Are Biblical values making a comeback today? People are going back to church, divorce rates are declining, Gen Z is prioritizing work/life balance. While patterning life in accordance with God’s word once might not have seemed culturally relevant in our post-modern society, the pendulum has begun to shift as people hunger for meaning and truth.

Michael and Tania Koehler, founders of Marriage Mania Ministry, have answered the call to lead couples and families in the path of Biblical truth and God’s design for the family. In 2023, they stepped into ministry full time after leading their church marriage ministry for 12 years. While they had been actively serving in their church separately, they were recruited to facilitate a marriage group after being married for just three months. It wasn’t long before the Koehlers took the reins of the ministry. Now Tania and Michael host a Marriage Mania Ministry podcast, speak at events and have written books and Bible studies including popular, The Helper: The Role of a Biblical Wife – 7 Week Bible Study and The Covering: The Role of a Biblical Husband. They’ve also published The Conflict Manual: The Biblical Approach to Communication and Disagreements; Biblical Hospitality: A Tool for Family Discipleship; and Follow Me As I Follow Christ: A Mother’s Prayer & Fasting 31-Day Devotional.

The Koehlers describe their mission to, “disciple spouses and parents in marriage and parenthood in order to enrich marriages and equip parents to raise passionate Jesus followers grounded in the Bible. We stick to the truth and share God’s design for marriage. The Bible is our authority, and we share real-life examples and how God can shape our lives to be set apart.”

Even before the two met, they were both heavily involved in church ministry. Tania was following her deep passion to encourage women. She had been leading women’s ministry while pursuing a business management career at a tech company and earning a master’s degree in business. Michael, originally a police officer, began teaching high school Sunday school classes when he was still in college. He eventually became a church drama director and youth pastor and earned a master’s in divinity degree from Liberty University and a law degree from North Carolina’ Campbell University.

By the time they met and married, Tania was 38, while Michael turned 40 on the day of their first date (which was lunch after church). Both had seen plenty of examples of dysfunction and disorder when God’s ways were not followed. As a police officer, Michael had first-hand experience with the sins of the world. Tania had watched her parents divorce and didn’t find a relationship with Christ herself until she was 35.

The two met at a church prayer gathering for singles. One of the first things Tania did was scan Michael’s Bible looking for clues. She noticed it was falling apart due to wear – a good sign!

Both determined they wanted to do things God’s way – developing their friendship and pursuing God’s leading for their relationship in prayer.

“I wanted to walk in a biblical relationship that was glorifying to the Lord,” Tania said. “God was showing my heart what it meant to be underneath his covenant, and I wanted to make sure I was talking to someone who was biblically sound.”

As for Michael, “I was impressed that she wanted to know about my faith,” he said. “I was looking for another strong believer.”

He quoted Ruth Graham, “There’s nothing better than two disciples of Jesus Christ marrying each other.”

They note there are questions singles should ask long before they become romantically involved.

Does the person go to church regularly? Ask some questions about the Bible – are they pursuing God? Are they a disciple of Jesus Christ? Look at their character. How do they treat their friends and family? They encourage singles to come to the marriage classes they teach to learn healthy habits beforehand. “We are all accountable to seek the Lord for ourselves and grow individually,” Tania said.

Once Tania and Michael made a decision that God had indeed led them to be together, they married within six months.

“We knew we had a mission and a calling together,” Michael said.  As the Koehlers led marriage ministry classes, they drew from existing curriculum like The Five Love Languages and Emerson Eggerichs’ Love and Respect, but they also created their own biblically based content. Much of their teaching centers on the roles of husband and wife as defined in the Bible.

“We each have roles God has given us,” Tania said. “It’s critical to understand when you first get married how to best serve one another in those roles. If we are doing our roles the way God intended, we should have a flow of continuous serving with Christ at the center. It’s an ongoing process.”

