An Extraordinary Phenomenon in Kansas | by jack cashill

Left, Kansas Chairman for Marriage Savers, Rev. Jeff Meyers, Director of Pastoral Care and Family Life at Christ Lutheran Church in Overland Park convenes with Pastor LeRoy Sullivan, Senior Pastor at Bread of Life Outreach Ministry in Kansas City, KS.

The numbers really are stunning.  While divorce statistics nationwide and even on the Missouri side of the state line have stayed depressingly constant over the last several years, these same numbers have dropped dramatically on the Kansas side.

In Johnson County, though the marriage rate held steady from 1995 to 1998, the number of divorces plunged from 880 in 1995 to 508 in 1998, a 42% decline in just three years.  In Wyandotte County, the figure dropped from 650 in 1995 to 340 in 1997, a nearly 50% decrease, before settling back in at 526 in 1998.  In Jackson and Clay Counties, however, the number of divorces has continued to rise.

These numbers may not be a fluke.  In 1996 the Reverend Jeffrey Meyers, the Director of Pastoral Care and Family Life at Christ Lutheran Church in Overland Park, and the Reverend Leroy Sullivan of the Bread of Life Outreach Ministries in Kansas City, Kansas organized a Community Marriage Covenant that was signed by some 40 Kansas pastors.  This covenant and its attendant publicity may well have transformed society’s casual attitude towards divorce in the western half of the metropolis. 

Meyers shies from drawing statistical conclusions, but he has seen the results of this covenant up close.  By implementing its principles at his church, he has taken much of the stress out of weddings and put the joy back in.  “There is a different look in their eyes,” says Jeff of the couples he marries.  The difference is that both he and they now expect the marriage to succeed.

The Community Marriage Covenant is the brainchild of Mike McManus, whose Maryland-based organization, Marriage Savers, has helped communities across America see just how important it is to shore up the institution of marriage.

Nationwide, the stats are alarming.  Between 1960 and 1980, divorce tripled in America, and the number has held constant since.  During that same period, marriage declined by 1/3rd.  Today, only 56% of adults are married.  From 1960 to today, cohabitation among unmarried adults has grown 10 fold.  Of these relationships, only about 15% will survive a decade.

This might all just seem academic were it not for the devastating effects of divorce and single parenthood on children.  For years, Americans have comforted themselves with the cheery bromides dispensed by movies like Mrs. Doubtfire.  The Doubtfire myth is simple enough: parents need to fulfill themselves, whatever direction that fulfillment takes, and children benefit from having two homes and twice as much love.  A recent Sesame Street episode, for instance, has  Kermit the Frog, as reporter, interviewing a little bird about her living habits.  She plays in one nest with her mom, the bird tells Kermit, and another with her dad, and it is all OK, “because they both love me.”

Judith Wallerstein, author of the breakthrough new book, The Unexpected Legacy of Divorce, doubts that the children of divorced parents could be so easily convinced.  As the architect of an extensive longitudinal study on divorce, Wallerstein had tracked more than 100 children of divorce for 15 years from 1971 to 1986.  It was only when prompted to do a 25-year assessment that she realized how the specter of divorce has haunted these childhood victims throughout their adult lives.

Like other researchers, Wallerstein knew the congregate effects of divorce on the nation’s young: more depression, more learning difficulties, and more severe psychological problems; more tendency towards early promiscuity, drugs and alcohol; less marriage, more children out of wedlock, and more divorce down the road.  Even more troubling--the little discussed fact that a “boyfriend” is about 30 times more likely to abuse a child in his charge than is the natural father.

Despite these obvious problems, Wallerstein expected these young people “to rally,” to recover.  What she discovered instead is “that the whole trajectory of an individual’s life is profoundly altered by the divorce experience.”  Some of the children adapt to the experience better than others, but almost no one ever really recovers, even as adults.

Meyers came to Kansas City in 1995 keenly aware of the havoc that divorce wreaks.  Part of his assignment at Christ Lutheran was to address the issue of divorce as it affected the church.  In reviewing existing programs, he came across Marriage Savers and liked the sweep of it.  The guiding principle behind Marriage Savers is simple enough: since 3/4 of couples still choose to marry in church, these couples will have little choice but to participate in a Marriage Savers program if enough pastors sign on to a community marriage covenant in a given area.

The community marriage covenant asks only for general compliance to its principles and allows local pastors room to adapt the program to their own needs.  As the program works, a church is expected to recruit couples from among its congregation as mentors.  After some systematic training, these mentors would then work with couples to help the church community achieve five basic goals: preventing bad marriages, educating engaged couples, strengthening existing marriages, saving troubled marriages, and reconciling couples that have separated.  In general, the program promotes abstinence outside of marriage, faithfulness within, and a concerted effort by the church community to strengthen and save existing marriages.

One of Meyers’ key recruits was the Reverend Leroy Sullivan who helped spread the word into Wyandotte County.  Between them, Sullivan and Meyers approached some 200 ministers and convinced 40 to sign on. In time, about ten more would come on board.

