How do yo find yourself again after emerging from fundamentalism? Many of us have had religious trauma from our church upbringing, or a dysfunctional marriage where we've stayed because we thought God wanted us to. We've endured so much, and have been taught that our...
Sometimes Jesus shows up in weird places--like cleaning shows. I want to do something different today and let you in a bit on my personal faith reflections. I'm currently on Day 9 of a really bad cold (likely COVID) and my husband is on Day 11 and I think has finally...
Can you tell if a church is healthy using its website? Absolutely! Or at least you can make a pretty good start and eliminate a lot of obviously unhealthy churches. And you can do it in under five minutes! One of the big things we've noticed in our surveys of 40,000...
It's time to go...and be free! Yesterday was launch day for Beth Allison Barr's new book, Becoming the Pastor's Wife. It's the follow-up to her first book The Making of Biblical Womanhood, which we talked about on the podcast a few years ago! In Becoming a...
What would it look like to create healthy marriage advice from the ground up? To go into writing a marriage book with no assumptions, just data? To take Jesus at His word that a good tree can’t bear bad fruit, and a bad tree can’t bear good fruit–so where there is...
Tomorrow The Marriage You Want launches! I wanted to talk about it today, and do all kinds of fun things leading up to launch--but 10 days ago my father-in-law passed away, and the funeral was this weekend. We've been so busy and reeling as a family. And yesterday I...
A big value at Bare Marriage is that we're evidence-based. I open my podcast every week with "we like to talk about "healthy, evidence-based, biblical advice." And our new book The Marriage You Want (which launches next Tuesday!!!) is totally evidence-based. We've got...
I’ve spent years trying to untangle the Christian marriage advice puzzle. When we started researching the best-selling marriage books when we were writing The Great Sex Rescue, we found, to our dismay, that the majority of them ended up giving really bad advice, that...
Ephesians 5 calls husbands to submit too. But whenever we talk about men submitting, so many men take offense to that! I wrote up this super quick overview of Ephesians 5 on social media last week, and it went so big that I thought I'd post it here, too, so people...
Is marriage primarily about teaching you to be selfless and to grow like Jesus through suffering? I hope you would all say a resounding, “no!” We know that God thinks of marriage for our benefit–our emotional benefit, not just our character-transforming benefit. He...
How exactly do we judge something by its fruit? One of the things we’re adamant about here at Bare Marriage is the concept of “evidence-based” and “healthy” advice–meaning that you can judge things by their fruit. If we’re going to figure out if a teaching is healthy...
"The husband has to be prepared to die for his wife." One of the most bizarre arguments defending men being in authority over women is the idea that one day, he may have to take a bullet for you. A husband has to be prepared to die for his wife, but God doesn’t ask...
How do you have a Christian marriage? And is a healthy Christian marriage different from a healthy marriage of two non-Christians? A woman wrote in asking:You guys do a wonderful job showing what biblical marriage is NOT but sometimes I’d love just a clear and concise...
Does complementarianism lead to good marriage outcomes? I'm going to answer that question in this post, but I want you to keep something in the back of your head as you're reading this. One of these things is not like the other, one of these things just doesn’t...
When it comes to marriage, teamwork is associated with all the good stuff! Hierarchy, on the other hand, is associated with all the bad stuff. We explain today on the Bare Marriage podcast some of our biggest picture findings in The Marriage You Want, and how we...