A Second Ministry, Built After the First

James Dobson spent more than three decades building Focus on the Family into one of American evangelicalism's most influential media ministries, but he did not retire when he finally left it. Dobson stepped down as the organization's president and chief executive in 2003, resigned the board chairmanship in February 2009, and completed his departure in early 2010. Rather than step away from broadcasting altogether, he immediately founded a new organization under his own name and launched a new daily program, Family Talk with Dr. James Dobson, continuing the same format of parenting, marriage and cultural commentary from an evangelical perspective that had defined his previous forty years on the air.

The new ministry was initially organized simply as Family Talk. In 2017 it was formally rebranded as the Dr. James Dobson Family Institute, restructured around four ministry divisions: the Family Talk broadcast itself, the Dobson Policy and Education Centers, and the Dobson Digital Library. Headquartered in Colorado Springs, Colorado, the same city where Focus on the Family had relocated in 1991, the institute describes its mission as preserving and promoting the family and the biblical principles on which it rests, introducing people to the Christian gospel, and promoting the sanctity of human life, religious freedom and what it calls righteousness in the culture.