Getting married in a church in Bermuda usually requires attending a few light-hearted sessions on getting to know each other. Bickering over whose responsibility it is to make supper might be among the problems tackled.

Whether your partner has herpes, homosexual or lesbian tendencies or beats women is not really something the minister usually wants to know -- except at the Emmanuel Baptist Church in Hamilton.

Emmanuel's assistant pastor the Rev. Glenn Caines believes local churches should take more responsibility for the couples they bring together in holy matrimony today.

It could be a means of tackling domestic violence, he said, which reared its head in public this month when a woman was killed on the job, allegedly by her estranged husband.

"When I heard about that, my immediate thought was, who married them?'' said Rev. Caines, who runs the Prison Fellowship Ministry.

Rev. Caines' church, which has a congregation of about 100, requires any couple who wants to walk down its aisle to go through 13 weeks of intensive, probing premarital counselling sessions involving a 46-page questionnaire and homework.

"I believe it raises the accountability level of us folk who are doing the hitching,'' he said.

"We should know who we are joining together. And they should know marriage is more than just the wedding cake and all that.'' And just because you are Christian does not mean you will have a marriage made in heaven.

"There are people in leadership roles in the church who I have discovered beat their wives,'' he said.

The probing spans questions on religious beliefs, views on children, past relationships, sexuality, marital responsibility, general behaviour, career goals, medical history.

The counsellor will ask such deeply personal questions as: Have you been exposed to pornography? Are you on drugs? Have you experienced incest? Have you had any physical fights? And he'll also ask: Do you hallucinate, do you have sleeping problems, whose responsibility is the housework, how do you react when angry? But the answers can reveal certain signs of trouble to come, Rev. Caines notes.

"I've heard of women being hit in the head with an iron,'' he said. "And both males and females talking about being abused.'' Couples can choose not to be honest but it's often easy to detect, Rev. Caines said.

And if they refuse the counselling or only answer half the questionnaires, the church will simply tell them, "Sorry we can't marry you.'' "Some couples are responsive, others find it a little difficult. Then it's our job to say the reason why we are doing it -- because we are responsible for what happens in your life down the road. The church is a place of healing and direction but unfortunately, in a lot of areas that is not there.'' In-depth counselling can identify root problems that often end in the break-up of a marriage, he said.

Rev. Caines has seen proof the counselling works -- not just in the handful of marriages that end up being put off.

A couple which had no proper pre-marital counselling and divorced after 15 years of marriage, got back together after counselling through Emmanuel and now have a totally different and satisfying relationship, he noted.

He also counselled a couple where the man revealed he had herpes during a session and the woman he was about to marry had no idea. The couple talked it over and went ahead with their marriage, he said. But it showed them there were things they did not know about each other.

Adopting the intensive counselling procedure, which was devised by a Philadelphia group called Christian research and Development, would go a long way towards identifying problems before the couple ends up back on the couch for post-marital counselling, he said.

MORE RESPONSIBILITY -- The Rev. Glenn Caines with wife Mrs. Tina Evans Caines and daughter Ariana.