The Honeymooners
A love less ordinary.
I mentioned Michael and Jenny earlier but let me give you some of their story. I’ve known Michael and Jenny for about two years. When I met them, they weren’t married or even dating. Both were focused on ordering their lives in a way that would best help them strengthen their church community.
Michael is a high school baseball coach, a home inspector, and owns a business that does seasonal farm work in central Michigan, employing several other 20-somethings from their church community. He is an avid baseball fan. And he is a young apostolic-type leader. Jenny has co-owned a bakery and delivery service with a few other women from their church family and worked in Michael’s farming business. She has doggedly pursued her own development in understanding and engaging in Christ’s plan for establishing churches. They both intentionally designed their work scenarios to give them maximum flexibility to prioritize the families in their church community and pursue opportunities for benefitting their cities and other parts of the church network. Neither had strong aspirations for marriage when I met them, or at least they avoided making it something they obsessed over and talked about all the time. And even though they had known each other for about 10 years and had a deep affection and admiration for one another, it seemed to them, at the time, that serving their community could be done more effectively as individuals, than as a couple.
Then about six months ago, after an abundance of fruitful conversations with some trusted men and women in their church, that all changed. Michael began reflecting on his life’s calling and the things he wanted to accomplish across the church network. It quickly became apparent to both of them, that they could more effectively make a contribution as a couple, through a shared life together, which would allow them to work as a team, processing their lives together as a household, making them a stronger, more effective part of their church community and opening up new opportunities across the network of churches. They realized that by sharing in this together, they would have exponentially more resources, wisdom, and opportunities to participate in the progress of the gospel. They would become an exponentially strategic household.
In October 2025, twelve of us from my church here in New Jersey travelled to be part of Michael and Jenny’s wedding in central Michigan. In some ways it was a very typical wedding. There was an officiant. An exchange of vows. Some music. A kiss. (You gotta have a kiss.) But in other ways, their wedding was incredibly unique. When they were looking for a wedding venue, their focus was on finding a location that could accommodate several hundred people. Turns out that isn’t so hard to do in the land of corn and soybeans. You just have to locate someone who prefers to use their property for hosting events to detasseling and rogueing. The reason they wanted a venue with that sort of capacity is so that they could invite families and friends from across their various spheres of relationship, particularly those from other church communities across the network, using their wedding weekend as a strategic church network connection point, thereby strengthening the North American network of churches who all share the common purpose of shaping churches as extended families.
But Michael and Jenny didn’t accomplish this alone. They were assisted by the families from their church community, who all jumped in and made a weekend of it, serving, celebrating, and hosting various gatherings, so that the churches from across North America could engage in significant strategic conversations while they were there. (I wrote about an August 2024 trip to visit their church community here.)
Then after the wedding, Michael and Jenny did the unthinkable. They skipped the honeymoon! That’s right folks, you heard that correctly. The very thing that young couples anticipate the most about their wedding, Michael and Jenny set aside to get back to work, so that they could have the resources to participate in other network opportunities and trips. Opportunities like this gathering of church leaders from the Latin American civilization, where I was once again able to spend significant time with them, talking through our situations and planning together for how to keep multiplying and maturing our church communities; simultaneously deepening our family ties with one another in this movement that Jesus’s Spirit is building.
Their lives and their joy have not been diminished because of a postponed honeymoon. Their affection for one another is deep, their lives are authentic and oriented around Christ’s plan, and their love for others is tangible. They have chosen the both/and option, not the either/or. If anything, their lives are more full, more strategic, and more enjoyable with each solid decision they make, and the effect of those decisions then ripples out across the entire network, which is expanded and made stronger as a result, especially those of us who have the privilege of being part of their particular extended family.