The Koehlers developed The Biblical Foundations of Marriage course to help establish a strong, faith-based foundation for a family. They’ve also packaged their Zoom presentation into a seven-step, self-paced program that shares God’s purpose for marriage, offers insights and practical guidance for how to build a home centered on Christ. They’ll help couples develop a mission statement for their marriage and be purpose-driven so they are focused and going the same direction, Michael explained.

Their most popular resources are Bible studies written separately for men and women. The Helper explains what it means to be a wife who supports her husband, as described in Genesis 2:18. Tania studied biblical characters and unpacks how to honor and submit to a husband God’s way. “’The helper’ is the title that God uses to describe women when he created her to be ‘a helper’ to her husband in a way that is comparable and complementary to him,” Tania wrote. “Likewise, the wife has the role of empowering her husband and helping him as he leads the family.” Tania plans to have a Spanish-language version of The Helper available by early 2026.

In The Covering: The Role of a Biblical Husband, Michael shares how God calls husbands to sacrificially love their wives the way Christ loved the church. He explores what it looks like to lead in a way that’s best for a man’s wife and family as described in Corinthians 11:3.

“Husbands are to cover their wives with their leadership, love and security as they oversee the health, well-being and direction of the family,” he wrote.

Both The Covering and The Helper are inductive Bible studies that teach people how to look up answers for themselves and lend well to group discussions. They are available in print or digital versions.

The Koehlers also teach a class on conflict resolution and communication styles in which they show a film of an argument they analyze to highlight positive and negative behavior. As they began to present the content, Tania and Michael realized they needed a printed resource to allow for deeper discussion, as well as a video so couples could watch the scenario with a line-by-line description of what they did right or wrong with Biblical support. The Conflict Manual: The Biblical Approach to Communication and Disagreements supports their presentation.

Visitors to their website, marriagemaniaministry.com, will find many helpful, free downloadables to get them started. There are challenges for marriage, husbands, wives and in parenting, like The Wife Who Builds: Grab your 7-day FREE Marriage Challenge. There are also encouragement, prayer and gratitude guides like the Marriage 7-Day Prayer & Fasting Guide. For Tania and Michael, marriage ministry goes hand in glove with parenting, so Marriage Mania Ministry offers a holistic, family centered approach.

“We wanted to know our marriage would mean something,” Tania said. “If the Lord would bless us with children, we needed to learn how to parent and raise children to know Jesus and leave a legacy. We want healthy marriages so healthy parents will disciple and raise up healthy children.”

“Our angle is to fuse marriage ministry with a strong parenting component,” Michael agreed. “We want to emphasize the discipleship aspect of a family and can’t do it if our marriages aren’t healthy.”

“The husband and wife operate as a team as they care for the family and disciple the children to be strong believers in the Lord,” Tania wrote. The Koehlers advocate healthy habits for families as they do for marriages. They note how much marital and family health is fostered when people eat meals together. Pursuing God as is another habit they espouse and put into practice. Tania, Michael and their daughter read the Bible together in the morning, have a family discussion and pray.

They also stress the importance of forgiveness. “When we model that we are able to apologize and work through things, there is security in the home,” Tania added. And the couple is not afraid to forge their own path. They homeschool their daughter and have raised her to be completely bilingual in Spanish/English in honor of Tania’s Central American heritage. In fact, Tania and Michael speak only Spanish with her at home, allowing her to pick up English organically. They even have spent years worshipping in a Spanish-language church.

While embracing the Spanish language has helped Tania reconnect with the culture of her birth, Michael also touts the benefits of the bilingual brain and its ability to organize information. “From an academic standpoint, the bilingual brain can do things the unilingual brain can’t,” he enthused. And as the world is increasingly connected globally, they anticipate their daughter’s ability to navigate multiple languages can only be helpful.

God always preserves a remnant. People who’ve remained steadfast in belief that his ways provide the best blueprint for families to grow in Christ. This means having a Biblical worldview of marriage that includes God’s design for husbands to lead and be head of the home providing a spiritual covering for his wife and family. Tania and Michael are leading the charge to practice a traditional marriage in alignment with God’s word and to his glory.