FamilyLife

What FamilyLife is

FamilyLife is the marriage-and-family ministry arm of Cru. It produces a daily radio program (FamilyLife Today), runs an in-person weekend getaway for couples (Weekend to Remember), publishes books and curricula, and maintains a free article library that covers every life stage from engagement to grandparenting. The teaching tradition is broadly evangelical Protestant, and the practical posture is closer to Christian counseling than to systematic theology.

The current public faces are Dave and Ann Wilson — Dave is the longtime chaplain of the Detroit Lions and the Wilsons co-host FamilyLife Today after taking the baton from founders Dennis and Barbara Rainey. Ron Deal leads the blended-family vertical through the Smart Stepfamilies imprint. Crawford Loritts and other guest voices round out the lineup. It’s a ministry, not a publisher and not a media company, and the budget rounds toward events and broadcast rather than apps and platforms.

Why couples in the trenches prefer FamilyLife

The single biggest practical difference between FamilyLife and the broader Christian-family internet is scope discipline. FamilyLife does marriage, and then the family that grows from it. That’s the entire beat. No political endorsements, no streaming-platform reviews, no candidate scorecards — which means a couple in real trouble can show up without having to filter through the rest of an evangelical worldview package to find the help they came for.

The second difference is that FamilyLife runs a single flagship event — the Weekend to Remember — and almost everything else points back to it. The article you read on Tuesday, the broadcast you heard on Wednesday, the workbook you flipped through on Saturday — they all reinforce a coherent set of marriage practices that get rehearsed and committed to over a weekend. Most ministries publish content and hope it lands. FamilyLife publishes content that funnels into a structured intervention, and the intervention is where the change actually happens.

Weekend to Remember: the marriage ministry that built a 40-year cohort

Weekend to Remember is FamilyLife’s flagship — a Friday-evening-through-Sunday-lunch getaway for couples, held in host hotels across the U.S. and internationally. Couples register, book the hotel, and walk through a structured schedule of teaching sessions (six to eight talks on themes like communication, conflict, intimacy, and roles), couple workbook exercises after each session, and unstructured downtime built into the schedule specifically so couples actually do the exercises. There’s no group therapy element and no awkward sharing — it’s explicitly a one-couple-at-a-time experience inside a shared hotel space.

The number to know is 300,000+ couples attended over four decades, and the follow-up retention numbers are better than most weekend retreats achieve. The reason it works isn’t the talks — most of the content is in the books and on the broadcast — it’s the forced 48 hours away from kids, work, and screens, with structured prompts that a couple cannot fake their way through. As of writing, registration runs around $199/couple plus hotel and meals, which puts the all-in cost in the $700–$1,100 range depending on city. Most attendees describe it as the best money they ever spent on their marriage. It is not the right choice for a couple in an active crisis (FamilyLife will tell you so and point you to a counselor) — it’s the right choice for a couple that wants to invest in a marriage that isn’t broken.

FamilyLife Today: the broadcast that survived a generational handoff

FamilyLife Today is a half-hour daily broadcast that runs on roughly 1,400 radio outlets and as a podcast. Dennis Rainey hosted it for nearly 27 years; Dave and Ann Wilson took over in 2019 and have hosted ever since. The format is conversational interview — the Wilsons sit down with a guest (a counselor, an author, a couple with a hard story, occasionally a recurring voice like Ron Deal or Crawford Loritts) and work through a topic across two to five episodes. It’s the kind of show that respects your commute time.

What separates FamilyLife Today from the field is candor. The Wilsons talk about the parts of marriage that most Christian broadcasts won’t — their own near-divorce, the parenting failures they’d undo, the season Ann describes as her dark night. Dennis and Barbara Rainey did the same thing for a generation before them. The result is a back catalog that functions almost like a marriage-counseling-podcast-on-demand: search for the topic, pull two or three episodes from different years, and you’ve got a small-group worth of material. This sounds like a small thing. In practice it’s transformative — a couple who works through twenty episodes on the commute has effectively done a counseling intensive without booking one.

