Today we talk with Christian leaders to find out the ways God moved in their life to build their ministry. In this episode, our Founder and CEO, William Vanderbloemen talks with Casey Caston and Matt Davis of Marriage365.
Founded in 2015 by Meygan and Casey Caston, Marriage365 provides tools, techniques, and resources for couples to discover hope, healing, and happiness in their marriage. They previously called themselves “a couple least likely to succeed in marriage,” but now are helping other couples save their own marriages. We are encouraged by their story and how the Lord has used their difficulties and struggles to help so many.
We hope this conversation is helpful as you navigate your leadership, ministry, and marriage. If we can help you further your mission, please contact us to get started.
Transcript:
Christa Reinhardt:
Welcome to the Vanderbloemen Leadership podcast. I'm your host, Christa Reinhardt, senior marketing coordinator here at Vanderbloemen. Today, we talked with Christian leaders to find out the ways God moved in their life to build their ministry. In this episode, our founder and CEO, William Vanderbloemen talks with Casey Caston and Matt Davis of Marriage365. Founded in 2015 by Meygan and Casey Caston, Marriage365 provides tools, techniques, and resources for couples to discover hope, healing, and happiness in their marriage. They previously called themselves a couple least likely to succeed in marriage, but now are helping other couples save their own marriages. We are so encouraged by their story and how the Lord has used their difficulties and struggles to help so many. We hope you enjoy this conversation.
William Vanderbloemen:
Hey, everybody, welcome to our podcast. I'm so glad you're here. My very favorite recordings are the ones where we do, how God built this. And we look at sometimes a church, sometimes a ministry, sometimes a company where God has put it in the heart of somebody, could you build something and I'll help you. And as a guy who 14 years ago, decided to start trying to help churches find their pastor and then Christian schools find their headmaster and Christian nonprofits find their CEO, I've just been on this wild ride wondering is this the day we have to close the whole thing when actually God's building something that lasts. And so I've really enjoyed getting to know founders and it's just been a joy to learn about Marriage365. What do y'all do, Casey, with leap years? Do y'all do 366 on the fourth year?
Casey Caston:
Yeah, something like that.
William Vanderbloemen:
Okay.
Casey Caston:
We actually did change our log this last year.
William Vanderbloemen:
You did.
Casey Caston:
Yeah.
William Vanderbloemen:
365 and a quarter doesn't really?
Casey Caston:
No.
William Vanderbloemen:
No. Marriageeveryday.com. Marriage365 is a startup with a wonderful story. And I will stop talking and let Casey Caston tell me about what God did. Casey, thanks for coming on the show. I'd love to hear a little bit of your backstory and then what God did to place something in you to say, I got to go start something.
Casey Caston:
The story starts when I was three years old, four years old, and my parents divorced and somewhat of a recurring nightmare growing up was a vision of myself and we're in a family car. There's an oncoming train. We're stuck on the tracks and I'm trying my hardest to save my parents. And that was an unrealized dream and hope of mine. And I grew up in a home that was broken several times, blended several times. My mom's on her sixth marriage. And so I don't know if I just imagined that I'd rise above all that, but I got married and all of the expectations, all the wounds, all the hurts came raging forward. And Meygan and I were truly the least likely to succeed in marriage. We have 12 marriages between both sets of our parents.
William Vanderbloemen:
Oh wow.
Casey Caston:
And we just came from all this chaos and then we put this expectation on each other. You're going to meet all of my needs, right? And when we didn't, we just got angry and we raged. And the worst part about it was I was a youth pastor. I was teaching kids Bible studies, leading worship, and then I'd come home and I'd just cuss out my wife. It just got brutal. It got physical. It got ugly. We were nasty to each other. Fast forward, Meygan says, "I want none of this anymore, but rather than leave the marriage, I want to go get myself help." And I started to see a change in her. She started becoming less insecure, more confident. She put on hard boundaries. I remember coming into the room raging. You don't know what you're talking about. And she was like, I can tell that you're very upset right now.
