Adding a Marriage Coaching Credential to a Ministry

You already field the marriage conversations, usually after a service or over coffee that turns serious fast. Couples come to you because they trust you, and most of the time you are working from instinct and experience. With a marriage coaching credential, you or someone on your team gets a repeatable framework for those same couples, one you can also hand off to a staff member.

Why a framework helps a ministry already doing this work

Pastors and ministry leaders are often the first call a couple makes, sometimes before either spouse has said much out loud to anyone else. You hear the surface complaint: we don’t talk anymore, or something changed and neither of us can name when. Without training, you have the harder part: you find the actual pressure point under that complaint and you give the couple somewhere concrete to start.

In The 6 Pillars of Intimacy® Certified Coaching Program, you get that structure. The framework organizes a marriage into six areas: Emotional, Physical, Financial, Spiritual, Recreational, and Sexual Intimacy. You take what a couple is telling you and turn it into a clear coaching conversation, which pillar is under strain and what one next step looks like. You are probably already doing pieces of this by instinct. With the certification you can name it, and you can teach it to someone else on staff.

How this fits alongside pastoral care and licensed counseling

As a certified coach you work alongside pastoral care and licensed counseling, and you add to both.

Pastoral care is often a conversation or two, listening and praying with a couple and pointing them toward each other. Coaching runs longer. It is a structured process with tools and a defined arc, so a couple who needs more than a conversation or two has somewhere to go next. You are better off deciding where that line falls on purpose, for the couple’s sake and for the ministry’s. Then a member of the congregation knows whether they are receiving pastoral support or entering a coaching relationship.

In part of the certification, you learn to recognize when a couple’s situation is beyond what coaching, or pastoral care, should carry alone. You also learn triage and referral. You learn to spot when a couple needs a licensed therapist as well as, or in place of, a coach, and how to make that referral without it feeling like a failure. We put safety first. If a spouse is not safe at home, your first job is a safety plan. Once a couple’s situation calls for a therapist, the certified coach’s job is to say so clearly and help them get there.

Premarital and small-group use

Several pastors are already part of the certified coaching community, and Tony and Alisa are building the premarital version of the framework directly from their feedback. That work is still in progress. If you already lead premarital meetings, a certified coach on staff can bring the 6 Pillars language into those conversations now. An engaged couple can then name what a strong marriage will require, well before the wedding.

The framework also holds up outside one-on-one coaching. Tony and Alisa led a young adults small group of singles and dating couples for three years. They used the same six areas to give that group language for what they were building toward. A certified coach on staff can lead a marriage small group or a couples’ class the same way, using the pillars as the shape of the conversation.

When a couple on staff wants to coach together

If you and your spouse serve together, or a couple on your staff does, you can go through the certification as a pair. A couple coaching side by side takes one spot in the cohort. You can add a spouse to an individual enrollment for an additional cost, so certifying two people from the same household costs less than two full seats.

What it costs

We set pricing for each cohort, and it can change from one to the next. The current price is on the certification page. If you are weighing this for a ministry budget, reach out before you enroll and we will talk through what makes sense for your situation.

How to start

Enrollment and full program detail live on our certification page. The next cohort starts January 2027, with twelve spots total.

If you want to hear why Tony and Alisa built this in the first place, episode 907, “This is Bigger Than Us,” is their own case for it, in their own words.