Who created the Together with Jesus Couple Prayer Series?
Bob and Kathy Ovies have been sharing their lives together in Jesus-centered ministry for more than 40 years, the last twenty-two of which have included Bob's ordained ministry. They have been blessed with six children, one deceased. Bob has served as Deacon, Evangelist, Retreat Director, Director of Family Life Ministries, Individual and Group Counselor (MSW), High School Teacher, Jail Ministry, and Co-Director of an inner-city Christian Half-Way House in Detroit's "Corktown District." Kathy has served as Director of Scripture Studies, Grade-, Middle- and High-School Teacher, Youth Minister, Jail Minister, Minister of Evangelism, and Mission Worker in the Appalachian Mountains, in Cook County, Chicago, and in Detroit's inner-city. Together, they also served as Directors of a Communal House of Prayer in the Detroit, Michigan, area and as teachers and mission workers on the Navajo Reservation of Arizona. They created the Together with Jesus Couple Prayer Series at the request of numerous couples in their own and nearby churches who were experiencing a strong desire to learn how to pray together as engaged or married couples in ways that would safely and surely help them experience a significantly deeper and more loving personal relationship with God and one another.
Can the Couple Prayer Series be offered in a time-frame
other than its present six-week format?
Even with the Home Edition for individual couples or small, Home Group gatherings of couples, where no large Church gatherings are involved, we strongly recommend that couples experience the Series on a six-week schedule if at all possible. The process of adapting to a new daily routine over a six-week period -- of mutually-sharing a process of adjusting individual priorities and schedules to allow making Couple Prayer a normal and important part of a couple's everyday life -- is extremely important and enormously blessed.
With the Church Facilitator Package, where the Series being presented will involve a large number of couples from a given Church community (and very often from other nearby churches) we have, in fact, offered the Series in a Friday-evening-through-Sunday morning weekend format on two occasions. Based on the feedback received at the time, both were very positive experiences for the couples involved, which demonstrated again that whenever couples come together to seek God’s company in shared-prayer, they’ll be very much blessed. But we also know that the couples in those shortened Series missed a lot from their condensed format, for at least the following two reasons.
1) In the six-week format, involving numbers of couples – and this has held true from our smallest Church Series, a
twelve-couple Series, to our largest, where one-hundred and six couples participated in a large Church Hall – we’ve seen without fail that a uniquely blessed dynamic develops between the couples over a full, six-week-period.
In this longer time-frame, where couples can discuss the ups and downs of their week-to-week experiences with other couples, they seem to develop higher levels of confidence regarding their own abilities to happily pray together. This happens because they keep on getting affirmed and mutually-encouraged in their own beginning-prayer experiences. They freely say so, and it clearly shows, each week. The couple-to-couple discussion-times which are a part of each weekly session (among groups of three or four couples per-table) invariably confirm to each couple that they are not, for example, the only ones feeling awkward during the first week or so, or the only individuals that might feel intimated because their husband or wife seems to pray “better” than them, or the only couples that initially have trouble with issues of safety and vulnerability in mind. So they become validated through various speed-bumps, not just by teachers or facilitators, but by other couples very much like themselves. In the end, it's the very act of safely talking over both their successes and stumbles with other couples like themselves – issues which, in fact, show themselves to be quite common to practically every couple involved -- that often seems to help a couple’s confidence in their own capacity for successful Couple Prayer best take root and grow.
2) The six-week time-frame also gives participating couples a more realistic amount of time to peacefully and personally experience a “wider menu” of ways that they might pray fruitfully together. This wider, “full Series” menu gives couples a better range of tools and broader range of shared-prayer experiences from which they can successfully select and build upon those particular prayer forms that they’ve found to be best-suited for them. Again, a shortened format is very helpful, as any new encouragement for Couple Prayer will be. But it simply won’t offer time for couples to experience the same range of personal experiences with Couple Prayer that they’ll come away with after a full six-week Series.
Can couples besides those who are married or engaged join a Couple Prayer Series,
such as mother and daughter, friends, associates, etc...?
