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Supporting Sunday Night Couples

LeRoy & Cathy Delair and Terry & Sue Smith

(Excerpted from Winter 1995 Volume 9, Issue 4 Matrimony magazine)

The Sunday Night Couple is one of the four pillars of Worldwide Marriage Encounter. Along with the Weekend, Presenting Teams and our Organization Structure, these are the areas we concentrate on in strengthening the effectiveness of our movement.

The Sunday Night Couple is any couple who has experienced a Weekend – couples whom we hope will become active members of our community. These are the couples who continue to work on their dialogue as a tool for continually striving for a more intimate relationship. These are the couples who make recruiting for the Weekend a way of life. These are the couples who joyfully take on the loving tasks of the Encounter. They do these things because they know what the Weekend has meant in their lives and they want other couples to experience the joy they've found. They want the Weekend to be around for their children. It has been shown that areas that have a regularly- meeting M.E. community have more couples experiencing the Weekend. There are simply more people to spread the word and attract others.

Are there dialogue sharing groups in your area that meet regularly? Where will the Sunday Night Couple in your area turn to for support of their new lifestyle? Do couples in your area keep the spark of passion that was re-lit on their Weekend?

In many areas, plans have been put in place for offering the Sunday Night Couple more of what they found on the Weekend. The idea of a post-Weekend program to "bridge" couples into community has been around for years. It works by introducing new couples to the concepts of Deeper Dialogue, sharing their feelings in a group, and the value of belonging to a group that supports relationship.

Currently, there seems to be a trend of re-vamping these programs and getting more couples involved in organizing and presenting. Obviously, the more couples involved, the larger the community.

Terry & Sue Smith from the Akron, Canton and Youngstown Encounter in Ohio were a couple who made their Weekend in 1980 and were sold on dialogue. They were approached, along with two other couples, in the winter of 1989 by their Executive leaders Tim & Linda DeFrange to consider being a Post-Encounter team. They attended a Community Deeper and caught fire.

"I (Terry) was very excited, but also apprehensive about our ability to accomplish the grand designs of the plan for our community. But I knew how important dialogue was to our relationship and that if we hadn't had a share group to go to where dialogue was emphasized after our Weekend, I would have let dialogue slide, just like I had let our relationship slide before our Weekend. I was ready to give back to M.E. what it had given Sue and I."

Their purpose was clear: "To encourage the Sunday Night Couple to live an Encountered lifestyle by actively dialoguing, and to support them by encouraging them to join sharing groups." They developed outlines for a four-session post-Weekend program, and they were off and running.

They explain the post-Weekend program at the reunion evening two weeks after each Weekend. They found that it was good for new couples to see that Marriage Encounter is more than just the presenting teams. There's a whole community living this radical lifestyle, ready to offer companionship and support.

The Akron, Canton and Youngstown Encounter now has 29 active sharing groups, and they are convinced that the post-Weekend program is a necessary ministry to the Sunday Night Couple. As Sue & Terry put it, in their part of Section VI, "'community' is more than a word. It's a lived reality."

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