DEPARTMENTS:
Home Front

By Roger Sider

Grand Rapids, Michigan, erects a large civic tent to strengthen marriage and families

Grand Rapids, Michigan, has long been known as a family-friendly community with conservative values, but this city of 500,000 has not escaped the cultural forces buffeting the institution of marriage. The surrounding area of Kent County recorded 2,783 divorces last year, more than half the number of marriages in the same period. More than 25 percent of the county’s children grow up without their fathers and mothers married and living under the same roof.

These figures got the attention of a group of local citizens: a mayor, a pastor, a social worker, and myself, a psychiatrist. Each of us had become alarmed at the mounting toll exacted by the erosion of marriage in western Michigan, especially on children. In fall 1996, we set out to establish a community marriage policy, modeled on programs enacted in 86 cities across the nation, to give children a better chance of growing up in stable, two-parent homes.

Most other community marriage agreements rely heavily on churches to raise the bar for wedlock. Their strategies often include premarital counseling for engaged couples. That’s a vital step, but we’re going much further: In Grand Rapids, we are erecting a large civic tent under which a variety of community leaders—not only clergy but also political, medical, business, and judicial figures—come together to strengthen marriage.

We’ve formed a steering committee comprised of college presidents, attorneys, business owners, members of the clergy, a local mayor, and a judge. Together, they have helped draft perhaps the most broadly supported community marriage policy in the nation. It is surely one of the most ambitious. The policy sets three goals to be achieved within 10 years: reduce the divorce rate by 25 percent, reduce by 25 percent the number of children growing up without the benefit of married parents in a stable home, and establish thorough preparation for marriage as a community norm.

Changing the community’s culture is a daunting task. Our policy asks everyone to take responsibility for the state of marriage in our community. A key ingredient in its success to date is the leadership shown by our steering committee.

Its chairman is Bill Hardiman, the mayor of Kentwood, a major suburb of Grand Rapids. The mayor is a passionate advocate for the Greater Grand Rapids Community Marriage Policy. Popular and charismatic, he knows how to disarm critics who believe the policy implicitly condemns divorcing couples or single-parent families. He grew up in a single-parent family of eight children and went through a divorce himself after a brief, early marriage. He and his second wife, Clova, have been together for almost 25 years.

Appearing on television and radio, speaking to the press, and addressing church services and civic gatherings on behalf of the policy, Hardiman has used his platform as a respected civic leader to attract broad, high-level support. This spring, Hardiman appointed three task forces, for physical and mental health, legal and judicial matters, and religious issues. Two additional task forces soon will be created for business and education. Their purpose is to mobilize each sector of the community to help strengthen marriage.

Joseph Scoville, a federal district judge, is a cochairman of the Legal/ Judicial Task Force. He intends to challenge judges and lawyers to become more sensitive to family considerations in their application of the law.

Scoville sees two major obstacles to this goal. The first is the strong bias in the law toward individual rights. Within this framework, marriage is regarded simply as a lifestyle choice and divorce as a right to be exercised unilaterally and at will. The second obstacle is the economic self-interest of divorce lawyers. Scoville wants the legal community to form a basic consensus about requirements—or at least recommendations—for couples seeking to marry. Judges who conduct civil marriage ceremonies might agree, for example, to strongly urge couples to seek premarital counseling.

Jerry DeRuiter, the CEO of a large mental-health services provider for families, is a cochairman of the Health/Mental Health Task Force. "We see too many kids whose parents are using them to play the game of divorce for points," he says. "No five-year-old should have to ask a therapist, ‘Who do I believe, Mommy or Daddy?’ "

DeRuiter wants the health-care community—particularly those involved in social work, counseling, and therapy—to encourage failing couples to honor their commitments to each other and to their children. "The language of individual rights tramples on kids," he says. "It makes children commodities to be disposed of." He wants health-care providers to become more aware of the value of helping parents stay together, and he wants the community to devote more resources to early intervention for marriages under stress.

He is attracting significant support. Susan Heartwell, the executive director of a local agency that combats child abuse, is a highly regarded local expert on domestic violence and its victims. She initially declined to endorse the community marriage policy because an early draft was silent on the subject of abusive marriages. But she eventually signed on after helping draft language recognizing that abusive marriages need not be endured.

