Marriage Preparation

The marriage preparation process at Christ the King is designed to provide you with resources that will help you to live out what you will promise at your wedding:

I, (name), take you, (name), to be my wife/husband. I promise to be true to you in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health. I will love you and honor you all the days of my life.

Marriage preparation at Christ the King requires several components:

• The Pre-Nuptial Questionnaire determines a couple’s freedom to marry in the Catholic Church. It affirms the couple’s commitment to the obligations of the Catholic life and an understanding of what the sacrament of marriage involves.

• The PREPARE Assessment provides an overview of a couple’s strengths, areas for growth, current disagreements, and potential sources of conflict. The PREPARE assessment is not a compatibility test. It merely provides a picture of you, your partner, and your relationship together. Honest and unidealistic responses on the assessment provide valuable opportunities for growing in intimacy with your partner.

• Meetings with mentor couples and/or Jon Stotts provide you with a context to discuss the picture of you, your partner, and your relationship that emerges in the PREPARE assessment. We use a number of conversation topics and exercises to help you reflect on your desires for growth and intimacy, to strengthen your abilities to communicate effectively, and to discuss issues that have arisen or might arise in your families of origin.

• Your appointment with a local marriage psychologist provides a safe, professional, and confidential space in which to deepen your knowledge of yourselves and one another. The therapists with whom we have partnered has been working with premarital and married couples for decades, and they can provide a degree of expertise and objectivity for which Christ the King’s marriage preparation ministry is not designed.

• Meetings with your wedding officiant will address any issues left unresolved in your preparation. These meetings will also provide a link between the insights you gained in the preparation process and the celebration of the wedding itself.

At any time during this process, do not hesitate to reach out with questions, concerns, or difficulties that emerge. Christ the King is here to make sure that you both enter into the sacrament of marriage with full awareness, readiness, and eagerness.

Click here for a brief meditation on the sacrament of marriage.