Casey Caston:
And I'd love to hear more about this, but when you can calm down, I will have this conversation. Right now, I'm going to leave the room. I was like, what? Literally just did not understand it all. I got jealous. 13 months later, I jumped on the train of maybe I should start working on myself. And it took some time. It takes time to heal a marriage. And one morning we woke up and Meygan said, Hey, I got a dream last night. It was pretty, pretty real. She said, "God said that we are going to be the voice of marriages for this next generation." To which I did like one of those Sarah chuckles like, God, you got to be kidding me. Right? We're the worst at it. Who's going to listen to a couple that completely failed through their marriage. And sure enough, there was just that very gentle leading. It felt like the thread of a sweater. And I just had an inch, right? I had no idea what would unfold in front of us, but you just give that thread a little tug.
Casey Caston:
There was some times though, I will say, when we got a dream that this is a vision for God's direction for our life. There's about a year, year and a half where there was just a lot of self-doubt. Again, who's going to listen to us? We're nobody's. In fact, we probably needed to be going to these marriage conferences. And I was involved in a very serious car accident and my car came to rest on the side after somebody ran a red light and car obliterated, but I was facing oncoming traffic. And I had that split second moment of you know what, if somebody hits me, I'm done. And God just gently came in and said, "Listen, if this is it, will you be happy that you lived in fear? Or are you ready to jump into this adventure that I'm calling you to?" And walked out of the hospital that night, started Marriage365 the next week.
William Vanderbloemen:
Wow. Before we get too far, what is Marriage365?
Casey Caston:
Ooh, that's a loaded question. It's transformed, the complexities of growing something. It was something here at one stage, and now it's transformed into something different. We were just posting social media quotes and doing lives. And then people are like, well, why don't you film yourself? And so we took videos of us talking about how to properly apologize, how to have boundaries with toxic people, what to do in a sexless marriage. Really approaching every subject that we possibly can. And then that turned into a platform where people could access content in a way that could address felt needs in their relationship.
Casey Caston:
But typically, those conversations are covered in shame. We go first. Meygan and I are the first ones to say, Hey, this is how it was for us. And the more brutally honest we are about marriage, the more they really appreciate that because then we can actually go in. Okay, so we're not the only one struggling. You struggled. Now, what did you do about it? And now people can enter into their own stories really through our story.
William Vanderbloemen:
Wow. Wow. And so not to just boil it down to brass tacks, but you've got content. You assist people and it's a membership driven service. Right?
Casey Caston:
Well, can I back up for a second?
William Vanderbloemen:
Yeah.
Casey Caston:
When you look around, marriages are failing and falling apart everywhere we look. I live in Orange County. That's got 72% divorce rate. 72%. A lot of couples are very dissatisfied with their current state of marriages, as well as when you think about the pandemic and what it's done to relationships, as people struggle, as people are stuck at home with their spouse, who doesn't emotionally take care of their needs or tend to them. And then when I look culturally, we are in love with love. Probably more in love with love than the person that represents that love. We have these such high expectations of how relationships should be that's influenced from curated images on social media, movies that show this romantic view of what a relationship should be. Of course, we could talk about porn's influence of what sexual intimacy should look like. And then we listen to celebrities and musicians on how to do relationships and it's not working.
Casey Caston:
We're really struggling in this department. When I think about God created marriage to represent his relationship to us. This is how I want you to think about me as your father, Heavenly Father, is how you see your spouse. The intimacy you share, the secrets you share, the physical intimacy, the thrill of that is all represented in my love for you. And we know that the enemy's tactic is always about division, is about dividing, and he's really doing a number on the marriage relationship. And I think by and large, it's an ignored topic. It's rarely addressed in churches. And if it is, it's once a year at a marriage conference, if that's a lucky faith community, because that's doesn't happen a lot. It's usually relegated to this guy that's sitting to me on my right. I got to introduce him. This is Matt Davis.
Casey Caston:
He's in charge of our strategic partnerships and spent 20 years as a marriage and family pastor. You usually took care of all the troubled couples, right?
Matt Davis:
Yeah. And I think what we've found was that couples were left with two options in their life, right? Either they look at their marriage and they quit and they get out. They're looking for the parachute, how do we get out? Or they quit and they stay in. And what we do at Marriage365 is it's an online, on demand, ongoing platform. Marriage365 would be Netflix for your marriage, right? And so you can go online and you can access videos and they're going to be right there. And you don't have to wait for the therapist to call you back or hope that the relationship with them is going to work out, but really forging some new territory to be able to work in there and help people to mitigate that gap of you don't have to leave the marriage and you don't have to stay in the marriage and be dissatisfied. But what would it actually look like if this could be happy? You could be happy. You could be connected and really love the person that you're married to.
