John McGee, Senior Director of Watermark Resources at Watermark Community Church is making a difference in the kingdom of God.

John established Watermark’s plan to provide a safety net for marriages in every stage. The church starts couples off strong with pre-marital prep, helps newlyweds establish good habits in the first years, enriches and strengthens marriages, and supports those struggling through highly regarded curriculum and community groups.

Pornography. We don’t talk much about it in Christian circles. It’s that dirty little secret hiding behind closed doors and computer screens quietly destroying marriages. The world’s number one site, Pornhub, estimates sixty-four million people click on its link EVERY DAY. Forty million Americans are regular users, and one in three are women.

Pastor and author Nick Stumbo serves as Executive Director of Pure Desire Ministries, the non-profit that helped him find victory over his decades-long struggle with pornography addiction and helps thousands of couples become sexually healthy.

If you’ve hit your 40th birthday and you’re married, you’ve probably felt the pull of midlife. Maybe it’s the squeeze of taking care of an aging parent and the kids. Or a corporate restructure has jumpstarted early retirement. Perhaps an empty nest has caused you and your spouse to wonder if you even know each other. Any and all of these situations can cause a midlife couple to pause and take inventory of their lives and the state of their marriage.

Dorothy Greco, award-winning photographer, author and speaker, addresses midlife issues and transparently shares lessons learned as she and her husband, Christopher, have navigated the past 33 years of marriage together … and in so doing drawn closer to God and each other.

Agape Catholic Ministries, founded and led by French-born U.S. citizens Christian and Christine Meert, offers a Pre-Cana program that combines the convenience of online and on-demand access with the ability to build relationship with a role-model couple. Its curriculum is inspired by and closely follows Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body.

Pastor, speaker, author and consultant Rob Rienow, DMin, has a heart for the Gospel and a passion for marriages and families. He feels called to share the message that God created marriage and the home as the bedrock of culture and civilization. Sadly, these concepts have lost traction in modern western culture.

Do you know what we need more than anything else to address these problems? We need more people who love Jesus Christ and who are willing to lay down their lives for Him.

The Rienows believe God created marriage for two main purposes. 1) To reflect God’s glory as a picture of the love between Christ and the church. 2) To raise godly children who will advance the kingdom of Christ to the next generation.

Whether engaged or newly married, young couples need a supportive community with authentic relationships. Ryan and Mary Rose Verret began working with engaged couples in their local parish to develop a better way to prepare them for a lasting marriage and reconnect them to their church family. The Verret’s created the Witness to Love program in 2012 for engaged couples to choose married mentors from their church to journey with them as they prepare for their married life together.

Most people would agree that raising ten children over 39 years of marriage qualifies someone to be considered an expert in family dynamics. The fact that psychologist Dr. Ray Guarendi and his wife adopted those children, some from very difficult circumstances, lends even more credibility to the advice he offers through his practice and media ministry.

Can a marriage be saved when one of the spouses is a narcissist or emotionally abusive? Would someone even want to save it? Surprisingly, the answer to those questions can be yes, according to David Hawkins, Ph.D. A clinical psychologist with more than 40 years’ experience, Dr. Hawkins has brought healing and restoration to thousands of marriages and individuals since 1976.

Ask those who’ve spent time strengthening marriages and families, and especially as a counselor or in public policy, and they’ve probably heard of Dr. Richard Marks. You might be familiar with his work at Smartmarriages or Christian PAIRS curricula, which he helped develop with mentor Dr. Lori Gordon. Dr. Marks focuses most of his efforts helping deeply troubled couples as they wrestle with how their struggles with trauma, substance abuse, sexual addiction, and general mental health issues affect their marriages.

There’s something special about great duos. Where would Fred Astaire have been without Ginger Rogers? Or Batman without Robin? The most effective partnerships combine individual strengths for a greater mutual outcome. Such is the dynamism of Brenda and Gil Stuart’s work over the past 18 years helping people with their relationships.

It’s no secret that Focus on the Family has long carried the standard for marriage and family. Marriage champions have relied on Focus as a valuable source of resources they can trust for decades. The depth and breadth of resources available at Focus is extensive and include an array of those Greg and Erin Smalley created that empower champions to support marriages in all ages and stages.

God has a beautiful way of redeeming brokenness to serve his purposes. As carbon under enough pressure becomes a beautiful diamond, so too, do those who overcome adversity through the power of the Holy Spirit shine Christ’s light.

When Julie and Greg Gorman married 24 years ago, they didn’t start with a blank slate. Both were previously divorced, Greg was raising a pre-school-age daughter, and when Julie became pregnant shortly after their honeymoon with two babies in three years, stress levels escalated.

Gary Chapman, Ph.D., counselor, pastor, speaker and best-selling author, can be considered a founding father in the field of family and relationship ministry. He’s best known for developing the 5 Love Languages concept. His book by the same name, The 5 Love Languages, published in 1992, continues to sell more copies each year than the one preceding. It’s now been continually in print for 30 years, sold more than 20 million copies in English and has been translated and published into 57 languages worldwide.

Nobody gets divorced if they are in love. That profound realization became the thesis upon which marriage therapist and researcher Willard Harley, Ph.D., built his work and eventually became the inspiration for bestselling, His Needs, Her Needs book. The concepts Dr. Harley introduced became the bedrock upon which later experts in the marriage field founded their practices, including the Nashville-based Marriage Dynamics Institute (MDI), which began in 1994.

Alan Hawkins, Ph.D., has devoted his professional career to studying family life. A professor in the Brigham Young University School of Family Life, Dr. Hawkins has focused his work on studying and applying relationship education tools to help individuals and couples form and sustain healthy relationships and strong marriages. His award-winning work focuses on educational interventions and public policies aimed at preventing unnecessary divorces. He assists couples in answering the question: “Should I try to work it out?”

Sex. Our culture’s obsessed with it. Sex sells everything from cars to power bars. It’s the topic on everyone’s lips – the pursuit of it, the results of it, or whether a person’s pronouns change because they feel like they identify with the opposite. What was designed by God to be a powerful representation of the union between him and his people has become something (all sorts of things) so far removed from the original intent it’s almost unrecognizable.

Have the events of the past couple years left you feeling anxious? Worried about your marriage or your family? Maybe you have a relationship question, and you just don’t know where to turn. 

These thoughts occurred to seasoned therapists and relationship experts Dr’s. Les and Leslie Parrott. Les and Leslie are a husband-and-wife team who share the same name and passion for helping others build healthy relationships. Les, a clinical psychologist and ordained Nazarene minister, is a professor of psychology at Northwest University. Leslie is a marriage and family therapist. They offer marriage and relationship help through their speaking engagements and their New York Times Best Selling books, with more than six million copies sold. 

Click. The sound of a light switch. That small switch has the power to change a room from darkness to one illuminated with warming light. A switch can also describe a change in a person’s emotional and mental state from positive to negative, or vice versa. The ability to identify, then actively move one’s emotional outlook from negative to positive is what Christian life coaches Chuck and Ashley Elliot call “Switch Theory.”

If you’ve listened to Christian talk radio anytime in the past 35 years, it’s likely you’ve heard his voice. Pastor, author, and on-air announcer, Bob Lepine was the co-host of FamilyLife Today®, FamilyLife’s nationally syndicated radio program, for 28 years, just retiring in May 2021. Over the decades he’s interviewed leaders on a wide variety of marriage and family-related topics.

Many have felt helpless watching a friend or family member struggle in their marriage. George Kenworthy, M.Div., D.Min., feels the same heart tug. As he began pastoring churches, he realized the depth of the need of those experiencing marital difficulties and the passion of his conviction to help.