hello, I am getting married in June and I am on the search for premarital counseling or a retreat.
I would do it with the Pastor who is marrying us, however it would be hard to squeeze in 12 hours in a town 3 hours away before the date...
does anyone know where I should begin? what you've done??? any suggestions???? (Lutheran)
Take a look at www.marriages.org. They have marriage/engaged retreats right in Eagan. My husband and I did a marriage encounter about 10 years ago early on in our marriage and it was great. They have different dates available and it looks like they go Friday night to Saturday night.
I don't know what denomination the pastor is who will be marrying you, but we were in a similar situation; we lived in St Paul and were getting married in Itasca State Park, so we found a pastor in Bemidji to marry us. He was Methodist, so he put us in touch with a Methodist pastor in Stillwater, which worked out great. So you may want to ask the pastor if they know anyone closer to you, or contact other congregations of the same denomination and see if they can help you out.
Congratulations!
I don't know if you are Catholic but all Catholic parishes require premarital counseling and even tho you may not be Catholic the subject matter is pretty transferable to any and all marriages. Try your local Catholic parish, they may be able to set you up. You certainly don't need to be Catholic to join in on the classes and since it is a requirement before all Catholic marriages they are pretty easy to locate. Obviously there will be some Catholic content (teaching about natural family planning as well as Catholic wedding traditions) but everything else presented would pertain to all marriages Catholic or not and contrary to popular belief marriage preparation classes are not wholly presented by Priests who have never and will never be married, they are presented by experienced couples who have had a lot of training on the subject.
K. H
My husband and I just called around to different family counseling places and asked if they worked with couples through the PREPARE inventory since that is something commonly used by clergy and others when doing premarital counseling. I think we went to 4 sessions or so after the test. We really only had a couple areas where we were widely divergent and spent our time talking about those. I can't even remember who we used, but it was just a family therapy counselor, not a clergy.
You can contact Bethlehem Baptist Church in Minneapolis. They do a huge marriage/family seminar and it is coming up soon. I have heard wonderful things. My husband and I are planning to attend this year.
