Our STory
Welcome to Cultivating Relationships! We are Chris and Christine Hoover. We have been married for over 28 years and have helped hundreds of couples navigate the ups & downs and ins & outs of their relationships. We offered our first premarital “counseling” sessions to an engaged couple in 1994 in the humble living room of our first home. With warm, gooey homemade chocolate chip cookies on the coffee table, we imparted every teensy bit of relational wisdom we had, which wasn’t much since we were barely out of the newlywed stage ourselves! They were the first of many to find their way to our home and plop down on our couches, searching for grace and wisdom. Through the years, broken hearts were repaired, communication skills were practiced, cookies were devoured, wounds were healed, conflicts were resolved, and shattered trust was rebuilt. We have been laboring together since those early years of “couch and cookie sessions” to cultivate vibrant and healthy relationships with anyone that stumbled into our lives.
We have been teaching faith-based classes and retreats on relational health since the late 90’s, teaching on topics like creating family memories, building family traditions, navigating stressful holidays, connection-based parenting, as well as how to cultivate healthy emotional and relational connection.
Fast forward to 2009 when Christine realized the time had come to be professionally trained as a counselor. Off to grad school she went, with their 3 teenagers busily involved in band, soccer, track, musicals, NHS, choir concerts, football, and everything else imaginable. But somehow they tag-teamed it and decoded their way through a multi-colored Google calendar! Around the same time, Chris was trained as a Prepare and Enrich facilitator and they both began to more purposefully invest in marriages in their community. Christine graduated in 20013 with a Master of Arts degree in Counseling. Her transition to becoming a full-time LPC has opened new doors for Chris and Christine to share their passion together for relational and soul wellness in new, more effective ways. Chris and Christine began Cultivating Relationships because of their desire to nurture the soul while growing and enriching healthy relationships. They are both crazy passionate about issues such as redemption, healing and wholeness.