To use your thoughts and feelings to explore the relevance of Christian marriage in our society today

Who the project is for

Begun in 1996, the Students Exploring Marriage Initiative (SEMI) carried out by The Grubb Institute has enabled 152 students from the first year sixth forms of 13 schools and sixth form colleges, to learn about the realities of marriage in our society today.

The Initiative is addressed to young people who are growing up in families where customs about marriage and families are unclear. Many of them come from families where the traditional thinking about marriage has been eroded and they may be searching for ways of thinking about the circumstances in which they will, in due course, have a family themselves. These young people may drift into marriages without much reflection on what is involved. For others, their parents are amongst those who have divorced and perhaps remarried: they may harbour doubts about marriage because they have had some contact with the stress that the breakdown of marriage involves. They are surrounded by conflicting press and media images about marriage, at one moment publicising the glossy weddings of celebrities and at the next giving a high profile to marriages breaking down and apparently encouraging cohabitation.

The National Office for Statistics has pointed out that:

"In the last generation the number of people marrying has halved, the number divorcing has trebled and the number of children born outside marriage has quadrupled."

What expectations can young people have of marriage today?

Being 17 years old and in one's first year in the Sixth Form is a difficult time at which to imagine one's longer term future with much certainty.

Most young adults feel in their bones that they are likely to have a family and that this will take place in the context of a long term relationship with someone of the opposite sex. Market research indicates that 9 out of 10 young people expect to have a family and that most of them want to do so in the context of a long-term committed relationship, probably marriage.

Introducing the Students Exploring Marriage Initiative (SEMI or 'the Initiative') to meetings of sixth formers in a dozen different schools in the spring and summer of 1999, we have begun by asking anyone who does not expect to have a family to put up their hand: in gatherings of up to 200 students never more than 2 or 3 hands go up. We follow that by inquiring how many of those who expect to have children expect to have them outside a long term, committed relation-ship: only a tiny number indicate that they do. Thus, the research on young people's aspirations is reflected anecdotally.

It is natural that they should look to their elders to offer them some kind of answer about how they can achieve their aspirations. They say they want to tie the knot: will the adults show them the ropes?

There is an untapped resource present in this country in the form of millions of married couples who have experience to offer these young people. This Initiative has discovered a way of mobilising that resource in an effective way.

It does this by enabling students to carry out open ended dialogues with married couples who believe themselves to be in a Christian marriage, in Workshops held weekly, out of normal school hours, over a period of about three months. Each Workshop is assisted in its work by an Adviser-Coach who is a volunteer but who has been trained for the job.

Christian marriage: a cultural phenomenon

Marriage has different meanings in different cultures. In Britain today, most people associate marriage with a commitment between one man and one woman, for life. This traditional understanding of marriage has been shaped by the church in society over hundreds of years. Because of the effect of the church upon this process, and the fact that the church in this country is a Christian church, it seems reasonable to name this type of marriage, 'Christian marriage'.

The project uses 'Christian marriage' as an exemplar, as a means of focusing the exploration that the young people are invited to carry out for the following reasons:

As the project has expanded the interest of the students in taking part in the wider research of the second and third points has increased.

The young people are given a task, a research question and a structure to support them as they carry out this research. The task offered to these students is:

To use your thoughts and feelings to explore the relevance of Christian marriage in our society today.

They are invited to work with the research question:

Does Christian marriage matter in our society today?

and to write an article at the end of the Workshop answering this same question. The articles are being posted on the Initiative website. (exploring-marriage.org.uk)

The Workshop structure is the 6 step process discussed later in this document.

There are 3 roles involved in a Students Exploring Marriage Workshop; those of student, visiting couple and Adviser-Coach. The students are 16-17 year old volunteers from schools and Sixth Form colleges and meet in groups of 8-12. They are invited to meet married couples and to enter into dialogue with them to carry out the Workshop task. The couples are encouraged to respond openly and honestly to the students' questions, telling the stories of their own marriage, offering their experience for investigation. It is not about giving ideas or opinions or about teaching; it is about making their experience available to the young people. The students and the couple are supported in their work by an Adviser-Coach trained by The Grubb Institute. The students manage their own research but the Adviser-Coach is responsible for managing the boundary around the Workshop as a whole.

