Come to the Table
Marriage SEMINAR
with
Calvin and Patience Sayler
Practical tools for couples who want to grow together
Authentic. Empowering. Applicable.
Rooted in Scripture and decades of counseling and lived experience.
Together, Calvin and Patience have become sought-after Christian marriage speakers and couples’ retreat leaders. Through their authentic approach, they communicate biblical truths of how to build your marriage on the foundation of God’s Word. Their careful application of Scripture, along with personal stories and practical tools, has been used by God to transform marriages and redirect families.
WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN BOOKING a Come to the Table Marriage Event
When you fill out the contact form. Calvin will call you to talk through the details of your event. You and your team will be encouraged to look through the menu of sessions listed on this page. Please prayerfully consider which topics are most relevant to your organization’s needs. Calvin and Patience will help you with marketing ideas and resources for building excitement around the event you’re planning. Also, your event will be promoted through their growing social network. Just before your event, they will notify their Prayer Team to be praying for God’s blessing on the couples attending your marriage retreat or conference!
Calvin and Patience offer eight primary modules, with several specialized options.
Core Modules
Move from drift and distance toward conversation, partnership, and oneness.
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How couples move from drift, distance, and discouragement toward partnership and oneness. Marriage is built one conversation at a time, and it is never too late for a couple to begin turning toward each other again.
Key ideas:
The movement from isolation toward oneness
Marriage as a covenant life, not merely a feeling or status
Recognizing drift before it becomes distance
Creating a safe place for honest conversation
Hope for couples at every stage
Understand how two different histories shape one shared marriage.
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Understanding how personality, family history, gender, expectations, and experience shape the way spouses see each other. It helps two good people understand why they can experience the same marriage so differently.
Key ideas:
Family-of-origin patterns
Differences in communication and emotional processing
Expectations brought into marriage
How spouses misread each other
Replacing judgment with curiosity
Learning to understand before trying to correct
Practice four essential skills for stronger conversations.
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Four essential skills for building a stronger marriage one conversation at a time.
Listen to understand, not simply to respond
Ask clearly for what you need
Protect the friendship and emotional safety of the marriage
Repair the relationship when something has gone wrong
This session is highly interactive. Couples will practice listening, asking a better question, making a clear request, and offering a repair.
Protect the friendship, affection, enjoyment, and intimacy of marriage.
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Why friendship is the emotional foundation of a lasting marriage—and how couples can rebuild it. This includes affection, enjoyment, emotional intimacy, romance, and intentional connection, its not just a session on date-night advice. But date-nights are good!
Key ideas:
Knowing and continuing to discover your spouse
Turning toward instead of away
Protecting time and attention
Enjoying each other again
Affection, romance, and sexual connection
Rebuilding friendship after seasons of distance
Keeping lightness and humor in the marriage
Raise children while continuing to strengthen the partnership.
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How couples can raise children, carry family responsibilities, and still protect their relationship.
Key ideas:
How parenting squeezes the marriage
Exhaustion, resentment, and unequal burdens
Differing parenting styles
Presenting a united front
The emotional atmosphere of the home
The marriage as the trellis supporting the family
Strengthening “us” to stabilize the children
Parenting children without neglecting the partnership
This could also be adapted for blended families or parents of teenagers.
Tell the truth and disagree without damaging the relationship.
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How to tell the truth, disagree honestly, and protect the marriage at the same time. Sometimes winning at your spouse’s expense is losing.
Key ideas:
Recognizing destructive conflict patterns
Pursuing, withdrawing, yielding, controlling, and escalating
Emotional flooding and the need to pause
Criticism, defensiveness, contempt, and stonewalling
Presenting a concern without attacking
Remaining on the same team while disagreeing
Repairing after conflict
Stay connected through change, stress, loss, illness, and crisis.
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How couples stay connected through change, disappointment, stress, loss, and crisis.
Key ideas:
How pressure exposes established patterns
Carrying burdens as partners
Responding differently to fear and stress
Staying emotionally connected during crisis
Supporting a spouse without trying to control them
Faith and fear existing together
Preparing the marriage before the crisis arrives
Living out “in sickness and in health”
Create a shared life through decisions, sacrifice, faithfulness, and conversation.
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How two people create a shared life through thousands of decisions, adjustments, and conversations.
Key ideas:
Collaboration rather than competition
Negotiation as the way two lives become one life
Shared decisions, values, dreams, and direction
Spiritual oneness without requiring sameness
Character, humility, sacrifice, and faithfulness
Building a marriage that influences future generations
Choosing each other through every season of life
Marriage is not one decision made on a wedding day. It is a covenant life built through thousands of conversations.
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Specialized or Optional Modules
Forgiveness and Repair - How couples take responsibility, offer meaningful apologies, forgive without minimizing harm, and rebuild trust over time.
Spiritual Oneness Without Sameness - How husbands and wives can encourage one another spiritually even when they pray, worship, process faith, or express spirituality differently.
Intimacy Through the Seasons of Marriage - How emotional, physical, and sexual intimacy change through parenting, stress, health challenges, aging, and the empty-nest years.
When One Spouse Finds Their Voice - How silence, yielding, control, bluntness, and unequal influence affect a marriage—and how both spouses can become more fully present.
The Home You Are Building - How pace, technology, discipline, faith, emotional atmosphere, and soul care shape both the marriage and the family.
The Second Half of Marriage - How couples navigate the empty nest, retirement, aging parents, health changes, changing roles, and the opportunity to rediscover friendship and purpose.
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Friday evening
Come Back to the Table
Two Histories, One Marriage
Saturday morning
Listen, Ask, Protect, Repair
Conflict Without Losing Us
Protect the Friendship
Saturday afternoon
Becoming Parents Without Losing the Marriage
Marriage Under Pressure
Building a Covenant Life
“We are not simply presenting marriage information. We are helping couples practice a different way of relating while they are in the room.”