What support? You'd think that if a church decided to do the cultic thing by strictly arranging all marriages, they would at least provide sufficient support and guidance, knowing that the problems associated with arranged marriages will inevitably surface. But not so in UBF. Here's something I wrote in 2004:
Date Posted: 14:59:47 10/11/04 Mon
Author: Joe
Subject: UBF's support for healthy marriages
[A UBF spokesperson wrote as a way of defending UBF arranged marriages:]
>>b.) Since you bring up marriage, I would like to point
>>out that marriage is more of a process of forming a
>>relationship, rather than a single event. [Sounds nice, doesn't it?]
I've wanted to write about this for some time, and I will do that more fully later. Not only is the way that typical UBF marriages begin wrong, but the way that UBF marriages are nurtured (or rather, not nurtured) is wrong. Consider the utterly asinine marriage "vows" that have been typically exchanged at UBF weddings.
"Do you promise to cook for him and do the dishes? Say 'I do!' Not loud enough! Say 'I do!'"
* Add your examples here.
Consider how husband and wife typically refer to each other [in UBF]: "my coworker"
This betrays a lack of understanding and a lack of interest in trying to understand just what marriage is, just how serious it is, just how hard the work is to make a marriage work. Yet they are constantly pushing their recruits and their children to get married and often hurriedly putting two people together at the 11th hour.
Nick T. has recently expressed this better than I have:
10th-Aug-2006 04:07 am (UTC) - what normal people think of marriage
[by] nick__t
The ubf tries to define marriage as the 'big day' that the arranged couple becomes a couple formally. The ubf has no concern or theology about what constitutes a marriage after the big day.
If we survey healthy churches, there is almost no interest in how a couple become married. What healthy churches are concerned with is how the couple progresses, and the welfare of the people in the marriage.
For example, I went to the Grace to You website of John MacArthur's church. I went to resources, plugged in the keyword 'marriage', and it came up with 244 results, mostly books on marriage. A 'marriage' search at the Willow Creek Church Seed's Bookstore came up with 1108 items, mainly books. Healthy ministries do all kinds of things to be a blessing to married couples, and thus entire families. Marriage in God is so much, but ubfmarriage is so lame and pathetic they can't even describe it.
ubf cares about young peoples' marriages about as much as Stromboli cared about Pinocchio.