Each Workshop session lasts 90 minutes and is held weekly for 12 weeks. Most sessions take place at the end of the school day although some are held within school hours. The important condition is that students opt in voluntarily. During the 12 week period students meet 3 different married couples, each of whom visit on 3 occasions. This leaves 3 sessions for briefing, review and conclusion. Students and couples need to know that what is explored in the Workshop remains confidential. The Workshop uses a 6 step process shown in Figure 1 below.

In step 1, the couple are briefed by the Adviser-Coach. The Adviser-Coach prepares Workshop participants for the Dialogue during step 2 and then the Dialogue itself is step 3. In step 4 the Adviser-Coach reviews the Dialogue with the students and the couples together. The students assess where they are overall in their exploration of marriage with the Adviser-Coach and identify issues to be taken further next time, in step 5. In the final step, number 6, the couple reflect upon their experience of the Dialogue with the Adviser-Coach and note points they would like to return to next time.

Couples came away from the experience of the Dialogue with impressions of the students as being "respectful - open - perceptive - honest - intelligent - curious". One couple, who represented views expressed by several others, said:

They were courteous, genuinely interested in how our marriage 'worked' and attentive to what we had to say. ... they showed a serious, thoughtful concern to understand the values that underpinned our marriage

The quality of the work done with the students is dependent upon the way the Adviser-Coach role is taken. They hold the professional integrity of the project. They are trained by The Grubb Institute during a 50 hour preparation programme where the emphasis is on working with experience and facilitating the students' research process rather than managing it. Adviser-Coaches found themselves being challenged about their own thinking about Christian marriage as well as developing new professional skills.

They found it challenging as they found they had to approach situations from a new perspective. One of them wrote:

The role is more difficult and demanding than I had imagined ... where I am silent throughout the dialogue and am then required to take an active role in enabling the students to optimise their learning from the dialogue was quite difficult.

Because every Workshop took place within a different college or school culture, Adviser-Coaches had to be flexible but to hold to the principles on which the work is based. As one Adviser-Coach put it:

The whole experience was challenging, especially finding the resources to deal with the unexpected! ... Need the capacity to work with far from ideal circumstances.

Nevertheless, the evidence from the articles indicates that the Adviser-Coaches found ways of enabling the young people to use their own thoughts and feelings as they explored the relevance of Christian marriage in our society today.

Emerging conclusions

Does Christian marriage matter in our society today?

In principle young people are saying 'yes'. It provides a bench mark which can be used to measure the extent to which we are dehumanising ourselves in the chaos that surrounds marriage today. Yes, it runs the risk of being distorted and polarised but when the experience of men and women in marriage is looked at frankly the benefits it offers can be seen clearly. There are common areas between Christian marriage and those of other faiths to enable variations to be approached if the issues of commitment are able to be faced and worked through.

Marriage: part of the structure of our society

The initial work in getting this project off the ground including thinking about marriage as a social institution, part of the structure of society. Almost all the young people who have taken part in this Initiative have found this to be a new idea, indeed many of the couples themselves have also found it new. It is certainly not prominent in the general consciousness. Lord Northbourne, introducing a major debate in the House of Lords on the economic and social role of marriage on 24 March 1999, opened by suggesting that we are facing a social revolution. He pointed out how for thousands of years marriage has been the norm and went on to say:

Young people in love have been forced by social sanctions to make a long-term commitment to stay together to support their children and one another. In the past three decades, things have changed.

What Adviser-Coaches have done in all the Workshops has been to help their students to think of marriage as very much more than just a wedding, rather a part of a natural human process, a part of the structure of society that is getting lost to sight, the early stages of which they them-selves are probably already experiencing. This process begins with personal relationships and then goes on to build something that increasingly acquires the characteristics of an institution, whatever the people within the relationship may wish personally.

The methodology

The findings from the students' experience supported by the information gathered from the couples and the Adviser-Coaches indicates that the Workshop method, the training of the Adviser-Coaches and the briefing of couples has created a robust methodology for the purposes of this project. The project offers a way of working which fills a particular gap, given the issues identified at the beginning of this digest about the lack of appropriate guidance and support for young people about marriage as a social institution.

At the heart of this work is a focus on the exploration of experience rather than simply the swapping of opinions. This enables students to explore marriage without any moralistic presuppositions being imposed on them, giving them the freedom to draw their own conclusions based upon evidence they are able to test for themselves.

