The Church Has a Marriage Problem….and Most Don’t Know It

This week, Brad sits down with Devin again, a family ministry pastor who makes a compelling case that the church has been investing in the wrong place first….pouring resources into children and student ministry while leaving marriage largely unattended. They get honest about why that gap exists, what it’s costing the next generation, and what it looks like when a church finally decides to fix it.

Walk into almost any church in America and you’ll find a children’s wing, a student ministry, maybe even a dedicated family pastor. What you probably won’t find is anyone whose job is to invest in the marriages sitting in those pews every Sunday. That’s not a small oversight. The consequences reach further than most churches realize.

Devin is a family ministry pastor who has spent his career thinking about how churches form the next generation. After years in the work, he keeps arriving at the same conclusion: the church has been investing in the wrong place first.

We Dropped the Kids Off and Called It Discipleship

The prevailing model goes something like this. Get the kids into the building, give them great programming, trust that the faith will stick. Parents drop them off. The church does the work. Everyone goes home.

That model is backwards. Scripture is clear about it. Deuteronomy 6, Jesus himself. The primary disciplers of the next generation are mom and dad. Not a youth pastor. Not a Sunday school teacher. The parents.

And if mom and dad’s marriage is fragile or falling apart, whatever is happening in that children’s ministry is building on sand.

“If you want to impact the next generation, you have got to make sure that mom and dad have a stable relationship, a stable marriage.”
— Devin Tharp, Family Ministry Pastor

When kids grow up in a Christian home and their parents divorce, the odds of their faith surviving drop sharply. One question tends to take over in their minds: if Jesus is so great, why couldn’t he save my parents’ marriage? That question unravels years of Sunday school fast.

What the Next Generation Is Actually Seeing

Young people aren’t avoiding marriage because they’re lazy or scared of commitment. They’re avoiding it because of what they’ve watched.

Divorce rates at 40 to 50 percent. And the couples who stayed married? A lot of them settled into something that looks more like a business arrangement. Two tired people managing logistics. Getting the bills paid. Getting the kids to their next game. Nobody fighting. Nobody really living either.

People are drawn to beauty. They’re repelled by boredom and conflict. Right now, for a lot of young people watching from the outside, marriage looks like one or the other.

What changes when they see something different? Two people who are genuinely crazy about each other. Who date. Who laugh. Who choose each other on hard days. Devin puts it plainly: if the next generation actually saw that, they wouldn’t be waiting until their thirties to get married. They’d run to the altar.

That’s what the church should be producing. It starts with the marriages already in the building.

An Ounce of Prevention

Think about what it costs to help a couple in crisis. Years of counseling. Lawyers, sometimes. Devastated kids. Shattered finances. A family spending the next decade trying to recover.

Now think about what it costs to invest in that same couple five years earlier, when they were a five out of ten. Not terrible. Not great. Just coasting.

It’s not close. Taking a stable marriage to a thriving one is far easier and far less costly than dragging a broken one back from the edge. And yet the church waits. Lets couples drift from stable to stagnant, stagnant to struggling, and then mobilizes when the crisis finally lands.

Not changing your oil for a hundred thousand miles and then acting surprised when the engine blows is bad stewardship of a car. The same logic applies to a marriage, and to the families built around it.

“If you catch them before they hate each other, marriage ministry is easy.”
— Brad Rhoads, Grace Marriage

Why Churches Keep Skipping It

None of the reasons are particularly flattering.

The first is attendance. Children’s and student ministry fill seats. They bring families through the door. Marriage ministry doesn’t always move those numbers, so it gets bumped down the priority list. The ripple effect of a thriving marriage is real but slow. Healthier kids, stronger families, a more stable congregation. Churches thinking in quarters tend to miss it.

The second is culture. Pastors leave seminary understanding the theology of marriage. The Bible begins and ends with a wedding. The covenant, the mystery, the picture of Christ and the church. They get it theologically. Then they step into a church where the infrastructure is built around children and students, and they go along with it. Everyone else is doing it. Nobody’s doing anything different yet.

The third reason is the most honest one. A lot of pastors don’t have a compelling vision for their own marriage. It’s hard to champion something you aren’t experiencing. The churches that actually build strong marriage ministries almost always have a lead pastor whose marriage is genuinely thriving. Not just surviving. Someone who wants everyone around them to have what they have.

Do It Because It’s Right, Not Because It’s Popular

A minister in western Kentucky was asked by a volunteer how many couples they expected to sign up for their new marriage ministry. His answer was, “That’s not really relevant. We’re doing it regardless of the number of registrations.”

Marriage is important to God. Important to scripture. Important to families. So we’re going to do it. Eight couples or eighty, we’re going to keep doing it. We’re not waiting for demand to justify the decision.

That’s the posture. You shepherd sheep by leading them somewhere worth going. You don’t follow them around to wherever they already are. A church that only offers what the congregation is already asking for isn’t leading. It’s accommodating. Accommodation rarely produces transformation.

The Best Kids Ministry Might Be in the Living Room

This isn’t an argument against children’s ministry or student ministry. Both matter. But the sequencing is off in most churches, and sequencing matters.

Invest in the marriage. Watch it become a living example of what faith looks like when it’s actually practiced. Watch kids grow up in a home where mom and dad love each other well, where grace isn’t a doctrine but a daily reality, where commitment looks like a choice made joyfully over and over again. That home becomes the most effective discipleship environment the church has. No curriculum required.

The best kids ministry, Devin says, can happen in a kitchen. On a Saturday morning when a dad puts his phone down. When two people show their kids, without saying a word, what it actually looks like to be for each other.

The church’s job is to build those marriages. Everything else follows.