Join us on Family Talk as we explore the transformative journey of Brad and Marilyn Rhodes, founders of Grace Marriage. They share their personal story of how their own marriage struggles led to the creation of a ministry that empowers churches across America to nurture strong, grace-filled marriages. Discover how intentional investment and discipleship can turn marriages into reflections of the gospel, and learn practical steps any couple can take to rejuvenate their relationship.
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.
SPEAKER 01 :
Well, 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? Well, 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. And 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. 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.
SPEAKER 03 :
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.
SPEAKER 02 :
We’d love to. So we love being married. We’d worked with youth for 10 years. And that’s one of the couples that we do our premarital instead of our pastoral. And I said, why? I said, we want what you have. What you have looks fun. So we did that premarital. We did another premarital. 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 a group. Then they ordained me lay pastor of marriage. Basically, you’re doing all the marriage stuff anyway. We’ll just call you pastor. And then 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. I’m like, 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 in you and lose 85% of you. Crazy. So I thought we have to have an ongoing strategy, discipling marriages. And then I realized, with Communio Barna study, 72% of churches have no marriage ministry. 80% of churches spend no subsidy dollar on marriage. And I thought, 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 it’s pouring six digits into children and youth and wondering why it’s not working, Every church needs a marriage ministry and it needs to be an ongoing marriage ministry because the church is that important. So I felt a clear call from God to leave the law practice with the prayer and hope that God would start a movement that every single Bible believing church would have an ongoing marriage ministry to disciple marriages. We wouldn’t just leave people their own devices and let them be conformed to the patterns of the world, but we would teach them how to do it well. Because the church had taught us how to do it well. Hey, you got to date every week. You got to spend time together. You got to communicate. You got to prioritize this. You can’t put other things above it. It would have saved us a lot of trouble. But a lot of couples aren’t as fortunate as we were to have people intersect in our lives to help change our direction. They end up in complacent marriages that are terrible or they end up divorced. And the church can stop, I think, 90 to 95% of it if they start shepherding and discipling. So that was our lifetime call is to help the church do marriage well.
SPEAKER 03 :
Man, Brad, the enthusiasm in your voice during that explanation was very revealing. I mean, this is obviously something close to your heart, to both of your hearts, but it really came through. And Marilyn, I can see why you wouldn’t want to argue with Brad. I mean, I’m… 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? And I said, well, I wouldn’t want to say that. I will throw you a bone every once in a while. But 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. So 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 or whatever.
SPEAKER 02 :
And the thing is about, 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 norm. There has to be a discipleship structure to help people continue to prioritize marriage, work through life changes, work through issues. Otherwise, life gets in the way and they end up complacent, stagnant, or divorced.
SPEAKER 03 :
Marilyn, anything that you want to add to that?
SPEAKER 04 :
We have seen in our church specifically, because we started there, and we noticed when we had the sign-ups for couples to invest in their marriage, couples were almost apologetic, like, 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. But 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. And our marriage is there to be a picture of the gospel. And so 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. And as you mentioned… The young people in our churches aren’t getting married. The numbers are staggering. And we long for that to change. And if we have beautiful marriages before our families and before our churches and our communities, it will have an impact on the next generations.
SPEAKER 02 :
If we would do it right, the young people couldn’t wait to do this thing. They wouldn’t be putting this thing off. The reason they put this thing off is they see stagnancy, boredom, and complacency in divorce. And that’s not going to be attractional to the younger generation. But if they see people crazy about each other, affectionate, having fun, displaying the gospel, they’re going to want to do this thing. So like Marilyn said, we have to change the way we do it. I mean, what if I was a doctor and I said, hey, 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. You know, that’s what we do in marriage. We basically don’t worry about it. Don’t invest in it. Don’t really do anything. If you’re ever at a really bad point, go to conferences, go to intensives. So we have to change it that every couple is investing in marriage because they want God to get more glory in marriage. They want to protect their marriage. They want to grow their marriage. Not that they just go along side by side saying, we’re OK, we’re fine until they’re not.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yes. 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. And then even further than that, as I’m sure both of you are aware, we’re in the middle of an incredible birth dearth where if marriage is down, having babies is down too. We won’t celebrate a 300th anniversary if we can’t rebuild this basic God-inspired institution that is meant to bring a man and woman together and to be the perfect institution to bring children into the world and raise them in a godly way yeah it’s i think a pastor in atlanta summed it up well like the light bulb went off in his head while i was talking he was oh my goodness
SPEAKER 02 :
If our marriages in our church don’t work, nothing we do as a church works. And 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. And that’s why the evil one wants to go straight there because he knows if he gets that, he gets it all. And that’s why it’s so baffling to me that we’ve gone decades leaving the space empty in most churches. And 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.
