A leader's marriage isn't separate from their leadership.
It's the biggest lever they're not using.
Many Christian leaders in the marketplace and ministry feel disunified, unprepared, or reactive under the weight of leadership, calling, and family.
We help husbands and wives lead together, not just survive together, with pastoral, practical formation for both their marriage and their calling, so they face what's ahead with unity, purpose, and a plan.
What is True
Leaders who actively integrate their faith and work experience higher job satisfaction, higher life satisfaction, stronger organizational commitment, and to lower intent to leave.
— Journal of Business Ethics, 2012"The most important decision you'll make in life is who you marry."
— Scott Galloway, NYU Stern professor and author of The Algebra of HappinessWives who regularly attend worship services together with their husbands have 124 percent higher odds of reporting high marital stability than wives who don't; husbands, 116 percent higher odds.
—Institute for Family Studies, 2022Most Christian leaders have advisors for their business and mentors for their career. Almost none have someone speaking honestly into the intersection of their faith, their marriage, and their leadership at the same time.
Think of a leader you already know. Sharp, effective, carrying real weight, in a church or a boardroom. Now picture what happens to their capacity, their decisions, their staying power, if their marriage were fully aligned instead of quietly disjointed. That's the difference between a leader managing tension every day and one building from strength.
Most support for Christian leaders, in the marketplace and ministry both, targets the calling and leaves the marriage alone, as if the two aren't connected. We think that's backwards. A leader's marriage isn't a liability to manage around their calling. Aligned, it's the thing that makes the calling sustainable.
Here's what a Christian leader in ministry or the marketplace can actually turn to right now.
Counseling
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Good relationally, and it can genuinely help the marriage. But it's built around one person's experience more than the marriage as a shared, aligned unit, and it has nothing to say about the leadership side of their life. A leader walks out understood, not equipped.
Leadership Training & Executive Coaching
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Sharpens real, practical skill, strategy, and execution, for pastors and marketplace leaders alike. But it ignores the marriage entirely, and treats spiritual life as outside its scope.
Their church or organization
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Support here is aimed at keeping the mission running, not the leader's own marriage. The leader is the one carrying others, not the one being carried.
Nothing
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For most Christian leaders, in the church or in the marketplace, none of the above exist at a price they could actually pay, even if they went looking.
So what would it actually take?
If you're with us so far, here's what we think a real answer has to do.
It has to be built around opportunity, not just damage control, aimed at what a leader's capacity and impact could become, not only at what might go wrong, for marketplace and ministry leaders alike, since a disjointed marriage costs a boardroom and a pulpit the same thing.
It has to address the marriage and the person, not only the org chart or ministry skill.
It has to come from people who have actually lived this, not just studied it.
And it has to be affordable enough that cost is never the reason a leader who needs it doesn't get it.
✓Build capacity for Christian leaders in the marketplace and ministry, not just prevent a breakdown
✓Address the marriage and the person, not just the skill
✓Come from guides who've actually lived this
✓Be affordable enough that cost is never the reason someone says no
Lead Together
Nick & Kim Bogardus, Orange County, CA
We're a nonprofit built to give Christian leaders, in ministry and the marketplace, access to the kind of marriage and leadership formation work most of them can't find, and many of them couldn't afford even if they found it. Not just counseling, not just another leadership framework. Both, held together, from people who've actually done it.
A leader’s marriage is the largest lever they’re not using so imagine the impact on families, businesses, churches, and cities if thousands of them actually did just that.
How we built
Built for the upside. Retreats, cohorts, and coaching for pastors and marketplace leaders alike, built around what a marriage and a leader's capacity could become, not just what might go wrong.
The whole person. Belief formation, marriage health, community, and leadership, integrated. Pastoral and practical, together.
Guides who've lived it. Over 20 years in leadership in marketplace and ministry. Two church plants. Hard-won lessons from seasons of success and grief. Not theory.
Affordable by design. Most of what we offer runs at subsidized rates. That's the reason the nonprofit exists.
