Why this library exists

It started with two people in Phoenix who would not stop talking about marriage.

In the 1990s, Leo and Molly Godzich founded the National Association of Marriage Enhancement out of a conviction that was simple and stubborn: the local church is where marriages are saved, and the church is not ready.

Leo served as an associate pastor at Phoenix First Assembly of God for more than two decades, where he taught a marriage Sunday School class for nearly twenty years. That class became the seedbed for everything that followed. He wrote Is God in Your Marriage? He founded the Covenant Marriage Movement, and the International Marriage Conference.

But the idea that mattered most was smaller and harder to sell: that ordinary couples, trained well, could counsel other couples. Not clinicians. Couples who had been through something and come out the other side, certified, equipped, and sent back in.

NAME called them Certified Marriage Specialists. Churches built NAME Centers around them. The counseling was free, it was couple to couple, and it worked. More than 200 Centers opened across six continents. More than a quarter of a million marriages have been strengthened or saved. Nobody can really count a thing like that. The number is a shadow of something larger.

In 2011, Leo was killed in a car accident on a mission trip in Africa. He was fifty-two. He and Molly had been married twenty-nine years.

The ministry that had spent two decades teaching couples how to survive the unsurvivable then had to do it. Molly carried NAME forward. She kept speaking, kept training, and kept sending people out, doing the thing the curriculum described, in front of everyone, without the man she had built all of it with.

Then Arnold and Gwen Tackett took up the work.

They came out of the same Phoenix First Assembly soil where NAME began. Marriage, counseling, and the local church were not their assignment. They were their whole life. They served as Second Half Ministries Directors for the SoCal Network, bringing purpose to people navigating the back half of life, and most recently they served together as Counseling and Marriage Ministry Pastors at Victorville First Assembly of God.

Arnold and Gwen were married in 1970. Fifty-five years.

That is the part not to miss. This ministry taught that a marriage which has been through something is the most useful thing in the room. The two couples who led it were twenty-nine years in and fifty-five years in. Nobody here was teaching theory.

Gwen was a shepherd, a mentor, and a friend. She was the kind of person who could make you feel seen, valued, and pointed toward God all at once. A woman of deep conviction and even deeper grace.

Gwen went home to be with her Lord on February 22, 2026.

For the second time in its history, this ministry lost the person it could not lose.

Why we closed

There was a version of this where we handed NAME to someone, kept the name alive, and called that faithfulness. We prayed about that one for a long time.

But the honest answer is that this work needs more than a caretaker. The core of it is as true as it ever was. Some of the references, the video, and the assumptions belong to a world that has moved on. It needs somebody with fresh eyes and their own calling, who will build something for the couples sitting in front of them right now.

And there is a season for building the thing, and a season for going home. A lifetime of ministry gets paid for, in part, by a family. The same Scripture we taught for three decades has something to say about a good man leaving an inheritance to his children’s children.

So we did not pass NAME on. We closed it in 2026, with gratitude, and opened the vault on the way out.

What we are asking

Everything is here. Take it. Adapt it. Cut what is dated and keep what is not. Put your own name on the flyer. Build the thing you are called to build, and let this be your running start.

There is nothing to buy and nothing to subscribe to. We ask one thing, on your honor: use these materials to serve couples, keep them true to their faith-centered purpose, do not sell them, and say where they came from.

Not for our sake. For Leo’s, and for Molly’s, and for Arnold’s, and for Gwen’s, and for every Certified Marriage Specialist who gave years to this and was never paid or thanked for it.

NAME always said it was not the answer, only a representative of the Answer. That was true when there were 200 Centers, and it is true now that there are none. The organization was never the point. The work was.

In the 1990s, two people in Phoenix decided that marriages were worth fighting for, and that ordinary people could do the fighting. They were right. That conviction outlived Leo. It outlived Gwen. It has outlived the organization they built.

That is the whole point of a covenant. It holds when the people who made it are gone.

The covenant was worth keeping. Now carry it forward.