A Trusted Voice in Christian Broadcast | Venerated Radio Host Shares Highlights from the Decades

May 2

If you’ve listened to Christian talk radio anytime in the past 35 years, it’s likely you’ve heard his voice. Pastor, author, and on-air announcer, Bob Lepine was the co-host of FamilyLife Today®, FamilyLife’s nationally syndicated radio program, for 28 years, just retiring in May 2021. Over the decades he’s interviewed leaders on a wide variety of marriage and family-related topics.

Bob caught a vision for Christian radio when he was captivated by Chuck Swindoll’s preaching broadcasts in the late 1970s. He realized, “if there were more like this, we could have a good Christian radio station.” He began managing stations in the Southwest including spending seven years as KSLR station manager in San Antonio in the late 1980s. Bob connected with Dennis Rainey of fledgling FamilyLife through his call-in radio show, which led to Dennis recruiting him to join him in creating FamilyLife Today® in 1992. Although Bob was reluctant to leave San Antonio’s Spurs basketball team and Alamo Café tortillas, he felt called to join Dennis’ mission in Little Rock.

Bob remembers the first thing Dennis asked him was, “Does marriage and family make you weep and pound the table?” Bob thought, “I’m passionate about the Bible and theology,” but reports not realizing then how dear marriage and family are to God’s heart.

So much of the Bible speaks indirectly to marriage and family issues, he said. Everything can be summed up by loving God and loving your neighbor. “Who is my neighbor?” he wondered. “Who are near me most who are often in need? That’s my wife and kids,” he realized. “Everything in the Bible is about how to get along with others – which is marriage and family in broader application. It’s more significant than I realized. The end of creation for God was creating a married couple. More important than the church, more important than the government – the family is the foundation. Dennis knew it before many of us knew it,” Bob added.

As the two began sketching out the format for FamilyLife Today®, they did some soul-searching to decide if there was need for another radio program in the marriage and family space. At the time, Dr. James Dobson’s Focus on the Family was already thriving. Bob and Dennis decided that while Focus was talking on a cultural and political/social level, FamilyLife Today® was going to home in on the personal level – “What’s going on in your marriage, in your family,” Bob said. Then he thought, “So this is 260 days a year. When are we going to run out of things to talk about?” Thirty years later FamilyLife Today® has not run short of things to talk about, now led by Dave and Ann Wilson, who took over as full-time hosts last year as part of FamilyLife’s strategy to hand off to the next generation.

“The waterfront is broad,” Bob said. “There’s so much need. Things change – who would have thought in 1992 that someday it would be the law of the land that people of the same sex can marry or that people would advocate boys participating in women’s sports?”

He notes that so many times in conversations with people about the challenges they are facing, he’ll say, “let me send you a link (to one of FamilyLife Today®’s programs). You’ll find help there.” As Bob and Dennis interviewed guests and uncovered helpful topics and themes, they realized the need to create collaterals to further equip people – books, video series, studies – gold standard resources for which FamilyLife has become known. Bob notes that for 20+ years, his primary assignment was to help Dennis create content – which led to publishing 40 books. Keeping the spotlight on Dennis meant Bob’s personal writing projects remained on the back burner.

Transitioning from daily hosting allowed him the time to write Love Like You Mean It: The Heart of a Marriage That Honors God, released in 2020. Two decades earlier he’d based his previous book, The Christian Husband, on 1 Corinthians 13, but he realized there was plenty of content he could expand into the marriage and family context. You may be familiar with 1 Corinthians 13 as the chapter most often read at weddings. “Love is patient, love is kind…” While it sounds warm and loving to our modern ears, Bob interprets the Apostle Paul’s words as a scolding to the church.

“He’s saying, ‘what are you doing? What you have is not love!’ Do we have real love at the foundation of our marriages? Is there patience here?” Bob found conviction when he replaced the word, love, with the word, “Bob. … Bob is patient, Bob is kind… “ in fact, he noted, in the King James translation, patient means “long suffering.”

“A lot can be discovered through the characteristics of love,” he said, “not just the emotional side. What are the work boots of marriage?”

Bob is encouraged by positive feedback from readers. “One woman told me her marriage was frustrating, and while she just chose my book off the rack, it ‘revolutionized how she felt about marriage.’ It has made a difference! That’s what you write for.”

Love Like You Mean It is also available as a 10-part video series designed to open the door for small group discussion, available, naturally, from FamilyLife.

Bob has written two more books coming out in Fall 2022. The Four Emotions of Christmas is a short volume designed to be given away during the holidays as a vehicle to point others to Christ.

