About Wyoming Strong Families
What is a Community Marriage Initiative?
A Community Marriage Initiative (CMI) encourages, promotes, and supports a community-wide implementation of marriage ministries in local churches as a way to strengthen marriages and families, and reduce divorce rates.
What are we trying to accomplish?
There are three basic, strategic elements that a CMI uses to reach it's goals: inspiration, resourcing, & empowerment.
Inspiration
We want to inspire communities by elevating the value and importance of marriage at all levels: individually, between couples, and across the community. We want to bust the common myths about marriage and subsequently divorce by reframing these beliefs with accurate statistics and the truth found only in God's word: the Bible. Marriage isn't just a romantic notion & private matter between two people: every marriage is a family leadership team! Strong marriages create strong families, which in turn create strong communities.
We want to inspire couples to think more highly of marriage and encourage them to invest in their marriages! Every marriage team is only as strong as its leadership. We want to connect couples to programs that will strengthen leadership and other skills that make for a great marriage.
We want to break destructive generational cycles. Societal issues often exist when the general perception of a problem is not accurate. By changing the way communities think about the importance of marriage we can create positive societal change.
Resource
One role of a community marriage initiative is to act as a central resourcing hub to unite those that are serving marriages in one place that is accessible to the whole community. Even in Wyoming, there are already programs and resources in place to build strong marriages and help those that are struggling. We want to make these services known to those that need them most, as well as to others who are already serving marriages. We're stronger together!
Empower
Divorce, and its effect on communities, is not a new problem. In fact, this massive and complex problem has been a growing trend since the early 1800's. When we talk about the breakdown of marriage and family in a contemporary context where we only consider how it affects us today, we miss opportunities to see where the real solution lies. There have been many programs, institutions and government programs that have attempted to address the fallout of broken families, yet the problem still increases. When we empower individuals to serve at their best in their own unique role, we can start to see real change.