The Engaged Couple Sponsor Program: Beyond the Wedding Day, Preparing for a Lifetime Together

“Wedding planning.” This simple phrase alone is enough to send many engaged couples into a flurry of activity — there is so much to be done! Set a date, find a venue, choose flowers — the list is seemingly endless. And while it is good to put some thought into such a momentous day, our culture all too often neglects the importance of planning for the couple’s future once the “big day” has come and gone. In the Catholic Church, we seek to bring that longterm planning to the forefront of an engaged couple’s experience, emphasizing that preparing for married life is even more important than planning for the wedding day.

When couples schedule a wedding at All Saints, their first step in the marriage preparation process is to complete a questionnaire with FOCCUS — Facilitating Open Couple Communication, Understanding and Study — coordinators Glen and Marie Abel. FOCCUS covers values, attitudes and behaviors that are important for any engaged couple to thoughtfully discuss with one another before entering into marriage.

Once FOCCUS is completed, the coordinators of our Engaged Couple Sponsor Program, Mike and Kathy Havel, match the engaged couple with a sponsor couple. Our sponsor couples come from all stages of married life, and one new sponsor couple is bilingual — English and Spanish. Once matched, a sponsor couple meets with the engaged couple four times for open and honest conversation, using their FOCCUS results as a jumpingoff point. While these meetings used to take place in the sponsor couple’s home, they have moved to the Zoom online platform this year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

As a Holy Sacrament, marriage in the Catholic Church is much more than a legally binding union — it is a covenant relationship between both spouses and God, nurtured and strengthened by the abundant grace that comes to us in the sacrament. And as with any other sacrament, we are called to fully prepare our hearts and minds to receive that special grace.

“As much as I love hearing about what the couple’s wedding plans are, they are already so focused on that, so we’re trying to get them to see that the wedding is for an hour and the marriage is for a lifetime,” Kathy says. “We hope that they look at the wedding in ways where it’s not just about them, but about God and also the celebration of the union of the two families.”

The benefits of marriage preparation meetings are both spiritual and practical, as couples discuss the sacramental nature of Holy Matrimony, as well as many issues at the center of married life, such as communication, finances, family and extended family, career, and social media use.

As couples move beyond their marriage preparation — and the wedding day — Kathy hopes that they will take what they have learned from their meetings with the sponsor couples well into their future life together.

“Marriage is a sacrament, so we don’t want to let two people go into it without any kind of support or anything else, to show them that we do think it’s important,” she says. “Mike loves to bring up the idea that you will spend four or more years training for your profession. So for marriage, where we are expecting you to stay in that union of the rest of your life, we need to provide that support and education. And it’s a continuing education that will be ongoing in life.”

After 41 years together, the Havels truly understand that the “continuing education” of marriage never ends! As a sponsor couple, they feel that their own marriage continues to be strengthened by their participation in this ministry.

“It’s affirming,” Kathy says. “The couples that are doing this remind you of your own early days, and there is something sweet about stepping back and remembering what your own courtship was like. And when you are emphasizing what is important in a marriage and how to keep a marriage going strong, it reminds you to do that yourself. It’s like a constant refresher course.”

Thankful for the blessings that the Engaged Couple Sponsor program brings to her own marriage and so many others in the parish, Kathy is excited to see this ministry continue to serve all those planning to marry here in the All Saints faith community.

“I hope that these couples will remember different things that were brought up or that they learned about each other so they can stay in that commitment,” she says. “I feel like there is a lot that can be gained from these programs.”

Are you interested in becoming a sponsor couple for our Engaged Couple Sponsor program? If so, please contact Kathy Havel at 972-345-1956 or haveldfw@sbcglobal.net for more information.

Mike and Kathy Havel coordinate the Engaged Couples Sponsor Ministry at All Saints.