SPEAKER 03 :
Give us a little bit more details. You’re working, how many churches nationwide are you working with on this theme? And what does that look like when a church, do they form an ongoing relationship with your ministry to help guide them about the most effective way to do this?
SPEAKER 02 :
Yes, we help them succeed. So we don’t want them to feel like our ministry is called Grace Marriage. So we don’t want people to feel like we have Grace Marriage in our church. So say it’s First Baptist Church. It’s First Baptist Marriage, but we equip the church to do it really well. Everything from promotional strategy to promotional resources. to curriculum, to video, to process. And we have multiple methodologies of implementation to fit church discipleship structures. So what we do is we help the church launch an ongoing marriage ministry as opposed to bringing our program in a church. Big distinction. Because we want people to feel they’re discipled by their church and their marriages, not that they have a program there. So really one call is… And we’ll take it with the leader and just help them go from there to success in the marriage space. And that’s what we can do. We work with about 300 churches. We work with about 10,000 participants right now. But our hope is the Lord adds several zeros in the next few years.
SPEAKER 03 :
So you’re not writing a whole set of curriculum and saying week one, do this week, or do you?
SPEAKER 02 :
What we do is we do have a whole set of curriculum that people follow. It’s kind of a platform of investment. They’ll get a teaching. They’ll think on it. They’ll have structure discussion. They’ll have group discussion. We have a whole process for them to follow. So we basically have created everything so the church doesn’t have to. Because like in our first years of a ministry, we really kind of struggled and we’ve learned through the impact of the church. So 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.
SPEAKER 03 :
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, many thousands of other couples facing the same kind of issues would be blessed by what you and your husband are doing?
SPEAKER 04 :
I had no idea. And one of my favorite verses is, we will overcome by the blood of the Lamb and the word of our testimonies. And I feel like the Lord has taken what we struggled through to help us encourage other couples who come to marriage. just in that not understanding the beauty of how God created it to be. And we long for people to be as intentional with their marriages as they are everything else in life. Marriage is the first thing to get squeezed out, it seems. And 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 like Brad said, being intentional. 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. We do our grace marriage meetings are quarterly meetings. We have monthly, they can be set up monthly or quarterly. We’ve been doing this for 13 years, Brad, I’d say 13 years. And every quarter we need it because we need to regroup. We need to revisit. How are we doing with our technology? Is our schedule getting out of hand? When are we going to get away together, the two of us? Or 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, 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.
SPEAKER 03 :
That’s saying something, I’ll tell you. You know, the date night concept, I mean, a lot of people over the years have talked about that. But it really is true. You have to find time for each other. Absolutely. There’s all kinds of other things that will demand your time. A few years ago, one of our national get-togethers, Charlie Kirk, God bless him, was one of the speakers. So here’s this young guy, and he’s talking a lot about marriage and family on campuses of all places. And there’s Dr. Dobson in the audience, a man that had devoted his whole life to that. And there was this really heartfelt exchange between the two when Dr. Dobson said to Charlie Couric, you know, Charlie, you’re a shooting star right now. You’re getting a lot of attention and Your work is growing and growing. But I want to tell you, as a guy that had my own period of shooting star growth, et cetera, don’t forget your own wife and children. Don’t forget your marriage that God gave you. And it was just really amazing. 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. And Charlie Crook said, I know Dr. Dobson, we’re already looking for ways to do that because I’m on the road all the time and so forth and so on. And so for our listeners today, You know, 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 that I’ve got to get done? And all those things make sense until you wake up one day and find out that you’ve become… a stranger to your own spouse. And that’s a disaster. Either of you want to react to that? I’m sorry.
SPEAKER 02 :
Yeah, I would totally, totally agree with you because the air fills the balloon. There’s always going to be more to do than time to do it. And 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 from my wife and I can’t do that because I’m going to enjoy my wife that evening. You know, until we say our marriage is important and I’m going to prioritize it over other things, we will not see change. And time is a container a marriage grows in. And you can’t have a big marriage without big time. So most marriages have very small containers of time And the marriage fails to mature and oftentimes dies. But I haven’t had a couple come in yet and say, we spend a ton of time together. We talk regularly. I don’t know what happened. We got sideways during crisis. They all say the same thing. We’re lonely. We don’t spend time together. We don’t feel connected. I mean, I heard one guy say every story is different and every story is the same. So basically, we always say schedule your life around your marriage, not your marriage around your life.
