This article presents findings about problematic issues from a national study of couples married five years or less. It argues that the top 10 issues identified as problematic suggest key content areas for premarital education and makes suggestions for both program development and existing program evaluation. The top three issues reported by this sample are balancing job and family, frequency of sexual relations, and financial issues. For each of the 10 issues, comparisons by gender, parental status, cohabitation status, and age are also reported.

This article is an effort toward practical, pastoral, theological correlation, an effort to bring together the American cultural tradition and the Christian theological tradition. Its argument develops in four cumulative theses to be explicated: (1) there is a crisis of family in the United States today; (2) what is said of family in both First and Second biblical Testaments is of no direct help in that crisis; (3) what makes a family Christian is not the slavish following of some biblical saying about family but the following of Jesus confessed as the Christ; (4) the Christian family has an important contribution to make in the contemporary crisis of family in the United States. Each thesis is developed in turn.

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