We certainly pray that everyone, single, married, widowed, divorced or separated, will be able to find other members of the Body of Christ with whom they can share their closest prayers. That's one reason the Body of Christ exists.
In fact, it's our hope and belief that the Home Edition of the Couple Prayer Series will bring significant blessings to a great many relationships, such as that of the widowed mother and adult daughter who live together and approached us one day asking for help in their learning how to pray together more peacefully and regularly in their own home.
But those Couple Prayer Series offered in a Church or for gathered couples in a small, Home Group setting are necessarily focused in large part on the mutual sharings and encouragements of the married or soon-to-married couples attending. The majority of these important mutual discussions, then, are going to revolve around life-experiences more common to marriage than to the single state of life (just as discussions about the single state won't usually relate to experiences which are more common to relationships within a marriage).
For this reason, we suggest to those of you who are going to facilitate the Series in a Church or to a Home Group of couples that you limit the attendance to those who are either married or engaged, and try to arrange other means of helping those who are single grow in sharing their prayers together if and whenever the love of God stirs that desire in them.
How did the Couple Prayer Series come about?
Several years ago, Bob and Kathy were asked if they would fill in on a last-minute basis for a speaker who had gotten ill just before giving the main address at a dinner honoring married couples. They agreed, and chose to speak about something that they had entered into, wrestled with, worked at through various highs and lows, and been enormously blessed by in their then thirty-six years of marriage. Their subject: "The Blessings of Couple Prayer."
The response to that presentation, and the requests from so many attending couples for help in teaching them how to pray together, was so immediate and so surprisingly strong that Bob and Kathy invited participation in several follow-up meetings involving nearly fifty couples. Over the next six months, Bob and Kathy learned much more about why so many couples feel awkward (and even unsafe) in trying to pray together for the first time. They learned about proven "hows" and "whys" of successful Couple Prayer from married couples who have been growing closer to God and one another through sharing daily Couple Prayer for a number of years. And they discussed and prayed for the better part of a year with a number of other couples for insight into what would best help married or engaged couples already touched by God with
a desire to pray together grow though easy stages to more and more fully and comfortably experience "the blessings of couple prayer." The six-week Together with Jesus Couple Prayer Series is the fruit of that shared prayer and vision.
Is the Couple Prayer Series denominationally focused?
The Couple Prayer Series is Jesus-centered, gospel-centered, bible centered, Christian faith centered. It introduces no uniquely denominational points-of-view for a very simple reason. Statistics confirm that even among the most traditional denominations, at least fifty percent and often more of church weddings celebrated today involve one spouse from the tradition or denomination of the church celebrating the wedding and one spouse from another Christian tradition or denomination or from another faith altogether. Or, in a minority of cases, even from an entirely non-spiritual background.
At the same time, we know that Jesus, who is “the same yesterday, today and forever,” still prays for deep unity in faith, hope and love among married couples, including each couple taking this Series. And Jesus still offers himself as the one and only source of that life-changing, life-saving unity.
If this Series, then, can simply help couples come together with Jesus as the rock upon which everything else in their marriage can be built, and if it can help couples firmly establish shared Couple Prayer as one of their foundational ways of keeping that personal relationship with Jesus alive in their marriage relationship, we believe that we can happily thank God and peacefully leave whatever else the Lord is going to lead them to and bless them with for the remainder of their lives in the entirely capable hands of the Holy Spirit.
How long does it take to view each of the Series' six video sessions?
On average, each of the six DVD video sessions takes something short of one hour to view straight through. However, there are several sections in each session designed to let you pause on title-frames (relating to what's come before and what is coming after) so you can discuss relevant subjects before you continue, and/or so you can pray together about these issues before you continue. Whenever you're ready, you would then push "Play" and continue.
Each Title Frame included for Discussion and/or a Prayer Experience will therefore take whatever amount of time you choose to give it, with individual couples viewing the Series at home understandably moving through each session quicker, on average, than a Home Study Group of four to eight couples. With all of this (plus a usual short break) considered, and depending on the number of couples involved, our feedback indicates that each fully-experienced session may take from approximately 80 minutes to 2 hours.