✓Built for the upside
✓Address the whole person
✓Guides who've actually lived this
✓Affordable by design
We’ve helped Christian Leaders from
Fifteen years. Hundreds of leaders. One Conviction.
Lead Together helps faith-driven leaders turn identity and relationships into a strategic advantage.
We combine executive-level operating experience, practical tools, and faith-shaped wisdom to help you lead with clarity, connection, and effectiveness.
Kim and Nick Bogardus have built their ministry around a single conviction: the quality of your life and leadership depends on the quality of your relationships.
That conviction has taken them through two church plants, a decade of marriage cohorts, and fifteen years of coaching and consulting with Christian leaders across business, nonprofit, and ministry contexts.
Kim holds a Masters-level Certification in Executive Coaching. She has walked dozens of leaders and couples through some of the hardest seasons of their lives.
Nick has led communications, organizational development, and executive teams across business and church contexts, and consults with organizations on strategy, leadership, and culture. Together, they are the couple that leaders call when the door is closed and there is no one else to call.
Both are trained through the Soul Care Institute. What they offer is not counseling, and it is not skills-based coaching. It is harder to categorize and more valuable for it: practical tools, pastoral depth, and the kind of honest community that most leadership development programs never touch. They work in the space between therapy and training, and they have learned to work that space well.
What Others Have Said
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"One of the biggest problems that happens in leadership is losing a sense of your own identity or the identity of your marriage. Nick and Kim helped us discover afresh our goals, mission, vision, and values. All of this leads to us having a more unified purpose and identity individually and as a couple as we lead our congregation."
—Lead Together Cohort Participant
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"By using what I learned in Leadership Coaching, I negotiated my largest contract, made partner at my firm, and my marriage and family are in the best place they’ve ever been."
Jeremy, Partner | Baker Hostetler
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"The Lead Together Cohort surfaced the value and Kingdom-impact my wife and I bring to others. So much of our shared ministry in church planting has been in service of supporting one another's individual ministry. The Lead Together Cohort gave us fresh vision, tools, and tangible steps for leading together with intentionality. Highly recommend!"
—Adam, Lead Together Cohort Participant
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“Nick and Kim have taught, led, coached, and counseled in a number of different venues and circumstances for us over the years. With over two decades of experience in both ministry and the marketplace, they have the scope of experience to help provide coaching and training for your team to flourish. I highly recommend them!”
Dave Owens, Executive Director | Harbor Network
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Our time with Nick and Kim has helped me grow as a leader, in that, it gave me a deeper understanding of how our team relates to each other and tangible things to work on to increase our care for each other and our effectiveness.
Jared
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“Leadership is a future-defining ability that requires great clarity and courage, honesty and humility, passion and persistence. It also requires community—another set of eyes and ears to confirm or confront one’s ideas. If you are serious about reaching your potential by having a leadership coach, I strongly recommend Nick and Kim to you. Both have the education and life experience to help you. Both have the heart to serve you. Both will prove their worth in a short amount of time. So invest in your future as you lead others into their future.”
Jim Cofield, Author | The Relational Soul
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We reached out to Relational Leadership looking for help in being able to connect better as a staff by better understanding both our unique strengths as well as our deficiencies. We gained insight into both of these areas, but we were also encouraged, affirmed, and coached well through the process.
—Brian, Team Dynamics Workshop participant
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*5 out of 5* The way that Nick & Kim explained it was so well done! It was easy to follow and they didn't get bogged down with the details that don't matter as much. The third session of interacting with your team was helpful in giving me words for what I've been feeling, but haven't been able to articulate in this current season.
—Courtney, Team Dynamics Workshop participant
How we help
Cohorts
Strengthening Marriage — Premarital and marriage enrichment curriculum refined over ten years of working with couples at every stage.
Lead Together — A marriage alignment cohort for couples who want to lead well together, built on self-awareness, values, purpose, vision, and strategy.