Casey Caston:
But I'm going to probably assume that most of your listeners have probably never heard of Marriage365 because we don't clothe ourselves as a traditional Christian marriage ministry. And I think it was a really interesting lane that God had called us to, and that was, Hey, I've given you a book in the Bible that's all about marriage. It's called the Book of Proverbs. And what if you pilfer all of the wisdom in the Book of Proverbs and put it into a nice, shiny social media post and let people interact with the wisdom, the truth, and allow them to apply that to their lives in a way that doesn't maybe bring about questions of, well, is this Christian or not Christian?
William Vanderbloemen:
That's good. Well, it widens the platform, right?
Casey Caston:
Yeah. It gives kingdom truth to people that may not be part of the kingdom just yet.
William Vanderbloemen:
What year did you start Marriage365?
Casey Caston:
2015.
William Vanderbloemen:
Wow. And the ministry's grown. Right? Walk me through the before and now.
Casey Caston:
Yeah. It was Meygan and I trying to figure out what to do with this as a business that was growing on social media. We have the largest Instagram platform on marriage in social media. Reach millions of people, but it was trying to figure out what do you do with that? How do you create a business around that? And so I think we tried figuring out a nonprofit, would people donate to us? I'd come knocking at the door and they're like, we don't really want to talk about marriage right now.
Casey Caston:
Because my wife and I aren't doing really well. Nobody really wanted to give to us. We tried shopping around publishing a book, but nobody wanted to publish marriage books. We were like, fine. We'll do it on our own. And we've literally bootstrapped. Those early years, we went out and self-published a book that sold over 70,000, probably 80,000 copies. And we just started doing courses and realizing people appreciated the real conversation for real couples. That this is a real life couple. They're not trying to put on errors. And I do actually find it funny that God would say, Hey, I know you were the worst husband ever. And so what I want you to do is spend your life telling people how bad of a husband you were and that's going to bring them hope. It's like, man, really?
William Vanderbloemen:
That's awesome. Only God can do that.
Casey Caston:
Well when you said, how God built this? I just want you to know, there is weekly prayer. We constantly come to the team. We're praying. We're stewards of this calling. This is totally a God thing first of all. And it's His vehicle of bringing hope into the places that frankly the church is not getting to, when it comes to healing a marriage. Now, a marriage, according to the catechism, said that this is a sacrament, that marriage is a sacrament, a place where God is uniquely active. And so if we can impact someone's marriage that's outside the walls of the church, that's a place God's uniquely acted. And so we're not throwing down crusades or anything and harvesting souls, but we are the early stages of really softening the soil for other kingdom workers to come in. We're just part of the phase of someone getting a chance to meet Jesus. And we're just talking about the relationship.
William Vanderbloemen:
When you started in 2015, I'm guessing it was a side hustle and I'm guessing it's not a side hustle now. Get me from there to now.
Casey Caston:
Oh yeah. Side hustle. I think it was, we were two years in or something, we hired our first employee. And it was just very slow and steady growth. And I think we were at six or so pre-pandemic. Then everybody goes into lockdown. And I will say, the reason why we've experienced such significant growth is that online learning pre-pandemic was a bit fringy and not mainstreamed. Now, it is completely mainstreamed. Online learning is a thing. And now we were already occupying this space that now all of a sudden people were made aware of. Oh, I can get help for my marriage. I don't have to wait three weeks for my therapist. It's way cheaper than therapists. And it's way more effective than seeing a therapist. That became a solution for a big problem that people are encountering. And we went from, I think in the first 12 months of the pandemic, we went from 800 subscribers to 16,000. And then our team doubled. I think we're about 20 now.
Matt Davis:
Yeah.
Casey Caston:
And we're building out a mobile app and it's really exciting to see more content creators jump on onboard with us as platform providers. Eliciting the expertise of a sex therapist, of someone that deals with blended family, of someone that deals with emotional awareness, somebody about depression, some of the mental health topics too, that impact relationships.
William Vanderbloemen:
Well, it's amazing how the pandemic accelerated some things. I would also maybe wonder if during the pandemic people had to actually spend 365 days with their spouse and might lead to we might ought to get some help.