“We go into the season expecting peace and joy and hope, when often we have stress, sadness and disappointment,” he said. Bob hopes a reader will be intrigued by the title and find the Gospel message leads them to Jesus, the one for whom they are really searching. “This is what Christmas is supposed to bring,” he said.

The second, Build a Stronger Marriage, came out of the experiences of Bob and his wife, Maryanne, as they minister to couples at Redeemer Family Church of Little Rock, which they founded in 2008. As lead pastor, Bob believes churches need to do more to create a climate of healthy transparency where couples can admit they are struggling. Bob is conscious to model authenticity in his preaching because, “I struggle with things, too,” he said. “I’m a sinner. I feel the pressure as a dad to try to be the model of righteousness in my home (of five children – now grown). I wrestle with things and have to keep watch on my soul, too.

“Rather than waiting until things are toxic, say, ‘We need help,’ which can come from other relationships, older couples walking you through. If problems don’t get addressed early, the wound starts to fester. We need to encourage, admonish and bless one another.”

Build a Stronger Marriage addresses the need for young couples to create good habits and head off problems early. The book was written for those starting to experience malaise. Bob diagnoses some of the early breakdowns to make a plan before the marriage, “goes really off the rails.”

He noted spouses need to be on the same page on the things that really matter in life – beliefs about the Gospel, discipleship, the church. One of the biggest problems he sees when counseling is unrealistic expectations.

“They fantasize about the Hallmark Channel view,” he said. “They need a reality check! I’ll tell them, ‘This is going to be harder than you think it is going to be,’ and then Maryanne will chime in, ‘and it also will be more wonderful than you think it will be.’ We hope when they hit the hard spots, they’ll remember our words.”

He’s found people don’t recognize the suitcases full of baggage they are bringing into a marriage, “some that they have never looked at.” Patterns of relating from family of origin impact future relationships. “If there was no mom or dad, they learned parents leave, people are not to be trusted, marriages are unstable,” he said. “If conflict was not resolved, they fall into that pattern.”

Another issue: traumatic experiences that may have been minimized or left unaddressed. “Something is going to provoke that trauma and drive a wedge into the present marriage,” he said. “Then they’ll wonder, ‘Where did that come from?’” One example may be of a young woman pressured into sexual experience, which created mixed feelings of both pleasure and shame. She bundled that away and was managing it all, until in marriage, she tenses up when her husband makes advances toward her. He wonders why she’s not responding. “They may never have addressed the issue with anybody. They don’t talk about it because they don’t even understand it well themselves,” Bob said.

He said he sees history of early wounding in just about every marriage relationship – things said and done that leave a scar, an unaddressed sore spot that can become infected over time. Ten years later a couple is dealing with a wound from year two that was never confronted or healed. Bob addresses these issues, unrealistic expectations, dealing with the past and conflict resolutions, along with others, in Build a Stronger Marriage.

History with FamilyLife

“All marriages are going to drift toward isolation over time if not tended to. It’s like a garden, if you want fruit on the vine, it needs to be watered and cultivated. If you find it’s overrun with weeds, you didn’t take care of it.”

Bob Lepine

When asked about his favorite FamilyLife memories, Bob’s response was a concept he learned at a FamilyLife Weekend to Remember – the idea that “your spouse is not your enemy.”

“There is an enemy that has your marriage in his sights and wants to destroy it. When we are in conflict, there is an enemy that wants to divide us – but it’s not my spouse,” he said. “That’s a paradigm shift that just stuck out.”

Another was, “different isn’t always wrong, it’s just different.” We can value each other’s perspective when we see things differently.”

Another takeaway from the Weekend to Remember, “All marriages are going to drift toward isolation over time if not tended to. It’s like a garden, if you want fruit on the vine, it needs to be watered and cultivated. If you find it’s overrun with weeds, you didn’t take care of it.”

Isolation will naturally happen to a marriage if it isn’t given time, attention and care. “Our view of marriage is shaped by pop songs and the Hallmark Channel instead of the Bible,” Bob said. When people feel isolated and frustrated, they think they must have made a mistake. Instead, he hopes couples will recognize a well- maintained marriage can last a lifetime. But, if they don’t take care of it, it will “be in the shop” a lot.

Lastly, he remembers the impactful wisdom of Gary Rosberg about conflict in marriage. “Gary said conflict is common to all marriage. I thought it wasn’t, in good marriages. Gary unpacked Romans 12:18… “As much as it depends on you, be at peace with all men.” All of a sudden I realized how realistic the Bible is – it’s telling me how to get along with my wife! I learned I need to seek peace and pursue it.”