Since its inception, Biola’s Center for Marriage and Relationships (CMR) has received a tremendous amount of positive response from the community, with more than 2,600 participants in its marriage conferences, retreats, and seminars, and most recently, a sold-out marriage mentoring conference for those interested in counseling other couples in their churches.

On April 16, in response to a growing request, CMR hosted 170 participants at their marriage mentoring conference. The conference centered on the recently published Marriage Mentoring Facilitator Workbook and Participant Workbook, created by the center’s director, Chris Grace, with assistance from Biola communications professor Tim Muehlhoff and Consulting Director Alisa Grace.

According to Grace, the Marriage Mentoring Conference first came about due to a request for marriage mentoring from Bayside Church in Roseville, Calif. Grace, along with his wife Alisa and Tim Muehlhoff, created the curriculum, and conducted inaugural training for approximately 50 couples at Bayside. However, requests continued to be made for this type of conference on Biola’s campus.

Grace explained that CMR offers “level one” conferences for couples interested in receiving marriage counseling, but that they soon realized couples wanted a conference that was more in depth. “Going Deeper” conferences began to be offered every fall, and on top of that, requests were made for a new level of marriage counseling — training for mentors who counsel other couples.

Pastors, mentors, and couples traveled from as far as Arizona to attend the conference.

“We really appreciated the biblical content woven into every topic,” said Robin Fuller, conference attendee and administrative pastor at The Warehouse in Whittier, Calif.

Kurt Fuller, head pastor at The Warehouse, appreciated the balanced nature of the curriculum, and looks forward to utilizing it while mentoring couples in his church.

“The marriage mentoring program is built on a balance of biblical and clinical stances,” said Fuller. “The marriage curriculum is going to help us tremendously.”

Apart from their conferences, CMR also provides podcasts, videos, and other resources on its website, as well as free pre-marital counseling and referrals for Biola students, a Biola Relationship Retreat, and weekly hours for free, drop-in relationship advice.

Chris and Alisa Grace co-teach a course at Biola in the spring on Christian perspectives on relationships alongside Tim and Noreen Muehlhoff and Erik and Donna Thoennes. The course has proven extremely popular amongst students, with over 600 participants in the class thus far.

CMR plans to spread its influence with the addition of “Neighbor Love” conferences in hopes of bringing the resources that the center provides to economically challenged communities.

“One of the groups in the United States that has the highest rates of divorce are the lower economic classes,” said Alisa Grace. “And they’re the ones that need the most help but can least afford it . . . So our vision is to take this to them, and to partner with local churches in different communities by bringing the material, the speakers, for free, supplementing childcare for the couples to come, and partnering with an outside vendor to do the lunch. And then the church would take care of hosting it, marketing it, getting the people there, and we would present the marriage conference for them for the weekend.”

Looking toward the future, CMR intends to take its conferences and materials to outside campuses. This spring, Chris and Alisa Grace plan to conduct a prototype of the marriage conference on the campus of UCLA in partnership with Cru (Campus Crusades), and in the fall of 2016, the center plans to target campuses such as Chapman University, Cal State Fullerton, and University of California, Irvine.

As CMR continues to flourish, its leadership team only hopes that awareness of it will grow.

“People may think, ‘Center for Marriage, that’s not for me’ and they miss the ‘& Relationships,’” said Chris Grace.

“We talk about healthy communication— that’s something anybody and everybody needs to do,” continued Alisa Grace.  “We talk about how to manage conflict, we have a video on how to manage toxic relationships, so there’s a lot that we’re providing that’s available and that’s relative to singles.”

The CMR staff continues to pray for further funding, in order to fully realize the goals they have to reach beyond the Biola community.

“In five years, if we had the capacity to double our staff, I believe we could quadruple our impact,” said Chris Grace. “We could be a trusted source for marital and other types of relationships that is integrative and biblical, and that is able to reach out to communities on a national, or even international level.”

Written by Kathryn Toombs, Public Relations Intern. For more information, please contact Jenna Loumagne, Media Relations Specialist, at jenna.loumagne@biola.edu or via phone at (562) 777-4061.