No one involved is fully convinced that the Community Marriage Covenant achieved sufficient critical mass to cause the drop in the Kansas divorce rate.  But, says Dave DeFreece, who with wife Rhonda heads up the mentoring program at Christ Lutheran, “I think the publicity generated by it has made some people more aware.”

Much of the publicity came from Meyers and Sullivan themselves in their direct appeal to area pastors.  Even if not all of these pastors signed on, their awareness of the divorce problem and its solution was surely heightened.  More than that, the program generated significant press coverage when it was first launched, both in The Kansas City Star and in various church publications.  McManus refers to The Star as the program’s “megaphone.”

The irony is that all The Star articles were restricted to the editions zoned for Kansas.  While this publicity was alerting citizens on one side of the state line, the people on the other side had little or no idea such a program even existed.  On the plus side, this zoning of information provided McManus with a controlled study that he could not have begun to create on his own.  Indeed, he promotes the Kansas City experience as a classic test case of how a change in “the marriage culture” can affect divorce rates.

In that participation is voluntary, and often idiosyncratically applied, neither Meyers nor McManus has any real way to monitor compliance among the churches involved.  Meyers has, however, been able to track results at three of the participating churches with which he is in close contact, including his own.  The numbers are impressive: after four years of mentoring, none of the 135 couples has separated.  Although the couples in question are newly married, some more recently than others, Meyers believes that these first few years are the most vulnerable ones and takes satisfaction in this early success, especially since many of these are second or third marriages with children already involved. 

If nearly one-half of first marriages end in divorce, nearly 2/3rds of second and subsequent marriages do.  Meyers is convinced he can improve the odds.  When approached by couples wanting to marry, Meyers asks them point blank if they are looking for a “five year plan or a life long plan.”  He has no interest in marrying couples without a firm commitment to the latter.

For those couples who do choose to participate, he offers “virtual marriage insurance.”  He believes that the program at his church, an adaptation of the Marriage Savers program called the Strategic Family Ministry, can increase a couple’s odds of a successful marriage from 50% of to 95%.

The program begins with a referral to the lead mentor who matches the new couple with an appropriate mentoring couple at the church.  If, for instance, it is a second marriage with children involved, mentors with comparable experience are assigned.  As DeFreece explains, each of the mentoring couples has been screened and has undergone 30 hours of training.  This training, DeFreece believes, has had the side effect of strengthening the marriages of the mentors themselves.

The mentors do not see themselves as counselors.  Their role is to help the couple “inventory” their relationship and to provide them with feedback.  “You have to have the heart for it,” says DeFreece.  “You have to be able to listen.”  The Marriage Savers organization has proved particularly useful in providing the churches with objective tools to perform the inventory. 

The program at Christ Lutheran is rigorous.  The mentors meet with new couples frequently in the six months prior to marriage and at regular intervals in the year and a half afterwards.  Nor are they shy about weeding out couples without real potential for a lasting marriage.  As DeFreece notes, “We tell them that the wedding date is only penciled in.” 

McManus believes that if well applied, the premarital inventory can predict with 80% accuracy who will divorce.  He also believes that it will prompt some 10% of engaged couples to break up.  DeFreece admits that some couples have, in fact, split up as a result of the mentoring.  Some of these, however, have returned later with more resolve and clearer heads.

Despite the rigor of the program, or perhaps because of it, couples are still choosing to marry at Christ Lutheran.  Meyers finds this particularly gratifying since nearly half of those who seek out the church are not current members.  DeFreece recalls at least one recent couple who read about the program on the web site and came to the church because of it.

As part of its marriage saving program,  Christ Lutheran has a Marriage Assist Team for couples whose marriage is in serious trouble.  Appropriately, the mentoring couples have themselves gone through rough waters and are in a good position to give an inventory and solicit feedback.  This program is so confidential that neither Meyers nor DeFreece can provide specifics as to its success.  The vibes, however, are positive.

“It is not good for man to be alone,” said the good Lord in Genesis, and McManus cites secular evidence to back up the scripture.  Married people are twice as likely as single people to say they are “very happy.”  A married man of 48 has an 88% chance of living to 65.  A divorced man has only a 65% chance of surviving to that age.  A married husband and wife in their 50’s have four times the assets of either a divorced person or one who has never married.  And as to sex, married women are much more likely to report an “extremely emotionally satisfying” relationship than their divorced or single peers are.

These would be reasons enough for a pastor to implement a marriage saving program.  But the most compelling reason of all is the emotionally crippling effect of divorce and single parenthood on children.  Given the scope of the problem and the urgency of the task, Pastors Jeff Meyers, Leroy Sullivan and others have declared war on divorce and adopted, as Meyers describes it, an “in-the-trenches kind of ministry.” 

Indeed, if the war on divorce is ever won, we may all one day look back and celebrate the Kansas experience as its Concord Bridge.