MARRIAGE MISSIONS BEGAN several years ago when God gave us (Steve and Cindy Wright) a vision of Jesus standing over Jerusalem (Matthew 23) crying on behalf of His people, longing to embrace them and be a part of their everyday lives—but they “were not willing.”
They were not willing to let go of their own “kingdoms” which were “pretensions” set up “against the knowledge of God” (2 Corinthians 10) and also to let go of their petty quarrels over what they perceived to be their “rights.”
In our mind’s eyes we saw Christ weeping over His children, who were showing their rejection of Him by their actions. God began to speak to our inner being saying,
“This is what my children are doing to marriage—to the visible picture of Christ’s love for the church, that I have entrusted with them to live out.“
We sensed God’s heart breaking as we began to look at marriages all around us that were ripping apart in divorce and so many others that were obviously unhealthy in how they interacted with each other. These were married couples who claimed to love Christ and yet were not living out His life-giving principles for loving each other within the sanctity of their homes.
We also sensed God giving us a vision and a passion to reach out to help others embrace the love God has for them and to put the heart of Christ back into their marriages.
MARRIAGE MISSIONS BEGAN when we started meeting with a few other married couples to share with them the vision to pro-actively take a stand in our own marriages—making them ones that reflect the love of Christ in every way. We decided to meet once a month to “spur one another on to love and good deeds” (Hebrews 10:24).
Then God began to show us how much we’re bombarded with the “world’s” views of how they believe love is to be lived out, and how absolutely contrary it is to His own. We started to see how important it was and is to pro-actively put God’s ways of loving continually in front of us to combat the world’s ideals and to be pro-active in preventing problems that occur in our marriages rather than just being “re-active” (trying to fix problems once they’ve revealed themselves). We realized that all of us needed to be doing both.
So we started reading and listening—becoming students of marriage from God’s perspective. God began teaching us and in 2001 led us to write down some of the “marriage tips” we’d been learning. We started to e-mail them out to our friends once a week so we could all benefit from what God was teaching us. From there it has expanded.
THIS MINISTRY GOT ITS NAME in 2001, when God laid it upon Steve’s mind and heart to call it Marriage Missions. He revealed, first to Steve and then to Cindy, that every one of us become missionaries to marriage as soon as we sign our marriage contract. It starts first with us, to continually live out the love of Christ in our own marriage, and then to reach out beyond to help others as well.
We then knelt together to commit this ministry to God to take it where He would want it to go and it’s been an awesome journey.
Eventually Marriage Missions grew from e-mailing “marriage tips” to a few couples we knew within the United States once a week, to sending Marriage Messages to multiple tens of thousands throughout the world—with the largest number going outside of the U.S.A.
And because of this growth we eventually commissioned to have this web site put together because we got so many requests for past marriage messages that we couldn’t keep up with the demand.
It wasn’t long before we had to have the web site re-designed so we could post additional marriage material, written by various “experts,” to help answer some of the questions we were receiving and to point our readers to additional resources that could further help them.
Since that time we have revised and up-dated the web site several times, to expand the information it provides, and to partner with God in what He is doing through this ministry which He began and continues to grow.
We feel blessed that He allows us to participate with Him in this awesome way!