I am delighted you share my interest in building stronger, deeper and more durable relationships. The principles in this course have the potential to impact every area of your life, including your friendships, your marriage and parenting, as well as how you build greater unity in your church, get along with co-workers and advance your career. Before we get into the material itself, let me give you a little bit of my background.

I am Ken Sande. I was born and raised in Montana and spent much of my youth on a ranch. I love to solve problems, so I became a mechanical engineer and worked in medical research and development.

However, I missed home, so I came back to Montana to pursue a degree a law. I hadn’t been working in the adversarial system very long before I realized it is really hard on relationships. It can tear them apart.

As a result, in 1982 I established an organization that became Peacemaker Ministries. Its mission was to equip and assist Christians to respond to conflict biblically. As I mediated hundreds of cases, I saw God do amazing things. Ministry relationships that seemed beyond help were restored. Marriages on the brink of divorce came back together. Lawsuits and church splits were resolved in remarkable ways.

In 2012, I decided to start a new ministry that focuses primarily on helping people get “upstream” of conflict, which could help them develop relational skills and actually prevent many of the conflicts that they encounter in life. Skills like self-discipline, communication, reading others’ body language and emotions, developing greater empathy and compassion … skills that are helpful not only for building stronger relationships, but also for preventing and, when necessary, resolving conflict. Most important of all, skills that enhance our witness for Christ. These are the things we’ll be studying in this course.

As you go through the course, I encourage you to imitate the Bereans. In Acts 17:11, the apostle Paul commended the people of Berea because they eagerly listened to what he had to teach, and then they went home to search the Scriptures to see if what he said was true. To make it easy for you to imitate those wise Christians, we have compiled a complete summary of all the Bible passages cited in this course, over 300 of them, so you can study these Scriptures for yourself and verify that what we teach is true. You can download that summary, as well as a detailed study guide for this course.

With these things in mind, let us move ahead with this life-changing course!