Print

Email story

Comment

Email editor

Couples course subtracts the faith part

The secular version of a Christian program to save marriages will get millions in federal grants.

By JODIE TILLMAN
Published January 8, 2007

ADVERTISEMENT Richard Albertson's Live the Life Ministries faith-based program is considered well-run. The Marriage Solution: More perfect unions (Sunday)

TALLAHASSEE - Richard Albertson became an evangelist for marriage not long after his own nearly failed.

Since 1998, he has worked with Tallahassee churches to provide hundreds of couples with relationship courses inspired by the Bible. His mission is to save the institution of marriage, one struggling union at a time.

Now, the federal government, armed with statistics showing strong marriages make healthier and wealthier families, wants to spend $750-million over the next five years, including $33-million on 13 Florida programs, to reverse the trend of one-parent households.

Albertson's Live the Life Ministries, one of three Christian-based grant recipients in Florida, will get $2.75-million of that money over the next five years.

The windfall will nearly double the size of Live the Life, allowing the program to expand its reach in the Big Bend region and spark what Albertson refers to as a "marriage renaissance." He wants to reduce the overall divorce rate in the eight Big Bend counties by 35 percent and increase the marriage rate by 15 percent.

But accepting funding from the federal government is not without challenges.

How effective will a Christian program be at promoting marriage in the secular world? And how will the restrictions of government money change what has been a small success story in the faith-based community?

Live the Life's board of directors debated these questions before deciding to apply for the money, Albertson said.

"If our mission was to evangelize and lead people to Christ, I'd say we shouldn't take it," Albertson said. "But this isn't about making Christians."

A foot in secular world

One recent Saturday morning, Albertson was standing in front of an overhead projector. This was the second session of a privately funded Christian-based relationship skills course for married couples.

In attendance were three middle-age couples with backgrounds as different as truck driver and lawyer. What they had in common was that their marriages, all of them at least a decade old, could use some work.

Click. The session started with a passage from the Gospel of John, concerning the notion of an abundant life.

"I know a lot of Christians who are miserable," Albertson said. "They don't have an abundant life.

"Where is the abundant life?"

Click. Second slide, this one of a time line marked past, present and future. Those who live in the past ruin their relationships with anger and resentment, he said; those who worry over the future ruin theirs with anxiety and fear.

"The fruit of the spirit," he said, "is in the present."

The class took place not in a church hall, but in the carpeted conference room of a Tallahassee office building. Albertson, who is not a minister, has long had one foot in the secular realm.

He raised money for Ronald Reagan's re-election campaign in 1984. He served as an appointee in the U.S. Department of Agriculture during the administration of former President George Bush, and as past chairman of a Florida commission on marriage. He got former Gov. Jeb Bush to endorse a pledge among Tallahassee religious leaders to help reduce the divorce rate.

In the religious community, he has earned a reputation as someone who moves easily between both worlds. Live the Life Ministries is often cited as one of the best-run faith-based marriage programs in the country.

New language needed

But Albertson is confident he can create an equally successful secular version.

To prevent mingling of federal and private funds, he hired a former Boys & Girls Club executive to oversee the operation of Live the Life's secular programs.

And he has tweaked the content, particularly the language.

When training sessions for the secular programs begin later this month, the curriculum will discuss the concept of commitment in relationships, for instance, but not compare the world's idea of a contract "My way or the highway," as Albertson recently put it with the biblical view of "God's covenant."

The secular classes will say forgiveness benefits your personal well-being. The faith-based courses will still encourage couples to forgive each other by emphasizing Jesus' forgiveness.

But some have doubts about how well this will work. Religious organizations that take federal money may run the risk of losing the very elements that make them effective for some people, said University of Virginia professor Brad Wilcox, who has studied the connections between religion and marriage.

When the language becomes more therapeutic than spiritual, he said, it may lose its connection with people who respond based on their faith.

"Religion has a transcendent purpose," he said. "It's 'God is sanctifying our relationship.' "

In Oklahoma, site of the nation's most ambitious public-private marriage initiative, church leaders have worked hand-in-hand with government officials since 1999.

Rev. George Young, pastor of Holy Temple Baptist Church in Oklahoma City, has taught dozens of secular marriage skills courses to low-income men and women and served as an adviser to the governor's office.

Though he believes marriage was "created by God to bring us from chaos to community," he is more motivational speaker than minister when it comes to the classes. Some people do better, he said, when the classes feel like practical workshops and not Sunday school lessons.

"I pray before the workshops. But once that's over, I'm going to give you some tools," Young said. "I don't say a thing about Jesus. I got a church so if I want to preach, I can do it there."

Success without God?

At the Saturday marriage class, Albertson was talking about conflict. "Jesus had conflicts with his disciples," he said.

"Yes, he did," one of the wives said.

"Remember James talking about the fire of the tongue, how the words we use fighting can be soothing or they can be destructive?" he asked. "How you fight tells you a lot about yourself."

He continued with instructions to calmly "make a list of the dirty fighting tactics you use and the ones your partner uses."

One of the wives, Bridget Harrison, took less than a minute to list a dozen of her worst habits. Her husband of 13 years, Steve, kept staring sleepily at his pencil.

She sighed. "I don't know if it's too late," she said in an interview during a break. "This is our last resort. We tried counseling. We had heard a lot of therapists, but what I like about (Albertson) was it's real basic, common sense."

Bridget Harrison wasn't sure how well the classes would work without the biblical references. It was her faith, after all, that drew her to class in the first place. "I'd die without God," she said.

But it's not just people like Harrison that Live the Life needs to reach anymore.

Last summer, anticipating the need to appeal to a wider audience crowd, Live the Life hired a consultant. The consultant recommended simplifying the mission statement, which had called divorce and out-of-wedlock births "the devastating consequences of a generation disconnected from their God and from one another" and cited Jesus Christ as the answer.

The new version is simpler: Live the Life "exists to strengthen marriages and families."

"The truth is the truth," Albertson said, "whether you use Scriptures are not."

Times researchers Angie Drobnic Holan and Cathy Wos contributed to this story. Jodie Tillman can be reached at (727) 869-6247 or jtillman@sptimes.com.

[Last modified January 7, 2007, 20:32:11]