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Marriage and Family Life<br />
Despite the challenges posed by Covid, during<br />
the year 2021 the MFL team ran 18 marriage<br />
preparation courses, 17 of which were online,<br />
presented between the three pastoral areas. As<br />
most courses were online, however, this gave us<br />
an opportunity to invite couples from anywhere<br />
in the diocese or elsewhere. We ran one-to-one<br />
preparation sessions for 15 couples who were<br />
nevertheless unable to access our ordinary courses,<br />
mainly because of children or shiftwork, or one of<br />
them being abroad. Our numbers generally were<br />
down compared to pre-pandemic levels, but this<br />
has now picked up in 2022 at the time of writing.<br />
Fr Liam Gallagher, Episcopal Vicar for Marriage and Family Life<br />
We also ran sessions of marriage enrichment, called Building a Better Marriage,<br />
and sessions for people who have experienced bereavement, as well as<br />
training bereavement befrienders from various parts of the diocese.<br />
In order to support engaged and married couples in their spiritual life we<br />
devised a course called Growing in Faith Together (GIFT) with Fr Stephen Wang<br />
from Sycamore. The 4 session course covers What is Happiness?, The power<br />
of Prayer, The Holy Eucharist and The meaning of Love. The course was trialled<br />
over a 3-month period from September to November on Tuesday evenings and<br />
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