Casey Caston:
Yeah. Well, and I work with my wife. I work with my wife. Not just, Hey, we make umbrellas. You're in marketing. And I'm, over here. We're building content together. It's not rare for us to have probably six to seven hours a day working-
William Vanderbloemen:
On a sad and serious note. I have a friend who is a lawyer. He practices, they call it family law, which is kind of ironic that's there's not a lot of a family left when he's done doing his work. Well, I mean, he's a divorce attorney and I just asked him, Hey, this is a Debbie downer question, but I'm guessing your pipeline's pretty full after this lockdown. He said, it's really sad, William. It's higher than I've ever seen it. I would imagine you're in the right place at the right time to help people who are at a whole new level of problem that they've never had.
Matt Davis:
When we saw at the very beginning of the pandemic that divorce courts are shut down. They're dealing with the reality that, oh, we have to actually stay home. We're going to be locked in together. You can't really move forward with those plans of I'm out of here. How do we actually live in the same place together and continue to grow in our relationship? And then they just started really getting stuck. And we saw behind the pandemic that was COVID, as things began to open up, you'd start to see in these cities, we started seeing these stats of a new pandemic that was hitting and we called it the divorce pandemic.
Matt Davis:
As people started getting that freedom again, they realized, yeah, those two years of being stuck together were not good for us and we needed to get out. And so you see that on different levels. There are people who just let themselves go. They gained all kinds of weight. And then there's some people that I'm just going to exercise all through the pandemic. And we see the same thing going on with marriage, that there were some people that said we have to dig in and we have to work on this, or we're not going to survive. We're going to atrophy. We're going to die. And then some people, they did. And then that divorce pandemic started to hit. We were trying to counter, how can we provide an option? Because telehealth was crazy. Anxiety and depression, are through the roof and how do we give somebody something that they can access right there and then, and get the help that they need?
William Vanderbloemen:
Hmm. Hmm. Well, so how would people find you guys now? Just marriage365.com.
Casey Caston:
Yeah. Yeah. We're all over social media as well.
William Vanderbloemen:
That's great. I'm betting there's a listener out there... Let's say it this way. Somebody listening today has a friend whose marriage is in trouble. What would be just one word you could offer, Casey, as a word of encouragement or advice to somebody listening saying, okay, I just was going to listen to a podcast. Now you're getting personal. What word of encouragement?
Casey Caston:
If I can make it, you can too.
William Vanderbloemen:
Oh, wow. That's good.
Casey Caston:
It is not lost on me that someone would call me a marriage expert when I feel like I'm probably the number one beneficiary of the ministry of Marriage365. I get to focus on my marriage. I get to learn how to do marriage well, and if I can do it, if I can do it, ADHD, broken families, lots of chaos, anger, impulsivity, just avoiding issues in my marriage 100%, because I was so terrified, than somebody else can. I think the issue is this. People are looking for practical tools. They don't want to be told you need to apologize to your wife.
Casey Caston:
They want to be told how to apologize to their wife. They don't want to be told you need to forgive, which I know we can get a little preachy in the church settings where we tell people this is what you should do, but we don't tell people how to do that. And when I work with husbands, they're just like, "Casey, just tell me what to do." I give them easy action steps. And they see wins. And they're like, this is amazing. I never thought I could see and make my wife happy like this.
William Vanderbloemen:
Wow. Wow. Well, thanks to you both. Next time, we'll have Meygan on and then it'll be even better. I appreciate you and Matt, thanks for joining us. Great to reconnect after some time. But thanks for being on the front lines. Marriage is the first parish. It's the first church. And just walk away encouraged knowing that you're helping a lot of people and we're excited to see what God's building through Marriage365. Thanks for all of you who are listening today for joining us. We're glad you're here. If you want to get the show notes, if you want to see what's coming up next, you can just go to VanderCast.com. We won't beat your inbox up with 5,000 emails. We'll just send you show notes, what's coming up next, and we'd love to have you as part of our family. Please join us again. Guys, thanks for joining us today. And God bless you all.
Christa Reinhardt:
Thanks for listening to the Vanderbloemen Leadership podcast. At Vanderbloemen and our sister company, Christian Teams, we help Christian organizations build their best teams through hiring, succession, compensation, and diversity consulting services. Visit our website, Vanderbloemen.com and ChristianTeams.com to learn more and subscribe to our Vanderbloemen Leadership Podcast wherever you listen podcasts to keep up with our newest episode. Thanks for listening.