.
    She emphasized that coach couples are all volunteers and that MarriageTeam provides the training and resources necessary to support them.
    MarriageTeam is now recruiting partnering churches and couples who are interesting in learning more about couple coaching. Goal is having 30 or more coaches available in late fall or early 2007.
    For details, phone 360-450-6042 or send e-mail to info@marriageteam.org General information on MarriageTeam is at www.marriageteam.org