Let’s Talk About Marriage Retreats

After I posted my article on women’s retreats, several people requested one on marriage retreats. I stopped going to those well before I left my church. They had become somewhat irrelevant to my husband and me. Over the years, as I came to realize the negative impact of patriarchy and role theology, I lost interest.

I want to say right off the bat that Mark and I led and facilitated many awful marriage retreats and workshops (and maybe some good ones too). I remember one particular one in London, where I immediately felt something was off about the way we had conducted our marriage retreat. We had focused so much on evangelism that we missed the point of marriage spiritual formation. I did not have the language at the time, but I felt it in my gut.

So let us see… What was good? For many couples, if the retreat was out of town, it was a nice way to get away from the hustle and bustle of daily life, a break from the children, and a change of scenery. In the Western world, a comfortable hotel room and food you did not have to cook were a nice experience. Hanging out with friends. Sometimes the lessons were really good, depending on who the speakers were.

What about the not-so-good? Many things come to mind. I will address the first one, which is where Mark and I failed. In our drive for evangelism, we used the marriage workshops (we did not do many actual retreats for financial reasons, as we led mostly in the UK and South Asia) to bring new people to church, so the messages were heavily geared that way. It must have been disappointing for people who expected help with their actual marriage.

Not that we could have helped very much. We were not trained marriage counselors. And that was another issue. I never attended a marriage retreat taught by actual trained counselors, except maybe once. I know that has changed a little, at least in some US cases, but it is still rare.

One-size-fits-all: everyone was supposed to have the same marriage dynamic. The husband leads, the wife follows, and so do the kids. There was very little awareness of multicultural settings. The model was and still is a white Western evangelical one. If that is what people want, that is their choice, but most of the world does not live that way or want it that way.

The lessons were heavily influenced by the men. There would usually be a session for the wives, but the main lessons were taught by the men with sometimes some sharing by the women. That is problematic in itself, as the audience got to hear more from the man’s perspective.

The heavy emphasis on sex, at least in the US. I remember cringing at the lessons, the innuendos, the sleazy talk, the TMI, the way women were objectified by their husbands, the crude jokes. Yuck. I hated that. Thankfully, my husband did not do that, but I heard a lot of bedroom talk I did not want to know. And I am not a prude. Some stuff is private.

Some of the teaching was really toxic. I remember being asked by a prominent elder’s wife in a marriage class how many of us had sex with our husbands every day. Yes, we had to raise our hands. She boasted that she did. I was like, sorry, but no way. And the expectation that if the husband wanted it, the wife had to comply. That toxic expectation led to much grief and, sadly, many cases of marital rape.

Forced attendance: some of us decided along the way that we would not show up. If people asked, we would just say we were not going. As leaders and former leaders, we had a little more confidence to say no, but I dread to think of what it was/is like for members who feel they cannot say no without being grilled and pressured.

The cost: those retreats were/are expensive! That is why Mark and I usually did workshops in-house rather than go away somewhere. We also led churches in less wealthy places. Forking out hundreds of dollars in this economy for a weekend you might or might not enjoy is unreasonable. Did the church staff, who made the decisions, have to pay too? In most churches, they didn’t/don’t. I appreciate my husband for always expecting everyone to pay for themselves. That caused some grumbling on staff at times, but our philosophy was that if we expect others to pay, we should too. Yes, we did the work to plan and run the retreats, but the regular members had full-time jobs too!

Finding babysitters. This was such a hard one. And of course, the young people in the church were expected to take that on, often at no pay. I am incredibly grateful for the ones who helped us over the years. But it was nerve-racking for the parents, knowing their kids were left with often inexperienced babysitters, even if those helping were good-hearted.

This is not about bashing my old church. This is about exposing dysfunctional and harmful practices that have nothing to do with our followership of Jesus. I credit our having a good marriage after 40 years to staying away from a lot of this stuff. And to the ones we subjected to our flawed marriage teaching and over-emphasis on evangelism, I am really sorry.