What would it look like, if everyone who works with marriages in your area, came together?
What is a Community Marriage Initiative (CMI)?
A Community Marriage Initiative, or CMI as we refer to them, aims to connect and empower local experts, church leaders, and Marriage Champions in a community to facilitate a marriage movement.
A CMI brings together individuals passionate about serving marriages and families to make resources readily available for couples, offering resources for both preparing and enriching marriages. Often, there are people throughout a community already engaged in marriage-related work, but they may not have connected with others who share their passion for reducing divorce rates. Through CMIs, we have observed significant reductions in county-wide divorce rates.
At Marriage Initiative, we facilitate a nationwide network of like-minded individuals who can exchange ideas.
Our aim is to collaborate with Marriage Champions across the US to impact marriages and families nationwide.
For you, brothers, were called to freedom. Only do not turn your freedom into an opportunity to gratify your flesh, but through love make it your habit to serve one another.
Galatians 5:13
“Marriage Initiative is collectively ours. Our mission is to serve our grantees and partner cities. MI is you and it is us. It is all of our partner cities together."
- Carl Caton
The process starts with us walking you through the steps of forming a Community Marriage Initiative “Team”.
Why join a Community Marriage Initiative Team(CMI Team)?
Whether it’s through your church or with a local ministry organization, many of you are already dedicating your time and talent to serving marriages and families. Our hope is that we can honor your current role in a meaningful way by helping you to find your own unique, highest and best role. By joining a Community Marriage Initiative Team (CMI Team) in your city or region, your efforts will be joined with others as you work towards a larger, more connected mission. You will see your work transform into something more effective and even more meaningful.
Although there will be a modest investment of your time, joining a CMI Team will benefit the work you have already accomplished instead of taking away from it. Finding the right place to serve should be something that benefits what you are already doing, and it is our expectation that the CMI Team will make your work easier!
Instead of asking yourself the question, "Do I have the time to serve?" ask yourself this, "Where is the right place for me to serve, the place that elevates and enhances what I am already doing and also advances the bigger, collective mission of what God is doing?" We think you will find the answer in your CMI Team. Let us help support you on this journey!
Philippians 2:3-4
Instead of being motivated by selfish ambition or vanity, each of you should, in humility, be moved to treat one another as more important than yourself. Each of you should be concerned not only about your own interests, but about the interests of others as well.
Romans 15:1-3
Now we who are strong have an obligation to bear the weaknesses of those without strength, and not to please ourselves. Each one of us must please his neighbor for his good, to build him up. For even the Messiah did not please Himself. On the contrary, as it is written, The insults of those who insult You have fallen on Me.
Apply for our Community Marriage Initiative Grant
The Community Marriage Initiatives (CMI) Fund is pleased to announce its sixth round of grant opportunities - with an application due date of September 1, 2024. The purpose of this grant opportunity is to fund non-profit organizations (or groups of individuals working towards establishing their non-profit status) who have some experience in assisting churches implement marriage ministries and have a desire to expand that work as they drive down their county’s divorce rate. In addition, the CMI Grant also focuses on capacity-building as it is designed to equip, empower and position organizations to raise additional funding in the future with the intent to become self sustainable.