Leadership Cohort — A cohort experience for Christian leaders navigating growth, transition, or the pressure of building something significant.
Women in Leadership — A cohort for Christian women in leadership navigating the specific challenges of leading with clarity and conviction.
Retreats
Leadership retreats for teams and organizations, and marriage retreats that give couples the unhurried time and honest conversation they rarely get anywhere else.
Coaching
One-on-one leadership coaching for executives, senior leaders, and founders. Marriage coaching for couples at any stage, from early in their relationship to couples who have been at it long enough to know they need help.
Teaching & Training
Team Dynamics — Practical training for leadership teams on building trust, navigating conflict, and working well together.
Leadership & Management Competencies — Training on the core skills of organizational leadership.
Speaking & Writing — Nick and Kim speak at conferences, retreats, and organizational events, and are developing books and curriculum grounded in their work with leaders.
What your support makes possible.
Donor support funds the work in two ways.
The first frees Nick and Kim to write, teach, and speak without every output needing to generate revenue. The operations budget covers the infrastructure that makes the ministry run: podcast production, software, and the cost of fundraising itself. It also means Nick and Kim can show up at churches to preach and teach at little or no cost, because the nonprofit absorbs what a market-rate honorarium would otherwise require. The outcome is reach — books, curriculum, and teaching content that gets to leaders who will never attend a retreat or sit in a cohort.
The second is a scholarship model. Retreats and cohorts cost real money to run well, and the leaders who need this most are often the ones least positioned to pay full cost. Donor support funds the gap between what a leadership couple can realistically contribute and what the program actually costs to deliver. Participants pay a registration that covers their share. Donors cover the rest. The outcome is access — a seat at the table for the leader who would have said no.
A gift here doesn't fund overhead. It funds the work directly, and it puts that work within reach of the people who need it most.
Questions You Might Have
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Yes, through our fiscal sponsorship with Lead Together, gifts are tax-deductible.
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See the ask below. Every dollar toward this first $75,000 goes to the scholarship fund for this fall's retreat and the Q1 2027 cohort, plus the podcast, writing, teaching, and speaking that extend the content past the room.
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No. ministryengine is a separate for-profit consulting entity and this nonprofit doesn't fund them. What it does fund is the ministry expression of the same conviction: subsidized retreats, cohorts, and coaching for leaders who couldn't otherwise afford this work, plus the writing, podcast, and speaking that carries it further.
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If you are a Christian, you should tithe to your local church. It’s not an either/or situation. Your church budget covers your church; however, it doesn't cover the marriage and formation work most pastors and Christian leaders never get access to at all, and it isn't built to reach leaders outside your own congregation. This fills a gap general ministry giving doesn't touch.
The Vision
A home for integrated leadership formation.
Imagine a CEO and his wife sitting around a table in a quiet place, finally having the conversation they've been circling for two years. They're at a retreat because someone else made it possible for them to be there.
Imagine a young pastor and his wife in their third year of church planting, holding on by faith and very little else, now in a cohort with people who know exactly what that costs.
Imagine a woman leading a team of forty, carrying more than anyone around her knows, finally in a room where she doesn't have to pretend.
And then imagine what happens when those leaders go home.
Books in the hands of leaders who will never sit across a table from Kim and Nick. A podcast in someone's ear on the way to a hard conversation. Curriculum being used in rooms we'll never visit.
These are not programs. They are the infrastructure of a community that finally does for leaders what leaders spend their lives doing for everyone else.
We intend for it to last.
You’re invited.
This fall we're running our first retreat. In the first quarter of 2027, our first cohort. We're raising $75,000 to get both off the ground and build a scholarship fund for this year and beyond, so cost is never the reason a leader who needs this says no. The same goal funds the podcast, writing, and speaking that carry this past the people in the room.
You're getting this because you already know us, some of you for ten or twenty years. This isn't a cold ask. We're inviting a small group of people who believe in what we're building to be part of the first chapter.