BAPTISTS PUT MARRIAGE COUNSELING PLAN ASIDE

Mickey Mouse may have beaten the Rev. Roy Jones this year, but the director of the Cape Girardeau Baptist Association is confident he will eventually come out on top.

Jones introduced a proposal to the resolution committee at the Southern Baptist Convention in Dallas earlier in the week that supported premarital counseling for any members considering church marriage. He said the committee only sent 20 resolutions to the convention floor to be voted on, including a measure that passed which encouraged members to boycott the Walt Disney Co. for its "gay-friendly policies."

The proposed counseling policy was one of 35 that got no action from the committee. Resolutions that pass are nonbinding because each church in the convention is autonomous.

"It's a tough committee assignment, to figure out in a week's time what speaks for one committee," Jones said during a telephone interview Thursday. "I was very encouraged by how well the community marriage policy was received. I will bring it back and I will do more homework and educate people better about it. It just takes time for a new idea to be accepted."

Jones said his resolution may not have made it out of committee in part because of confusion about the terminology. Although he initially felt positive about his presentation to the committee, he said he knew some people were unsure about the purpose of a community marriage policy.

"I had a feeling Wednesday that that was going to happen, but I couldn't confirm it until they made their final announcements today," he said. "I think there was some concern about what community marriage actually means. This would be an individual church action to improve ministry to people considering marriage or having problems in their marriage."

Jones said premarital counseling is not a new concept in the religious arena. Modesto, Calif., was the first community to form a cross-denominational community marriage policy in 1986, and today there are more than 55 communities that sponsor similar policies.

Thirty-three Cape Girardeau churches formed a Marriage Savers group in February 1996 to provide premarital and marriage counseling, said Jones. The group has since gone regional, and now includes communities throughout Cape Girardeau County and into Perry and Scott counties.

"We hope to see this group grow to have a regional type of impact instead of just one city or one county," said Jones. "The broader the concept is being used, the more likely people are to decide there are things they need to do to prepare for marriage. We believe the church is for helping people, even though it may inconvenience some people."

No statistics have been kept regarding the number of couples helped through the program. Jones said monitoring the program through statistics might deter churches from participating and would be a time-consuming and costly process. A better measure of success, he said, will be Cape Girardeau County's divorce rate in three or four years.

"It will take several years to see the true impact of this type of work," he said. "We would hope that four or five years down the road we'll see a drop in the divorce rate in Cape County and the surrounding areas."