You could say that Pat and Luther McKinstry, Jr., went on their first date to a church.

“I invited him to church and he came,” Bishop McKinstry, of Worship Center in Toledo, recalled recently. They’d met when she was door-to-door witnessing in Fremont, where she had grown up and where he was staying with his father, so the invitation made sense.

But to call it a “date” is admittedly a stretch. Once back at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, she recalled, she was baffled to to hear that a Luther McKinstry was trying to reach her on the dormitory phone.

“I was like, ‘I don’t know who that guy is,’” she said.

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That, of course, would change within a few years. They began dating and then married shortly after she graduated and returned to her hometown. As the couple look toward their 50th wedding anniversary in September, Bishop McKinstry credits that early church foundation as key to a relationship that’s stayed strong through the decades.

When they were struggling to adjust to married life as newlyweds, her pastor offered them advice in much the same way that she does today to her congregation.

With Valentine’s Day approaching, she took a few minutes to reflect on the practical and spiritual aspects of a relationship and to encourage couples to fight for theirs.

“I want them to fight for their family, fight for their home, and fight for their marriage,” she said.

At Greater St. James Church of God in Christ in Fremont, the late Bishop William James was an advocate for strong families as the core of a strong church, Bishop McKinstry said. He took what today might seems like an old-fashioned approach in saying that a couple should know where their relationship is headed after six months.

She still appreciates that advice; she thinks that’s why the 15 or 20 couples that she grew up with her at the church have likewise stayed together and stayed in touch.

In counseling couples at her church, individually or in group fellowship nights she organizes for married couples once or twice a year, she said she leans on her own experience and on her faith foundation. The latter informs her belief that husbands or wives should complement their spouses, coming alongside them in the areas where they might fall short.

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She doesn’t believe in the idea that a husband should “wear the pants” in a relationship.

“Find out where your best work is,” she said. “That helps build a marriage.”

It’s important to take time away as a couple, too. Valentine’s Day is an annual outing at Worship Center, this year at 6 p.m. Thursday at the University of Toledo Radisson Hotel on Glendale Ave.

Tickets, $75, are available by contacting Worship Center at 419-244-2100.

Time with children and family is important, she said, but so is time as a couple; she believes every married couples should get away at least two or three times a year.

After 30 years of operating on a pastoral schedule, she said she and her husband, for example, have fallen into the pattern of sharing “our day” each Monday.

Every relationship is bound to go through difficult seasons, where finances or an illness, for example, might create unusual stress. In counseling couples, Bishop McKinstry believes in directly addressing rather than sugar-coating these rough patches.

Does it get easier with time? Bishop McKinstry, for her part, thinks it does.

“He’s my best friend,” she said of her husband. “I’m grateful for him.”

First Published February 11, 2019, 2:34 p.m.