Mission: Gospel-Shaped Marriage

A mentor is walking a couple through the substance of Gospel-Shaped Marriage by Chad and Emily Van Dixhoorn so that the couple builds their marriage on the gospel of Christ rather than on cultural defaults. The couple may not read the book itself, so the mentor needs self-contained lessons that deliver each chapter's teaching, its Scripture, and a shared conversation, all in one place.

Success looks like

• The couple can articulate a biblical definition of marriage and its purposes in their own words.
• The couple can describe marriage's place in the four stages of redemptive history (creation, fall, grace, glory) and locate their own marriage within it.
• The husband and wife can each name and own their distinctive calling from Ephesians 5 (love and respect; headship and submission) as a grace, not a burden.
• The couple has concrete practices for confession, forgiveness, mutual study, intimacy, and hospitality that they are actually doing.
• The couple's marriage increasingly pictures Christ and the church to their church family and neighbors.

Constraints

• Lessons must be self-contained; do not assume the couple reads the book.
• Respect Crossway's copyright: teach ideas in fresh prose, never reproduce the book's text.
• Pace is one chapter per session, in sequence, mentor-led.
• Reformed-evangelical theological frame (the book's own): Scripture is the authority, Christ and the church is the governing analogy.
• Readable on screen and printable for a sit-down session.

Out of scope

• A standalone parenting course (chapter 7 touches parenting only as it affects marriage).
• Detailed sex-therapy technique (chapter 8 is principled and devotional, not clinical).
• Full premarital counseling methodology.
• Topics the book does not address (e.g. divorce and remarriage ethics in depth).

This mission grounds every lesson. When a session feels abstract, come back here: the point is never information alone, but a marriage that increasingly pictures Christ and the church.