In all its 10 years of ministry, the Bahamas GodParent Center had served a limited number of married couples. But 2024 saw a landmark number of 10 couples who were served through marriage support, inspiring the organization’s leaders to continue on its mission to strengthen relationships and community.
On Jan. 7, the center’s executive director Rhonda Darville announced last year’s ministry highlights in an email shared with supporters. She emphasized that the center has continued to be “a place where the most vulnerable in our community can find assistance.”
“We worked with 10 new couples to strengthen their marriages,” Darville wrote. “We believe that strong Christian families pave the way for strong communities and builds biblical foundations.”
The number of couples served last year was a first for the GodParent Center, according to additional comment from Darville.
“We hadn’t typically been serving couples, maybe one or two,” she told Pregnancy Help News via email. “Ten was a big number and solidified some things that God was saying to me about relationships and the strength of community.”
Darville expressed that the ministry is “very excited about” this new part of their mission.
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The organization initiated couple ministry by “helping the and fathers of the child that we were trying to rescue,” noting that “many of them were not together and so we worked with them with co-parenting and biblical life strategies for their lives.”
Many of the women who came to the GodParent Center for help were wanting to get married, Darville said, prompting her team to start working with single women preparing for marriages. Once these female clients met someone, Darville said, the ministry performed “couples counseling [with] pure biblical dating practices.”
From there, the ministry expanded to pre-marital counseling, building a network of couples. Once married, they “stayed in touch and if there were issues that they felt needed help, they would reach out for marriage help,” said Darville.
“This avenue truly happened organically,” Darville said. “We believe that kingdom marriages cannot happen apart from the Bible and then when marriages operate biblically, it doesn’t just help the couple but the community and for generations.”
“In Genesis, we are given a marriage and creation mandate, and we believe that this lines up with our work and ministry of bringing hope and healing to others,” she added.
The GodParent Center provides assistance for those facing an unplanned pregnancy as well as those needing abortion healing help [and] those trying to navigate relationships, Darville said.
Darville explained that the specific services offered by the Center range from “sound biblical counseling [an] pregnancy tests” to pediatric medical care, job placement, educational scholarships and “church placement for community growth and mentorship.”
In addition to free support like pregnancy and post-abortive counseling and material assistance for parents, the GodParent Center provides connections to the community to ensure “a stable future” for families, per its website. They also offer a fatherhood program to help men “learn the skills needed to be a great dad, better understand the important role a dad plays in the life of his children” and “discuss aspects of the mother-father relationship as it relates to parenting.”
Additionally, the Center’s abstinence guidance “is designed to teach youth how to walk in sexual wholeness in all areas of their life—physical, emotional, social intellectual and spiritual.”
Tweet This: Bahamas GodParent Center on Nassau is excited to be serving couples with marriage ministry to build a strong community.
As mentioned in the Jan. 7 email from Darville, the GodParent Center is currently looking to expand its already comprehensive services.
“We just joined a new mission organization, Harvest Alliance,” Darville told Pregnancy Help News. “We believe that kingdom partnerships allow for more kingdom work.”
The Center is actively working to develop a mobile unit, which Darville described as “strategic both financially and spiritually.”
Regarding funding to this end, she said, “we would not be tied to a brick and mortar and hence not limited by location and space.” The mobile unit would also provide the chance to “spread the hope of the Bible to more communities.”
Of the broader impact of the pro-life resources offered by the GodParent Center, Darville noted that “pregnancy [help] was non-existent [in The Bahamas] until we came along and is pretty much still rare based on our missions and values.”
“We are accepted for what we bring to the table, but we desire to increase our reach and our message,” she added. “We realize that we were sent home to create a movement not just a Center.”
In the past decade since its opening, the GodParent Center has overcome a plethora of challenges in its work. From recovering from the devastating impact of Hurricane Dorian in 2019 to alerting the Caribbean island community to dangerous, back-alley abortions, the Center and its founders—Darville and her husband Jeffrey—have persevered and continue to serve men, women and children in need.
As detailed on its website, the couple founded the GodParent Center in February 2015, a year after moving back to the Bahamas, “answering the call to serve as missionaries in their own country.”
