Family Talk

Dr. James Dobson: Welcome everyone to Family Talk. It’s a ministry of the James Dobson Family Institute supported by listeners just like you. I’m Dr. James Dobson, and I’m thrilled that you’ve joined us.

Roger Marsh: Welcome back to Family Talk. I’m Roger Marsh. What do you do when your marriage isn't just struggling, it’s really just barely surviving, when the person you love the most feels more like a stranger than a soulmate?

On today’s edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, we’re continuing a powerful conversation featuring Brad and Marilyn Rhodes, who discovered the hard way that strong faith doesn’t always guarantee a thriving marriage. On the last edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, they shared their surprising first-year struggles.

On today’s broadcast, you’ll hear how God healed their relationship and then transformed it into a ministry that’s now helping thousands of couples all across America build marriages that truly reflect the Gospel. You’ll also discover why Brad and Marilyn believe that the church has been missing a crucial piece in supporting marriages. They are passionate about helping congregations move beyond crisis intervention to establishing ongoing discipleship for couples.

Brad and Marilyn Rhodes are the founders of Grace Marriage, and in 2024, their book, The Grace Marriage, was named Book of the Year by Christianity Today. So let’s rejoin Gary Bauer’s conversation with Brad and Marilyn Rhodes on today’s edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk.

Gary Bauer: Welcome back, everybody, to Family Talk. We're going to continue our conversation with Brad and Marilyn Rhodes and their ministry, Grace Marriage. Let's get right into it, guys.

Brad Rhodes: We'd love to. We loved being married. We'd worked with youth for ten years. Then one of the couples said, "Will you do our premarital instead of our pastor?" I asked why. They said, "We want what you have. What you have looks fun."

So we did that premarital, we did another premarital, and we started a group. I don't know why God had given us favor with marriages, but He had. We had about a two-year waiting list for groups. Then they ordained me lay pastor of marriage. You're doing all the marriage stuff anyway, so people will just call you pastor.

When I was ordained pastor of marriage, this is key. I realized we did premarital counseling and crisis counseling, but we had nothing for the marriage. What a dumb ministry strategy. We'll get you ready for it, and if you ever hate each other and want a divorce, we'll pour thousands of dollars into you and lose 85% of you. Crazy.

I thought we have to have an ongoing strategy discipling marriages. Then I realized with Communio Barna studies, 72% of churches have no marriage ministry. 80% of churches spend no substantive dollar on marriage. If the church is salt and light and marriage has been in decline and the church is silent in the space and doesn't even find it worthy of a ministry, but is pouring six digits into children and youth and wondering why it's not working, every church needs a marriage ministry.

It needs to be an ongoing marriage ministry because the church is that important. I felt a clear call from God to leave the law practice with the prayer and hope that God would start a movement where every single Bible-believing church would have an ongoing marriage ministry to disciple marriages.

We wouldn't just leave people to their own devices and let them be conformed to the patterns of the world, but we would teach them how to do it well. If the church had taught us how to do it well—you have to date every week, you have to spend time together, you have to communicate, you have to prioritize this, you can't put other things above it—it would have saved us a lot of trouble.

A lot of couples aren't as fortunate as we were to have people intersect our lives to help change our direction. They end up in complacent marriages that are terrible or they end up divorced. The church can stop 90% to 95% of it if they start shepherding and discipling. That was our lifetime call, to help the church do marriage well.

Gary Bauer: Brad, the enthusiasm in your voice during that explanation was very revealing. This is obviously something close to your heart, to both of your hearts. It really came through. Marilyn, I can see why you wouldn't want to argue with Brad. I'm a lawyer by training, and after a couple of years, my wife Carol said, "I'm never going to win an argument, am I?"

I said, "I wouldn't want to say that. I will throw you a bone every once in a while." When you're trained to win in a court of law, it's easy to bring that into the marriage, which is probably not a great idea. A big part of this is trying to get churches to understand that having a specific ministry in their church is key, rather than just telling people to travel across the country and go to somebody's conference.

Brad Rhodes: Think about conferences. You go to a conference for a weekend. That's not going to fix your marriage. Everything takes ongoing investment to grow. Conferences are great, but if there's no structure or no plan going forward, that'll have diminishing returns over time with the return to previous norms.

There has to be a discipleship structure to help people continue to prioritize marriage, work through life changes, and work through issues. Otherwise, life gets in the way and they end up complacent, stagnant, or divorced.

Gary Bauer: Marilyn, anything that you want to add to that?

Marilyn Rhodes: We have seen in our church specifically because we started there. We noticed when we had the signups for couples to invest in their marriage, couples were almost apologetic, saying, "We don't really have issues, but we're going to do this." It's like couples almost think they need to be struggling before they invest in their marriage.