Local Initiative Steering Groups

The Workshop method is clearly dependent upon the structure within a local area which can provide the necessary resources. These include finding people willing to take the role of Adviser-Coach, couples willing to visit and make the experience of their marriage available to students, and schools that want to incorporate this into work with their Year 12 students. The project has produced a Handbook during the course of this last year which describes in detail what the structure of a Local Initiative Steering Group is and how it can be set up.

Marriage as a building block in society

Exploring these marriages, students have developed a sense of a structure which is part of society. Couples who marry do not choose to begin to relate to the whole of society, rather they choose a particular social structure in order to manage their relations with society and all its other structures. It was possible in the past to 'improvise' a marriage because society was predictable enough to support one in doing that. Society's structures can no longer be taken for granted, so forming a structure for containing personal relationships now requires attention.

In Britain we have the tradition of 'Christian marriage' and the different denominations state the purposes of marriage at the beginning of the services in almost identical terms. What then hap-pens is the move from the wedding to the marriage: it is that experience of Christian marriage that SEMI is studying. The questions that students are raising in their dialogues with visiting couples concern how a couple are living out their commitment to each other expressed in their vows in the context of our fragmenting and individualistic culture. What they are exploring is whether that boundary around a married couple is a prison wall or a semi-permeable membrane, strong enough to withstand the storms that will rage around the marriage without insulating the couple against real twentieth century life.

For the students, putting the idea of a marriage in the setting of a social and personal process which most of them are in the very early stages of getting involved in, opens up possibilities of thinking that do not trap them into moralistic arguments but enable them to feel free to explore where their visiting couples are and how they see their marriages. The openness in the articles supports this view of the students learning. They have had opportunities to see that what look at first sight like private decisions actually have an effect upon society, and society has an effect upon them. They discover that the decision to get married involves recognising those effects and choosing a particular way of responding to them through new understandings of the changing roles of husband and wife.

October 1999

The future of Students Exploring Marriage

Size and scale Having worked in the four areas of Kent, Oxfordshire, Winchester, and Salisbury new Local Initiative Steering Groups are being set up in Portsmouth, Gloucester, Chelmsford and Bolton, with growing interest in parts of London, Totnes, Blackburn, Lichfield and else-where. This will double the number of areas being worked in and treble the number of students taking part to about 300 in the next year. It takes the project forward towards being available to 10% of sixth form students in the country by the end of the next 5 years.

A new charity The Initiative has so far been run as a project of The Grubb Institute but by the early part of 2000 a new and independent charity will have been established, for which £174,000 is being raised for next year's work. The target is that within three years the cost per participating student will be below £100.

Nigel Fenner, who will become the full time Director, joined the project in October 1999, having been previously a senior manager in the YMCA. Justin Tomkins continues as National Initiative Organiser while John Bazalgette of The Grubb Institute, who currently directs the project, will in due course take up the role of Technical Consultant to the project.

Further information

This digest is expanded in several different papers including the full Report on the Students Exploring Marriage Initiative (March 1996 - August 1999) and the HANDBOOK of the Initiative. The latter is a training manual which covers all aspects of the development of the project, written to provide consistency and to give every opportunity for the project to continue its expansion. A twice yearly Newsletter is being written and a prayer card has been produced for supporters of the Initiative.

Further information can be obtained from:

Students Exploring Marriage, The Grubb Institute, Cloudesley Street, London, N1 OHU

Phone: 0171-278 8061 fax: 0171-278 0728 email: GrubbUk@aol.com

Students articles will shortly be available on: exploring-marriage.org.uk

Grants now totalling over £250,000 for the Initiative have been generously provided by: Abbey National Charitable Trust Ltd - An anonymous donor - The Bishop of Oxford's Outreach Fund -The Chief Constable of Kent's Fund for Kent - Esmée Fairbairn Charitable Trust - EWR Clubs for Young People Limited - Garfield Weston Foundation - The Haberdashers' Company - Hampshire County Council - The Hayden Trust - Individual Donors - The Jerusalem Trust - Hilda Laing Charitable Trust - The Lord and Lady Laing Charitable Trust - The Leathersellers' Company Fund - Lloyds TSB Foundation for England and Wales - Marsh Christian Trust - Sandra Charitable Trust - St. Mary's Church, Twyford - Trimite Ltd -The Trusthouse Charitable Foundation - Twyford Elders' Club The organisers of the Initiative are deeply grateful for the support and encouragement given by those who have con-tributed to the substantial sum of money needed to set up and launch the Initiative.