Re|engage Your Marriage

Fellowship Bible Church in Cabot is one of seven Fellowship campuses spread throughout Central Arkansas. While all campuses are connected through vision and teaching, each has its own unique flavor. “We have a little more suburban kind of feel,” says Jason Beams, Campus Pastor at Fellowship Cabot. “Everything in Cabot runs around the school district. This community is driven by families with kids in school.” 

Military families are also prominent in the church. “We’re six miles from the Air Force Base. We have an Army Base here as well. We have a lot of military families, whether they’re current military or stay here after retirement.”

Jason is familiar with military families. Before coming to Cabot, he pastored a church in Okinawa, Japan, that was near a military base. “The church was 80% U.S. military,” says Jason. “But educational struggles with our kids brought us back to the States. We started looking at churches, and God opened the door at Fellowship partly because I had ministry experience with military families. So, yeah. A unique little niche.”

A Different Approach to Marriage Ministry

Jason grew up in the Dallas/Fort Worth area and led worship at a church in Houston for 12 years. Before leaving for Okinawa, his church launched Re|engage, a marriage resource created by Watermark Church in Dallas. “We saw the launch of it, but didn’t get to really see the fruit of it, but we knew about it,” Jason says.

After the Beams family landed in Okinawa, Jason saw an opportunity to invest in military families and their marriages. “They were all young families. In that military environment, marriages were in turmoil because of the difficulty of moves, the separation of families, deployments, and all kinds of things.”

Jason and his wife, Stephanie, started with marriage mentoring, equipping several couples to mentor other couples. But there was a problem: that approach limited how many people they could help. “Even if you recruit six, eight mentor couples, you’re still bound to that small number.”

At the same time, Re|engage at his Houston church was thriving. “They launched it differently. Re|engage is a 365-day-a-year ministry. You can jump in at any point. It starts with open groups and goes to closed small groups to really invest in your marriage. We realized that wouldn’t work in a military environment. So, we thought, ‘Let’s get this down to 12 or 14 weeks and knock it out in a semester.’”

Jason and his wife believed that Re|engage could work for their context. For the next four years, every semester they offered Re|engage, 40 to 50 couples would sign up. With a different approach, they had solved a very practical problem. “We saw God use it in incredible ways,” Jason says. “Tons of marriages restored, and it brought so much stability to younger families in that environment.” 

A Discipleship Tool

After serving in Okinawa for six years, the Beams family returned to the States, and Jason joined Fellowship Cabot’s staff. “The elders at our campus really wanted to lean into marriages, because we’re a younger community filled with young families. They had heard about our marriage ministry in Japan and thought we’d be a good fit here,” Jason says. Within months of Jason’s arrival, the church started Re|engage groups.

Fellowship Cabot continued using the resource with new groups for nine years. Eventually, other campuses began to wonder, “What if we did that on our campus?” “Fellowship as a whole saw the fruit. They saw how many couples we were able to strengthen and come alongside,” Jason says.

This year, Fellowship launched Re|engage at all of their campuses. 150 couples signed up for the first semester. 380 couples signed up for this semester. “We’re four weeks in, and it’s already bearing a lot of fruit. There are a thousand different things you can use. This is just something that’s really worked well for us.”

Jason highlights how Re|engage is more than a marriage curriculum. It’s a discipleship tool. “It’s meant to put the gospel before couples, and put grace before them through the lens of marriage. That fits Fellowship. We’re a very discipleship-driven church, so it fits well with our culture.” 

Transformed Marriages

Fellowship Cabot’s marriage ministry has also helped fill a gap in the community. “The practical reality is there are couples that are really struggling and need help. When we launched Re|engage nine years ago, there was a real void in Christian counseling here. If you wanted that, you had to drive 45 minutes to Little Rock. That’s changed quite a bit in our community.”

Jason has seen couples in crisis transform their marriage. “I remember one guy from the first time we did Re|engage. He and his wife were on the edge of divorce. We got them plugged in, and I began discipling him. I watched God do a work in him that took him from just a nominal guy who comes to church on Sundays to someone really loving Jesus and realizing that God can use him, especially in his marriage. When you change, your spouse responds to that.”

Another couple was part of the church’s first Re|engage group. “They walked through infidelity, some hard stuff. But nine years later, they’re plugged in and leading a group for the first time because God has done such a work in them. They’re also plugged into The CALL, a foster care ministry. That began with respite foster care, moved toward regular fostering, and led to two adoptions. Those are the kinds of things that make Stephanie and me step back, smile, and say, ‘God, you’re good.’ Watching God do those things is a lot of fun.”

Build on the Foundation

Jason acknowledges that pastors have a full plate. “As pastors, there are enough overwhelming things that maybe small group efforts get pushed to the side because we’re dealing with sermons and the hardships of illness and hospital visits and all those things,” Jason says. He’s also seen the limits of what one pastor, or a few elders and deacons, can do for couples in their churches. “The reality is that doesn’t hit a lot of people.”

The good news is that resources exist to help churches strengthen marriages and share the ministry load across an entire congregation. Re|engage is one of them. “Just start something. If you mess up, you mess up. But honestly, you can’t mess this up. It’s just a good option for gospel-based discipleship that pours into marriages. I would encourage other churches to explore. See what’s available. Build on the foundation of the gospel and the difference Christ makes in us—and our marriages.”

We are grateful for the exceptional work of Fellowship Cabot and other churches in our cities that are strengthening marriages in their communities. They are helping the whole Church grow.

Speaking the truth in love, we will grow to become in every respect the mature body of him who is the head, that is, Christ. From him, the whole body, joined and held together by every supporting ligament, grows and builds itself up in love, as each part does its work.

Ephesians 4:15-16

If you’d like more information about launching a marriage ministry in your church, talk to one of our Arkansas Marriage Initiative (AMI) Coaches today at [email protected].