SPEAKER 04 :
That’s right. And another point to bring up is we’re in a child-centered culture. So 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. And that is not even parenting well. If our marriages aren’t going well, that’s the most important way to parent. So 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. So it’s okay to miss kids’ events. We have five children. We had kids in all kinds of sports, and there are times we miss things, but we were there a lot. We were there the majority of the time, but they knew if we missed something, and it’s good for them to know that the world doesn’t revolve around them. Our marriage is important. 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. So that’s another piece. And then technology, our phones, that’s another issue that has to be visited or it’ll squeeze out the communication between the couple. So there’s, like you said, it’s an assault on marriage. And in order to thrive, we can’t not be proactive.
SPEAKER 02 :
And 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 of the cusp of a major marital renaissance. Some younger generations moving toward it. There’s a lot of positive indicators. And if the church steps forward in this crucial moment, Man, I think Katie barred the door. I mean, I just visualize the snowball rolling downhill and then complacent marriages being the exception and divorce being the rare exception and invested marriages. People leave their marriage with this is how we’re going to do marriage. And then the whole thing’s flipped.
SPEAKER 03 :
I’ll tell you, you know, I don’t like big government, but a good bit of the government in Washington, D.C. are institutions, 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, quite frankly, that we move away from God, government inevitably will get bigger and bigger again. 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, church, local civic organizations, et cetera. You don’t want government trying to clean up the mess. that went wrong in the home. It’s not, a government’s 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? And did you, did you write it collectively or divide up the chapters? And look, it’s pretty big deal. You get called the book of the year by Christianity Today in 2024. Congratulations. So tell us about the book and why you went down that road.
SPEAKER 02 :
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. So Meryl and I did it together with Brittany Craig, who helped us put the book together as well. And so we released that, I think, in 2024.
SPEAKER 03 :
Is that still a major part of the ministry and a tool that you use with these churches?
SPEAKER 02 :
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. So our hope is that the book motivates people to launch ongoing marriage ministries, to invest in their marriage consistently. I think 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.
SPEAKER 04 :
And we also have a way that people could, if their church isn’t involved, they could 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.
SPEAKER 03 :
Yeah.
SPEAKER 04 :
But our problems are so common and similar. And 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. So it’s something that we pray just lights a fire in marriages around the nation.
SPEAKER 03 :
Well, you all have a fantastic story, and it’s amazing how God uses things, right? So 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 in that first-year experience. To save the marriage of probably thousands of other people that you won’t know about all of them until you’re home with the Lord. Not only, I’m sure you already meet married people that will say to you, you know, 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 and people. So 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 talks. So where can they go to get the kind of help that you’ve been talking about today?
SPEAKER 02 :
Just go to gracemarriage.com and you can reach, you can hit contact us. And like Marilyn said, from there, 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.
SPEAKER 03 :
Fantastic. Well, 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 dating time and everything. 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. So folks, if you, again, if you 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.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thank you for having us and thank you for all your amazing work.
SPEAKER 04 :
Thank you for having us.
SPEAKER 02 :
Thank you.
SPEAKER 01 :
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 supporting 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. But this work can’t continue without partners who share this vision. And that’s why your support is so important to us. It helps make this vision possible and makes it possible for us to bring you trusted voices and practical resources that equip families to live out biblical principles in their daily lives. Whether it’s a struggling couple who finds hope through a broadcast like the one you just heard, or a church that launches a marriage ministry after hearing this conversation, your partnership creates ripples of transformation that extend far beyond what we can measure. Now, to make a secure donation, you can send your gift through the U.S. Postal Service. Our ministry mailing address is Dr. James Dobson’s Family Talk, P.O. Box 39000, Colorado Springs, Colorado, the 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. This has been a presentation of the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute.
Join us on Family Talk as we explore the transformative journey of Brad and Marilyn Rhodes, founders of Grace Marriage. They share their personal story of how their own marriage struggles led to the creation of a ministry that empowers churches across America to nurture strong, grace-filled marriages. Discover how intentional investment and discipleship can turn marriages into reflections of the gospel, and learn practical steps any couple can take to rejuvenate their relationship.