Blended families and parenting: where the long tail lives

Ron Deal’s Smart Stepfamilies imprint runs through FamilyLife and is probably the most-cited stepfamily resource in evangelical counseling circles. The Smart Stepfamily, The Smart Stepmom, and The Smart Stepdad are the core texts, and Deal also runs the Summit on Stepfamily Ministry — an annual training event for pastors and counselors working with blended households. If you’re a stepparent who has tried Christian books that don’t name your actual problems, Deal is the one who names them: the four-to-seven-year integration timeline, the loyalty conflicts, the holiday geometry, the discipline-belongs-to-the-biological-parent rule. The work is pastoral rather than clinical, and it stays out of doctrinal weeds that would alienate any couple in the room.

On the parenting side, FamilyLife is lighter — fewer flagship books, more articles and podcast-episode arcs. Dennis Rainey’s Stepping Up (on biblical manhood and fatherhood) is the closest thing to a parenting-track tentpole. Crawford Loritts on fatherhood is the other voice worth seeking out specifically — his teaching on calling, presence, and what fathers owe their kids is the kind of content that quietly recalibrates a dad’s week. Across both tracks, the editorial posture is gentle: FamilyLife isn’t trying to win a parenting-philosophy argument, it’s trying to give a tired parent a next step they can take on Tuesday.

Pricing

Where FamilyLife falls behind

No mobile app. FamilyLife lives on the website and the podcast feed, and the navigation is dated. A search-first user can find what they need. A browse-first user — the kind who opens an app, scrolls a feed, taps a card — is going to feel like they’re in a 2014 publisher site, because they basically are.

Light on theological depth. This is applied marriage ministry, and the teaching is closer to Christian counseling than to systematic exposition. That’s appropriate for the audience, but readers coming from Desiring God or The Gospel Coalition will notice the register difference immediately. The marriage advice is excellent. The doctrinal scaffolding under it is implicit rather than explicit.

Narrower than Focus on the Family by design. FamilyLife doesn’t engage public-policy debates, doesn’t do candidate scorecards, doesn’t run a broadcasting umbrella over a dozen other ministries, doesn’t take public positions on schooling debates. If you want a one-stop family-and-culture ministry, FamilyLife is too narrow. If you want a marriage-and-family ministry that stays in its lane, FamilyLife is exactly right.

Paywall behavior on events is uneven. Some excellent resources — workbooks, breakouts, post-event follow-ups — are bundled into Weekend to Remember and aren’t obviously available elsewhere. The site doesn’t map the membership/event/resource overlap clearly enough up front, so couples sometimes register and then realize the resource they wanted is, in fact, the event itself.

The handoff to small groups is informal. FamilyLife publishes the Art of Marriage video curriculum and a handful of small-group studies, but it doesn’t run a small-group platform the way RightNow Media does. Churches end up DIY-ing the small-group infrastructure, which is fine if you have a marriage pastor and a problem if you don’t.

FamilyLife vs. Focus on the Family vs. Proverbs 31

Different strengths. FamilyLife is better at the marriage track and the in-person event. Focus on the Family is broader (parenting, culture, public policy, broadcasting). Proverbs 31 is built for women and runs a different content engine entirely (the First 5 Bible-study app, daily devotions, and Lysa TerKeurst’s teaching ministry).

FamilyLife’s narrower scope is its biggest difference from Focus on the Family. Focus runs a broad umbrella ministry — Adventures in Odyssey for kids, Plugged In for media reviews, Boundless for singles, the public-policy work through its affiliated organizations — and its broadcast covers culture, parenting, marriage, and faith in roughly equal measure. FamilyLife runs a much narrower beat: marriage, and the family that grows out of it. That means FamilyLife will never be the one-stop ministry that Focus is, and Focus will never go as deep on a single weekend marriage intervention as FamilyLife does.

Proverbs 31 isn’t really a peer of either — it’s a women-focused teaching ministry whose flagship product is the First 5 app (free daily Bible reading) and whose face is Lysa TerKeurst. Where FamilyLife is built around the couple as a unit, Proverbs 31 is built around the individual woman. A wife can absolutely use both, and most readers who use FamilyLife seriously will use Proverbs 31 alongside it for the personal-devotion track. Pastors building a marriage ministry should start with FamilyLife. Families building a media diet should consider Focus. Women building a daily Bible-reading habit should look at Proverbs 31.

Alternatives to FamilyLife