Saturday, October 04, 2008
Marriage for keepsFamily Bible Fellowship
Bob Moeller has written several books to help people maintain happy marriages.
MARCUS YAM
Roanoke Times After seeing Bob Moeller's presentation in Chicago this year, Bill Pierce (above), a member of Family Bible Fellowship, will bring his wife, Barbara, to today's seminar in Roanoke. "It really changes you to see a speaker like him," Pierce said.
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Pastor Bob Moeller and his wife, Cheryl, during their almost three decades of marriage and rearing six children, say they have had communication problems. They have lived through difficulties that would distress any couple: death in the family and unemployment.
And that's even though Bob Moeller has given dozens of seminars and penned books on making marriage work. As Moeller puts it, it happens to everybody.
"Oh sure, we have faced a lot of challenges," he said.
Moeller is the host of "Marriage: For Better, For Worse, For Keeps" a Dear Ann-style weekly show on Christian channel Total Living Network. He converses on topics such as "Taking Responsibility for Your Mistakes" or "Seven Top Mistakes Newlyweds Make" and then takes questions from callers. From 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. today, his road presentation will land him in Roanoke at Family Bible Fellowship, at 1342 Riverland Road S.E.
Moeller is the first to admit he is not a licensed counselor. "I am a pastor who has spent the last 15 years working with marriage," he said recently from his Chicago home.
Yet he has helped many people. His seminal work "For Better, For Worse, For Keeps," the first of his six books, was inspired by a divorce in his extended family. It made him feel, he said, that there had to be a better alternative to breaking a home and leaving children vulnerable.
So he tried to help couples going through marriage difficulties, and when he was working in a seminary in Chicago, the opportunity to have a book published came up. Then, he hosted radio segments on marriage advice, and eventually those appearances turned into a full television show that he says attracts Christians and secular channel surfers.
Among the common concerns people have: "My husband is addicted to pornography," "My wife is going through emotional distress," or "He hides how much he's making from me."
Moeller says most people think problems like that are very individual, but he counters that they are not.
"All these questions we might think just apply to us, are really quite universal," he said.
So today, Moeller will lead a conversation under his premise that in all marriages it's important to build intimacy, to communicate love, to have a joyous sex life and to apologize when mistakes are made. He will also talk about what he calls different types of "locked heart," or a heart that has been damaged by sin and pain.
The question, then, is, isn't this type of ministry simply injecting secular solutions to a secular problem into church?
"We realize that people who don't share our faith can have a happy marriage," Moeller said. "What we're saying is that there is a unique resource available that is beyond ourselves. When our capacity to keep trying wears out, God can give us a strength that is not our own."
It's with that strength, he said, that Moeller and his wife learned that he had a "locked heart" that tended to shut down instead of confront conflict.
Thanks to what they have learned, he said, he and his wife have stayed together for 28 years.