Over time, that whole paradigm has shifted in our church and people see that we want to be involved. This is good for our marriages. It's good for community. Our marriages are to be a picture of the Gospel. As Christians, our marriages should be beautiful and so God-glorifying that they attract other people.

Like Brad said, that one young couple said, "We want what you have." As you mentioned, the young people in our churches aren't getting married. The numbers are staggering. We long for that to change. If we have beautiful marriages before our families and before our churches and our communities, it will have an impact on the next generations.

Brad Rhodes: If we would do it right, the young people couldn't wait to do this. They wouldn't be putting this off. The reason they put this off is they see stagnancy, boredom, complacency, and divorce. That's not going to be attractional to the younger generation.

If they see people crazy about each other, affectionate, having fun, displaying the Gospel, they're going to want to do this. Like Marilyn said, we have to change the way we do it. What if I was a doctor and I said, "Don't exercise, don't worry about eating healthy, but if you ever get to a point where you're absolutely miserable or have a health crisis, then do a lot of it"?

That's what we do in marriage. We don't worry about it, don't invest in it, don't really do anything, and then if you're ever at a really bad point, you go to conferences and go to intensives. We have to change it so that every couple is investing in marriage because they want God to get more glory in marriage. They want to protect their marriage and grow their marriage, not that they just go along side-by-side saying, "We're okay, we're fine," until they're not.

Gary Bauer: I mentioned in the beginning of the show that we're having this conversation in the year that's the 250th anniversary of our country. If we can't rebuild marriage as an institution in America and entice young men and women to enter this institution, we won't celebrate a 300th anniversary.

As I'm sure both of you are aware, we're in the middle of an incredible birth dearth. If marriage is down, having babies is down, too. We have to rebuild this basic God-inspired institution that is meant to bring a man and woman together and be the perfect institution to bring children into the world and raise them in a godly way.

Brad Rhodes: A pastor in Atlanta summed it up well. The light bulb went off in his head while I was talking. He said, "Oh my goodness, if our marriages in our church don't work, nothing we do as a church works." I would say nationally, if the marriages of our country don't work, nothing we do as a country will work.

Children break down, youth break down, finances break down. It all goes haywire. That's why the evil one wants to go straight there because he knows if he gets that, he gets it all. That's why it's so baffling to me that we've gone decades leaving the space empty in most churches. That's why I would love the listeners, if you hear this and your church doesn't have an ongoing marriage ministry, be the impetus for change.

Gary Bauer: Give us a little bit more detail. How many churches nationwide are you working with on this theme? What does that look like when a church forms an ongoing relationship with your ministry to help guide them about the most effective way to do this?

Brad Rhodes: We help them succeed. Our ministry is called Grace Marriage. We don't want people to feel like we have Grace Marriage in our church. Say it's First Baptist Church. It's First Baptist Marriage, but we equip the church to do it really well. We provide everything from promotional strategy to promotional resources, curriculum, video, and process.

We have multiple methodologies of implementation to fit church discipleship structures. What we do is we help the church launch an ongoing marriage ministry as opposed to bringing our program into a church. It's a big distinction because we want people to feel they're discipled by their church in their marriage, not that they have a program there.

One call and we'll take it with the leader and just help them go from there to success in the marriage space. We work with about 300 churches and about 10,000 participants right now, but our hope is the Lord adds several zeros in the next few years.

Gary Bauer: Are you writing a whole set of curriculum and saying week one do this, week two do this?

Brad Rhodes: We do have a whole set of curriculum that people follow. It's a platform of investment. They'll get a teaching, they'll think on it, they'll have structured discussion, and they'll have group discussion. We have a whole process for them to follow.

We've created everything so the church doesn't have to because in our first years of a ministry, we really struggled and we've learned through the impact to the church. We feel like we can help the churches start at a point of success and not just try to create something that may or may not work.

Gary Bauer: Marilyn, when this all started in that first year, did you ever think that not only would God heal your marriage, but that ultimately God would use you and Brad to increase the chances that many thousands of other couples facing the same kind of issues would be blessed by what you and your husband are doing?

Marilyn Rhodes: I had no idea. One of my favorite verses is, "We will overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimonies." I feel like the Lord has taken what we struggled through to help us encourage other couples who come to marriage not understanding the beauty of how God created it to be.

We long for people to be as intentional with their marriage as they are everything else in life. Marriage is the first thing to get squeezed out, it seems. We call it Grace Marriage because we talk about how while we were sinners, Christ died for us. To jump out of a performance-based approach into a grace-based approach and being intentional is so important.