Michael McManus, the author of Marriage Savers and the architect of the community marriage policy concept, points out that churches and synagogues are foundational to the policy’s success. Because at least 75 percent of our community’s weddings take place in churches, our clergy and our congregations have both a special responsibility and a special opportunity to revitalize marriage. Therefore the policy includes a broadly Judeo-Christian theological basis, along with specific steps for clergy and congregations.

For some the policy has been catalytic. One pastor reported that his large downtown church had until now a "minimalist" policy with regard to marriage and premarital preparation. But his congregation rewrote their expectations to conform with those of the community marriage policy. Another pastor reported that his meetings with couples to lay out his expectations for premarital preparation have been more effective now that these expectations have been endorsed in a community-wide policy.

We are also assisting the clergy with practical tools. Last winter, we hosted four day-long seminars for clergy and lay leaders on techniques and resources for premarital preparation. We called on local experts, pastors, and counselors who were already leading model programs in our community. The four sessions attracted 120 registrants.

We have also developed a premarital preparation class for couples, conducted in two four-hour blocks on successive Saturdays. These classes cover marital expectations, communication, conflict resolution, finances, and gender and sexuality issues, among other topics. The faculty are mental-health professionals and the content is endorsed by our Clergy Task Force. Held four times a year, these classes rotate among various churches and attract couples from various backgrounds. They are designed to supplement, not replace, the vital role of clergy in preparing couples for marriage.

We face a huge task in raising public awareness about the importance of marriage to our community. Grand Rapids and Kent County are already home to strong advocacy groups and coalitions concerned with at-risk children and families, teenage pregnancy, juvenile delinquency, substance abuse, school dropouts, and sexually transmitted diseases. Until the advent of the community marriage policy, however, there had been little public discussion on the causal link between social problems and the marital structure of the homes in which our children are raised.

"In public discourse, marriage is the ‘M’ word," says Theodora Ooms of the Family Impact Seminar, in Washington, D.C. "Nobody talks about it." So we are using the new marriage policy as a way to begin a public dialogue.

To inaugurate the policy, we hosted a luncheon in March 1997 for 300 community leaders and members of the clergy at a downtown hotel. Our guest speaker was Michael McManus. In June 1997, we took out two full-page advertisements in three local newspapers, the Grand Rapids Press, the Grand Rapids Times (an African-American newspaper), and El Hispano. The first ad included a copy of the full text of the policy; the second was a roster of 400 people who had endorsed the policy.

Our headquarters is located at the Family Institute, a mental-health education and prevention program of Pine Rest Christian Mental Health Services, the largest provider of behavioral-health care in western Michigan. We have also secured broad financial support. We received contributions from about a dozen local philanthropists in amounts ranging from $500 to $10,000 each. In May, we received word of a $20,000 grant from a local donor toward the $99,000 budget for the next phase of the project.

We have a decade of work ahead of us. Because the weakening of marriage has deep roots in our culture’s focus on individualism, we do not expect a quick remedy. Most of our civic leaders have not yet elevated marriage to the top of their agenda. At this time, we’ve barely touched our minority communities and those who are most at risk financially.

But we are encouraged by early signs of progress. A local college has put together a committee of faculty and counseling center staff to find ways to better prepare their students for marriage. Churches are upgrading their premarital and marriage-support programs.

In March 1998, a local conference on marriage sponsored by the Pine Rest Family Institute attracted 300 mental-health professionals, members of the clergy, and others. William Doherty, the author of Soul Searching: Why Psychotherapy Must Promote Moral Responsibility, challenged us to examine our counseling ethics critically. He believes that many practitioners undermine marriage by being inattentive to the social obligations of their clients toward spouses and children.

A growing number of our city’s citizens and civic groups are beginning to see that healthy marriages are fundamental to healthy communities. We know this approach can work: In at least 15 cities that have embraced community marriage policies, says McManus, the divorce rate has dropped significantly. In the words of the Reverend Ben Ingebretson, one of the original framers of our community marriage policy, "Our job is to cast the vision. Having done that, we claim partnership with every person and organization in our city who is working to strengthen marriage."