Professional Dissertations DMin

Date of Award

2008

Document Type

Project Report

Degree Name

Doctor of Ministry

College

Seventh-day Adventist Theological Seminary

Program

Doctor of Ministry DMin

First Advisor

Alfonso Valenzuela

Second Advisor

Ricardo Norton

Third Advisor

Harold Guizar

Abstract

The purpose of this project is to develop, implement, and evaluate a marriage encounter seminar for conflict resolutions, which was presented during a weekend to 48 couples of the Atlanta Metropolitan Hispanic Seventh-day Adventist Church. This project presents biblical fundamentals of marriage, as well as the most common marriage conflicts and their solutions. According to the Bible, God not only created man and woman in his “image,” but also united them in the state of matrimony in order for them to live peacefully and harmoniously in the Garden of Eden. Unfortunately, the entrance of sin to this world ruined God’s plan for human beings; and today conflicts in marriage are a common reality that many couples have to confront.

Conflicts in marriage are defined as disagreements in which both couples maintain different positions about a topic or a specific area affecting its harmony. If conflicts are dealt with inadequately, the process of resolving them could lead the couple to a divorce. Factors that create conflicts are identified in this project as well as the most common problematic areas among couples. The dissertation also analyzes each of the methods that are used to resolve conflicts by Christians and reviews five steps that couples should follow when looking to resolve conflicts in a constructive way.

The project includes an informative summary about Gwinnett County, the location of the Atlanta Metropolitan Seventh-day Adventist Church, and the history of the congregation. It also presents information about the couples that make up the church, as well as the explorative survey that was distributed among couples to uncover conflictive areas among them. The results are analyzed and presented in the table at the end of chapter four. The seminar “The Art of Conflict Resolutions in Marriage” was elaborated upon considering the teachings of the Bible, contemporary Christian literature, Ellen White writings, and the results obtained from the explorative survey into consideration. The Seminar is designed for couples that want to learn and develop techniques in the art of resolving conflicts in an appropriate way, in order to, preserve, strengthen, and guide the marriage relationship. It was structured into four sections and presented from February 29th to March 2nd of 2008, at the Atlanta Metropolitan Convention Center.

Subject Area

Marital conflict--Religious aspects; Marriage--Religious aspects; Atlanta Metropolitan Hispanic Seventh-day Adventist Church (Atlanta, Ga.)

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.

DOI

https://dx.doi.org/10.32597/dmin/334/

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