Why Your Marriage & Marriage Ministry Need Attention Long Before a Crisis Hits

Most churches walk with couples at the altar and again if things fall apart, but the years in between often get overlooked. In this episode, Brad talks with Devin Tharp of Good Shepherd Church in Charlotte about the moment he realized love alone wasn’t enough to sustain his own marriage, and how his church built a full continuum of support, from premarital counseling to ongoing rhythms like Grace Marriage, so couples never have to wait for a crisis to get help. The big idea: a thriving marriage isn’t about finding the right technique, it’s about protecting enough time for one to grow.

Many churches have a marriage strategy without really knowing it. It looks like this: show up when a couple gets engaged and help them plan the wedding, then again when the couple comes in with real trouble and someone needs a counselor, a mediator, or in the worst case, a blessing on the way out the door. Everything in between, related to the marriage, gets minimal guidance. No check-ins, no structure, no expectation that a marriage needs tending the same way a career does, or a faith does, or a body does.

Our own Brad Rhoads, and Devin Tharp, a family pastor at Good Shepherd Church in Charlotte, spent a recent conversation picking that gap apart, and what emerged wasn’t a call for better counseling or smarter communication tools. It was something simpler and, in a way, harder to hear: most marriages don’t fail from a lack of love. They fail from a lack of time.

A marriage nobody warned him about

Devin’s own story is the clearest illustration of the problem he now spends his career trying to fix. Married 27 years, and by his own account still growing closer to his wife than he’s ever been. But the early years told a different story. “I didn’t know I had to spend time on it,” he said. “I just thought we’d love each other, we’re into each other, it’ll just be fine.” Six months in, his wife could barely stand to be in the room with him. Nobody had told him that love doesn’t sustain itself. His church at the time offered nothing for married couples, no ongoing ministry, no model, no expectation. Two people eventually stepped in and changed the trajectory of his marriage, and that rescue is a big part of why he’s built his church’s ministry around never letting another couple fall through that same gap.

That story matters because it strips away the excuse most couples reach for, which is that their problem is unique, or too complicated, or needs some specialized intervention. Often it’s much plainer than that. It’s a calendar problem before it’s anything else.

The container idea, and why it changes how you think about date night

Brad describes it as a container. Time is the space a marriage grows in, and whatever size that container is, that’s the size the marriage will be. Shrink the container and the relationship stalls out, undernourished, no matter how much the couple loves each other on paper. Give it room and the marriage has a chance to actually mature.

Devin saw this play out directly in a counseling session with a young couple who came in describing real, specific struggles. Instead of diving into their conflict, he asked one question: what’s your weekly rhythm for spending time together? They looked at each other. They didn’t have one. Whatever time they got was accidental, whichever nights they both happened to be home. His assignment wasn’t a communication worksheet or a conflict resolution technique. It was just: go spend time together this week, and learn to enjoy being in the same room again. They came back stunned by how much they had to talk about once they actually sat down and did it.

That’s the piece worth pulling out for anyone reading this as a couple, not just as a ministry leader. If your marriage feels distant, stale, or stuck in the same three arguments, the honest first question isn’t “what technique are we missing.” It’s “when did we last actually spend real, undistracted time together, and how often does that happen.” Rhoads counseled a couple who insisted they had no time for their marriage while logging fifteen hours a week driving kids to youth sports. Good people, real love, and still headed toward divorce because nobody had done the math on where the hours were actually going.

What this means if you’re a couple

The fix isn’t complicated, but it isn’t effortless either. Protect a weekly rhythm, even a short one. Tharp and his wife pray briefly together most mornings, read scripture on their own, and hold Friday as a non-negotiable day together, no email, no church work, just each other. They use the Grace Marriage journals to ask each other real questions, the kind that surface something new even after 27 years. None of that is dramatic. All of it is protected. The lesson isn’t to copy their exact schedule, it’s to notice that a great marriage, in his words, is not an accident. It’s the product of a rhythm someone decided to defend on the calendar, week after week, long before there was a crisis to justify it.

What this means if you’re a church

Tharp’s church, Good Shepherd, treats marriage as a continuum instead of a single event. There’s premarital counseling and a ten-week class called Merge for couples who are engaged or seriously dating. There’s Re|Engage, a fifteen-week discipleship program for deeper renewal. There’s Grace Marriage, offered quarterly, which gives couples who’ve already done the deep work a way to stay in rhythm instead of sliding back into old patterns. And for couples already in crisis, the church partners with a marriage intensive program built specifically for people actively considering divorce. Out of roughly 1,200 people at the church, hundreds of couples are currently active in Grace Marriage alone, with hundreds more having moved through other ministries over the past several years.

The point isn’t the specific curriculum. It’s the shape of the strategy. A church that only shows up at the wedding and the divorce has, without intending to, told its people that marriage doesn’t need ongoing discipleship and strategy in between. A church that builds something for every stage, premarital, early years, deep renewal, ongoing maintenance, and crisis, tells a very different story: that investing in a marriage is a normal, expected part of being part of that church. Not a sign that something is wrong. Just what healthy people do.

The part that applies either way

Whether you’re reading this as a couple wondering why the spark feels dim, or as a pastor wondering why your marriage ministry only ever gets used by people already in crisis, the answer points to the same gap. Nobody plans for the middle. Weddings get planned in exhaustive detail. Divorces get lawyers and mediators and support groups. The twenty or thirty years in between get whatever’s left over after work, kids, and everything else competing for a place on the calendar.

Unless! We do something very different.

Closing that gap doesn’t require a breakthrough. It requires deciding, on purpose, that the middle deserves a place in the container too, and then defending that place the same way you’d defend anything else that actually matters to you.