[Recovering]

Whether or not a "Good Brother" makes a "Good Husband" depends a lot on your definitions of "Good Brother" and "Good Husband".

The twisted definitions of "Good" was one of my triggers for leaving the Recovery. One branch of teaching on The Two Trees is "God doesn't want us to be good, He wants us to be God." This gets extended into sayings like "God doesn't want me to be a good husband", "...good father", etc. The idea is that you are not supposed to focus on being good, but rather dedicate yourself to spiritual growth, by praying, reading God's word, singing, and participating in prophesying — the so-called "life practices". With sufficient "growth in life" the good parenting, good marriage, and good character are supposed to be a spontaneous result. Any kind of emotional or psychological work is derided as "natural" and therefore suspect. The only genuine progress is that which is the spontaneous result of transformation and fostered by the life practices. So a working TLR-definition of "Good Brother" would be "a man who devotes himself to cultivating the life practices to experience spiritual transformation but does not rely on any worldly wisdom or 'natural' efforts". The irony is that they would reject the label "Good Brother" by saying, "I don't want to be a Good Brother, I want to be a God-Man!"

The definition of "Good Husband" might be a little harder to pin down, but I remember hearing messages on marriage that focused on Ephesians 5. "Husbands, love your wives as Christ loved the church and gave Himself up for her, that he might sanctify her, cleansing her by the washing of the water in the word." I think this is what most of the leaders in TLR (and in wider Christianity) would hold up as an ideal, so we might take as a Recovery-sanctioned definition of a "Good Husband", "a man who practices self-sacrificing love for the sake of his wife's sanctification".

If we take that charitable definition, I would say being a "Good Brother" does not necessarily lead to being a "Good Husband". It might, depending on how much you do or don't despise "natural" wisdom or effort, and I've seen examples of what the general public would recognize as good marriages, including (thank God) my own father, who has been a good husband to my mother for many years. But there are counter-examples a-plenty. And if you include being a good father, the counter-examples grow. In my observation, there is no shortage of absentee fathers/husbands in TLR who are "Good Brothers" devoted to "The Ministry". In my final days before exiting, I remember being with a couple of brothers after one of the meetings in the Job training, and they were so relieved that they "didn't have to try to be a good husband." It made me really sad.

But in practice, the definition of "Good Husband" or "Good Father" might actually be something more like "a man who devotes himself to reading the ministry and attending meetings and trusts the Lord to take care of his family". With this definition, a "Good Brother" very much makes a "Good Husband" or "Good Father". And I guess there are many on this forum who could go on at length about personal cost to wives and children of this kind of redefinition of "Good".