We date every week. Couples came alongside us after that first tough year and we've been dating once a week ever since. We get together and we do our Grace Marriage meetings quarterly. They can be set up monthly or quarterly. We've been doing this for 13 years. Every quarter, we need it because we need to regroup.

We need to revisit how we are doing with our technology. Is our schedule getting out of hand? When are we going to get away together, the two of us? What are we going to do for our dates? What do we need to work on communication-wise? It's so good to step out of the busyness of life and out of the heat of the moment to be in a neutral place to have good conversations. You can even have one with an attorney.

Gary Bauer: That's saying something. The date night concept—a lot of people over the years have talked about that, but it really is true. You have to find time for each other. There are all kinds of other things that will demand your time.

A few years ago, at one of our national get-togethers, Charlie Kirk was one of the speakers. Here's this young guy, and he's talking a lot about marriage and family on campuses of all places. Dr. Dobson was in the audience, a man that had devoted his whole life to that. There was this really heartfelt exchange between the two when Dr. Dobson said to Charlie Kirk, "Charlie, you're a shooting star right now. You're getting a lot of attention, and your work is growing and growing.

I want to tell you as a guy that had my own period of shooting star growth, don't forget your own wife and children. Don't forget your marriage that God gave you." It was just a magic moment to see the wisdom of Dr. Dobson being poured into the guy that was trying to pour wisdom into all these students on the university campuses.

Charlie Kirk said, "I know, Dr. Dobson. We're already looking for ways to do that because I'm on the road all the time." For our listeners, is there anybody out there that doesn't think, "I've got to go to this conference for my business," or "I've got to stay late tonight," or "I can't do anything with you this weekend, honey, because I've got this important project"? All those things make sense until you wake up one day and find out that you've become a stranger to your own spouse. That's a disaster. Do either of you want to react to that?

Brad Rhodes: I would totally agree with you because the air fills the balloon. There's always going to be more to do than time to do it. Unless you just say Scripture says let marriage be held in honor among all. Unless I can say, "I would love to do that tonight, and I know it would help our ministry, but I've got that blocked off for my wife and I can't do that because I'm going to enjoy my wife that evening."

Until we say our marriage is important and I'm going to prioritize it over other things, we will not see change. Time is a container marriage grows in. You can't have a big marriage without big time. Most marriages have very small containers of time and the marriage fails to mature and oftentimes dies.

I haven't had a couple come in yet and say, "We spend a ton of time together, we talk regularly, and I don't know what happened. We got sideways or in crisis." They all say the same thing. They're lonely, they don't spend time together, they don't feel connected. I heard one guy say every story is different and every story is the same. We always say schedule your life around your marriage, not your marriage around your life.

Marilyn Rhodes: Another point to bring up is we're in a child-centered culture. We feel like as parents, we have to be at every single event of our kids. We break up as husbands and wives with travel sports now. You've got one parent going to one state or city and another parent going to another. That is not even parenting well.

If our marriages aren't going well, that's the most important way to parent. I can't think I'm going to sacrifice my marriage for the sake of parenting. We need to totally pursue our marriages for the sake of our children. It's okay to miss kids' events. We have five children. We had kids in all kinds of sports.

There were times we missed things, but we were there a lot. We were there the majority of the time, but they knew if we missed something, our marriage is important and we're going to take time for it. You may have to catch a ride with a friend or have your sibling take you to something, but that's okay. That's another piece.

Then technology, our phones. That's another issue that has to be visited or it'll squeeze out the communication between the couple. It's an assault on marriage. In order to thrive, we can't not be proactive.

Brad Rhodes: The good news, Gary, is that it's happening. More and more churches are launching marriage ministry. A major thought leader in Texas talks about how he thinks we're on the edge, the cusp, of a major marital renaissance. Some younger generations are moving toward it.

There's a lot of positive indicators. If the church steps forward in this crucial moment, I visualize a snowball rolling downhill and complacent marriages being the exception and divorce being the rare exception and invested marriages where people leave their marriage with this is how we're going to do marriage and then the whole thing's flipped.

Gary Bauer: I'll tell you, I don't like big government, but a good bit of the government in Washington, D.C., is institutions and bureaucracies that have grown up trying to replace what mothers and fathers used to do in the home. In other words, the more the family breaks down, the more we get away from Christ-centered marriages, the more we move away from God.

Government inevitably will get bigger and bigger and ultimately that's a prescription for losing the whole idea of America, which was limited government built on families and what's been called the little platoons—the church, local civic organizations, etc. You don't want government trying to clean up the mess that went wrong in the home. Government is never going to replace a husband and wife, a mother and father.

