Customer Reviews

Becoming Married (Family Living in Pastoral Perspective)

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Herbert Anderson has some great approaches to pastoral ministry to those who intend on marrying! I am engaged and have learned so much about what it means to become married. I have given a copy to my pastor, and also to my mother! It is a book all should read. Anderson has some great pastoral excercises for pre-marriage work all pastors should read. It is a quick, easy to understand read!

I own Anderson's entire Family Living in Pastoral Perspective series (Leaving Home, Becoming Married, Regarding Children, Promising Again, and Living Alone), and I refer to them frequently.

Each book focuses on a different transitional event and the family tasks that event brings into focus. Anderson and his co-authors deal sensitively with the pastoral issues involved.

Becoming Married explores the process of becoming married as more than just a wedding ceremony. Chapter one discusses how relationships must begin to be reordered before the wedding so that the couple's bond takes primacy over relationships with parents and friends. Chapter two introduces the genogram as a tool for exploring each person's family history in premarital counseling. Chapter three examines the wedding liturgy and ways to plan a meaningful wedding.

Chapter four covers several situations which can make the process of becoming married more complicated: interfaith marriages, interracial marriages, leftover or buried grief, living together before the wedding, and second marriages. Chapter five discusses post-wedding work and the nature of the marital bond. Finally, in chapter six the authors develop their theology of marriage.

All of the books are well-written and easy to read--no convoluted prose to parse here. The works have added texture from the many personal examples shared by the authors (both their own and examples others have shared with them).

Every book in the series deserves an honored place on any religious professional's shelf. Except, you may find them so valuable they rarely make it back to your shelf.

This is the most helpful book on marriage I've ever read. Using Biblical and theological insights along with basic principles of family systems thinking, Anderson and Fite not only changed my understanding of my own marriage but they also helped me to be more effective in my work as a parish pastor. The section on pre-wedding meetings and the chapter on "Planning a meaningful wedding" provided a new way to do pre-marriage work with couples that was a vast improvement over past frustrations. I highly recommend it for clergy and anyone else who is interested in understanding the ongoing process of "becoming married."

I am a pastor and I first came into contact with this book when planning my own wedding. I found the book invaluable in negotiating the sometimes-confusing territory involved in getting married. Since then I have used it as a resource in helping other couples plan meaningful weddings and prepare for marriage. It is the best book of its kind I have found.