Church Offers Practical Help for Living

Tuesday, Oct. 13, 2009 Posted: 8:08:54PM HKT

Most churches offer at least pre-marriage counselling. This congregation goes all the way, guiding adult members from singlehood to marriage to parenting to financial management.

City Harvest Church is running a series of Better Life workshops to meet the needs of its members. The classes are run by professionals, according to the church website.

A class on singlehood prepares members for a romantic relationship and subsequent marriage and family commitment.

It teaches them about relationships that do not work, fatal flaws to look out for, how to develop the ‘X’ factor, practical issues on communication, and goal setting for life. Participants will get to know themselves better through the PEAKS Personality Profiling.

A marriage course explores foundational issues.

This includes the purposes of marriage, roles and responsibilities of the husband and wife, myths about sex, breaking the cycle of poverty and debt, emotional programming and how it can affect the emotional health of a marriage, communicating with emotional openness toward the spouse, managing anger, managing conflict, overcoming sexual temptation and making a marriage ‘affair-proof’, and long-lasting romance, intimacy and commitment in marriage.

Another workshop helps couples manage their finances. The seminar discusses managing the cash flow, protecting wealth, multiplying resources for the future and distributing to those one cares for.

In addition to the workshop, the church runs a financial education course for couples, designed to equip them with the right skills and tools to make ‘complete’ sense of their finances. The seminar will enable couples to connect money to life, create a sensible budget, get out of debt and stay out of it, figure out their insurance plans, understand key investment principles to work towards retirement and create a sound estate plan (will, nominations) among others.

There is also a class on parenting children aged zero to five years with confidence.

A class on improving self-image and fashion outlook is thrown in for good measure. The course helps participants discover their specific ‘winning’ image system that builds businesses, according to a write-up on the workshop.

Comprising eight sessions, the course will introduce attendees to image mastery with colours and style and will cover dressing strategies with colours and fashion highlights among other aspects.

Nathanael Ng
nathanael@christianpost.com