So you wrote this book. Was this the first book you ever wrote? Did you write it collectively or divide up the chapters? It's a pretty big deal. You get called the Book of the Year by Christianity Today in 2024. Congratulations. Tell us about the book and why you went down that road.

Brad Rhodes: We had developed a lot of curriculum that churches had already implemented. We'd gotten a lot of encouragement to put what it looks like to build your marriage on the foundation of the grace of Jesus into book form. Marilyn and I did it together with Brittany Cragg, who helped us put the book together as well. We released that in 2024.

Gary Bauer: Is that still a major part of the ministry and a tool that you use with these churches?

Brad Rhodes: It's a tool, but you read that book, it'll really help you, but it won't transform your marriage unless you do that ongoing work. Our hope is that the book motivates people to launch ongoing marriage ministries, to invest in their marriage consistently. The book is helpful, but the primary ministry is getting people to invest consistently week after week, year after year, so their marriage is more and more God-glorifying over time.

Marilyn Rhodes: We also have a way that people could, if their church isn't involved, start a group themselves in their home and invest in other couples and disciple together. The accountability of meeting with other couples, understanding that we're not alone—the enemy wants us to think we're alone in our struggles in marriage.

But our problems are so common and similar. When you gather with other people and hold each other accountable and hear how the Lord's helping them combat some of these attacks and the testimonies of how couples have overcome circumstances, that's powerful as well. It’s something that we pray just lights a fire in marriages around the nation.

Gary Bauer: You all have a fantastic story. It's amazing how God uses things. You didn't have the first year either one of you thought you would have, and that could have ended very badly. But then God takes that. He not only saved the rest of your marriage, but He's using both of you and that first-year experience to save the marriage of probably thousands of other people.

You won't know about all of them until you're home with the Lord. I'm sure you already meet married people that will say to you, "Without you guys, I think my marriage would be over by now." But there's probably a lot of people you won't find out about until you're with our Lord. Where do people go to find out more about your program and particularly churches? We know we have a lot of pastors that listen to Family Talk. Where can they go to get the kind of help that you've been talking about today?

Brad Rhodes: Go to gracemarriage.com. You can hit "Contact Us." From there, like Marilyn said, you can either contact us and we can help you launch a marriage ministry in your church, or you can start a group in your own home and have other couples come in and invest through Grace Marriage that way. So, gracemarriage.com.

Gary Bauer: Fantastic. Brad and Marilyn Rhodes, you are living proof that marriage can be everything that we all dream it will be and even more. It takes prayer, it takes intentionality, which I know you've described here a couple of times—the date night time and time together in prayer and seeing your spouse as the man or woman that God meant you to be with in a marriage built around Him.

Folks, if you again want to learn more about what Brad and Marilyn are doing, you can go to gracemarriage.com. Guys, keep up the great work and thank you for joining us on James Dobson’s Family Talk.

Brad Rhodes: Thank you for having us and thank you for all your amazing work.

Marilyn Rhodes: Thank you for having us.

Roger Marsh: Brad and Marilyn Rhodes remind us that building a thriving marriage isn't about perfection, it’s about partnership with God and an intentional investment in each other. Any couple can experience transformation when they make their relationship a priority.

You’ve been listening to Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk and Gary Bauer’s encouraging conversation with Brad and Marilyn Rhodes about strengthening marriages through grace and intentionality. If you missed any portion of today’s broadcast or if you want to go back and listen to part one, visit jdfi.net. We’ve also provided info about how you can get a copy of Brad and Marilyn’s award-winning book, The Grace Marriage, when you go to that website as well. Again, jdfi.net is where you’ll find it.

Here at the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, we believe that strong marriages don’t just happen by accident. They are built through consistent investment and biblical wisdom. That’s exactly what we are committed to support through these conversations here on Family Talk.

Broadcasts like the one you just heard today reflect our dedication to helping couples build relationships that honor God and reflect His design for marriage. When marriages thrive, children flourish, communities strengthen, and the Gospel shines brighter in our culture.

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To make a secure donation, you can send your gift through the US Postal Service. Our ministry mailing address is Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, P.O. Box 39000, Colorado Springs, Colorado, zip code 80949. Once again, our ministry mailing address is Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, or just use the initials JDFI for short, P.O. Box 39000, Colorado Springs, Colorado 80949.

If you’d like to speak with a member of our constituent care team, you can do so when you call 877-732-6825. That’s 877-732-6825. Or to make a secure donation, visit jdfi.net. I’m Roger Marsh, and from all of us here at Family Talk and the James Dobson Family Institute, thanks so much for listening today. Be sure to join us again next time right here for another edition of Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, the voice you can still trust for the family you love.