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Building Strong Circles
Published May 12, 2026
Building Strong Circles
How Christian Community Strengthens Your Marriage
One of the key takeaways we all learned from our time together in Re|engage is the circle concept:
“Draw a circle around yourself and begin changing everyone inside the circle.”
-John McGee (Founder of re|engage)
Staying in your circle is an important tool for investing in your marriage. It is good and right for each of us to consider our parts in marital conflict so that we can repent, make amends, and pursue oneness again. Satan wants us to blame our spouse, but it’s impossible to remove the dust out of their eye when we are ignoring the big plank in our own! Learning to draw this first circle, the one around you, matters immensely as you invest in your marriage.
But there is another circle that matters enormously too when it comes to our marriages – not the tight one that’s just around you, but the bigger one that includes your friendships in your church family that make up your core Christian community. Part of the power of the Re|engage process is that marriage work is done in circle – we get vulnerable in our closed groups, and God works amidst that community to change us!
Who's In Your Circle?
Scripture is clear, God did not design our spiritual lives to happen alone. We were made for relationships in strong biblical community, and we actually do need each other! We need people who know us deeply – our strengths, our passions, and our weaknesses. We need people who can encourage us when we’re hurting in difficult seasons. We need people who can challenge us when we’re drifting from the things of God. We need people to speak up, sometimes loudly in our ears, when we’re not listening to the right voices.
Satan loves to isolate Christians. Like a lion prowling around for prey, he tries to get us alone where he can devour us without protection and intervention from others. When we are alone, unseen, and unknown – that’s when we are most vulnerable to temptation, discouragement, and failures. God exhorts us in scripture to not be ignorant to his evil schemes, but instead be sober-minded and watchful against his attacks.
“Be sober-minded; be watchful. Your adversary the devil prowls around like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour. Resist him, firm in your faith…” – 1 Peter 5:8-9 (ESV)
One of the strongest ways that you can invest in your marriage is by building a strong circle around your marriage through true biblical community. This is how we resist Satan’s schemes! This is how we stand firm in our faith, by rooting our lives in strong relationships that can surround us with encouragement, prayer, and protection as we go forward in life.
Consider for a moment… Who’s in your circle? Do you even have a circle? Are you living amidst godly community right now? Are you investing to strengthen it? Let’s take a few moments to consider why this circle matters, and then we will close with a few tips for building a strong one!
Benefits of a Strong Circle
What good things come to life when we have a strong circle? Scripture tells us of at least three...
1. Strong Circles Soften Hard Hearts
Satan is the father of lies. When he lies, he speaks his native language. His greatest weapon for leading us into temptation and failure is to deceive us with lies about God and about ourselves. This is precisely what he did to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, and he’s been doing it ever since. He manipulates us to believe his deceitful lies and hardens our hearts to sin. He often uses this destructively to harm our marriages.
But Hebrews 3:13 teaches us there is a powerful antidote to the deceitfulness of sin…
“But exhort one another every day, as long as it is called ‘today,’ that none of you may be hardened by the deceitfulness of sin.” – Hebrews 3:13 (ESV)
When we walk through life with strong circles, surrounded by people who can exhort us daily with the truths of God, we keep our hearts soft and protected from Satan’s lies. He can throw those flaming darts, but they don’t take root in our hearts – the strong Christian community in our life acts as a protection to extinguish them before they start a raging fire. Strong circles around us in true biblical community protect us from the deceitfulness of sin by keeping our hearts soft!
2. Strong Circles Stir Up Godliness
There’s another benefit to living life in a strong circle of biblical community – these relationships have a powerful strength to stir up godliness in our lives. As we walk alongside other Christians, God uses them to help us grow in our own godliness. There is a Christian synergy at work that helps us be more loving and more fruitful as we follow Jesus. We truly are better together than we are alone! We see this in Hebrews 10:
“And let us consider how to stir one another to love and good works, not neglecting to meet together, as is the habit of some, but encouraging one another, and all the more as you see the Day drawing near.” – Hebrews 10:24-25 (ESV)
When we don’t have a strong circle, it is easy to drift into spiritual apathy and indifference. We grow distracted from the things of God, and find ourselves slowly but surely looking more and more like the world. But God uses the power of Christian community to stir us up toward greater godliness as we encourage each other to truly walk the walk as we follow Christ. The work we undertake to invest in our marriages unfolds faster and stronger when we are in strong circles. We grow stronger faster in Jesus when we walk together in Christian community!
3. Strong Circles Make Us Look Like Jesus
In Ephesians, God gives us a helpful metaphor to understand what Christian community in the church is like and how it actually works – a human body. He tells us that Christ Jesus is the head of the body, of which we are all individual members. As we live in Christian community, knit into relationships with other members, speaking truth in love to one another, we grow up into the head of the body, Christ himself. This is how Paul says it:
“Rather, speaking the truth in love, we are to grow up in every way into him who is the head, into Christ, from whom the whole body, joined and held together by every joint with which it is equipped, when each part is working properly, makes the body grow so that it builds itself up in love.” – Ephesians 4:15–16 (ESV)
What is clear from this verse is that our spiritual growth as Christians is directly connected to our relationships with other Christians. Once again, we see that we truly need each other. It is amidst the body that we grow to look just like our Savior. Our circle around us helps us look more and more like Jesus. We become more Christ-like husbands and wives when we have strong biblical relationships with those running after Jesus too. Strong circles matter immensely!
Building a Strong Circle
I hope you are persuaded! God did not intend you to work on your marriage alone. Yes, draw a circle around yourself and work on yourself, but don’t try to do this heart work alone! Seek to invest in relationships with other godly Christians in your church, so that you can tap into the amazing benefits of true Christian community and experience the growth God has for you. Strong circles with Christians around you help to strengthen God’s work in you! Toward that end, here are three closing challenges to help you build a strong circle with other Christians in your church.
1. Join a Missional Community Group. Take the step today to reach out to us and start the process of finding a small group here at Emmaus to connect with. This is a great place to begin to build relationships that God can use for spiritual growth in your life. The good relationships will take time to grow, but it will never start until you prioritize joining and participating in a small group.
Want to start now? Fill out this form to get started!
2. Go early. Stay late. Share meals. As you begin to build relationships, focus on strengthening them in the ways that always work – through shared conversations and experiences. Go regularly to your small group meetings. Go early and stay late to engage in conversations with your group members, and seek to get to know them, their lives, and their stories deeply. Invite people to dinner or hangouts where you can continue to deepen the relationships. All good things take time to grow.
3. Be Vulnerable. Invite Vulnerability. One of the things that makes re|engage groups so successful is how vulnerable we are with one another. We share the real, true, hard parts of our story with complete strangers, and before we know it, we’ve become close friends. This is always how it works! Vulnerability invites greater vulnerability, and as we share our hearts openly, we often find people are willing to share theirs too.
In all of this, pray and ask God to help grow strong biblical community around you, so that as you continue to do the work inside your circle for your marriage, you will be able to enjoy the benefits God has designed for you from your friendship circle!