Parent Compass Radio

JP DeGance: We ended up running a pilot initiative that succeeded in going to Jacksonville, Florida and lowered the divorce rate there by 24% in three years. Jacksonville, before we got there, was rated by Men's Health magazine to have the sixth-worst city in America for marriage. The Huffington Post had an article that said Jacksonville is one of the ten cities where marriage goes to die.

Natalie Jones: Welcome to Parent Compass. I'm Natalie Jones and today we have JP DeGance, founder and president of Communio and co-author of the book Endgame: The Church's Strategic Move to Save Faith and Family in America. JP is also the author of the nationwide study on faith and relationships.

Communio is a ministry with real results that transform communities, and I don't say that lightly. With Communio, churches across America are strengthening families, reducing divorce rates, and building thriving communities through the proven relationship ministry model. JP is a husband and a father and lives in Virginia with his wife and eight children. Welcome, JP.

JP DeGance: Thanks, Natalie. I appreciate you having me on.

I grew up one of six and was number five, as I like to tell people. I'm just glad mom and dad had five, as I like to tease my younger brother. Great family, loved the Lord, and they inspired me to want to work on the life issue. In college, I was blessed to be able to meet my wife, and because of that, she got me to go on a retreat where I met somebody that allowed me to start my career in the political world.

I moved to the Washington, DC area right out of school and got really involved in advancing conservative ideas and advocating on the life issue. About 17 years ago, God started to redirect my life in a big way. We had a very close family member of ours whose marriage failed in an abusive way. When that exists, folks don't talk about it, so nobody knew what was going on for this family member.

She called my wife and me and asked us to take in her four kids as she found herself to be homeless, and my wife ended up picking them up almost the next day at the Quantico train station. We saw what happens when families fail in such a big and terrible way and the family wounds that come from it.

We had three of our own at the time, three and under. They're not in our count of eight. They've all moved on now. But God used that experience to help us understand how devastating family trauma can be and why it's so important to avoid it.

Over the coming years, I ended up making a major professional change. On the political side, I started to see in my professional work that so much of what was going on in our culture was the result of the breakdown of the family. I remember I had a conversation with Kirk Adams, who was Chief of Staff for Doug Ducey out in Arizona.

He said to me, "JP, I'd say 80% of Arizona's state government spending is to mitigate the effects of the collapse of the family. What we do is we educate, we incarcerate, and we medicate frequently because of that."

I started an initiative that ended up becoming Communio, trying to figure out how to take my old work experience in the political world and the private sector. What if we baptized it, sanctified it, and brought it into the service of ministry? The idea of using effective strategy, message research, and husbanding resources well.

We ended up running a pilot initiative that succeeded in going to Jacksonville and lowered the divorce rate there by 24% in three years. Jacksonville, before we got there, was rated by Men's Health magazine to have the sixth-worst city in America for marriage. The Huffington Post had an article that said Jacksonville was one of the ten cities where marriage goes to die.

I partnered with a great ministry and a good friend, Richard Albertson, and the great folks at Live the Life Ministries, who were muscle on the ground. We worked with 93 churches. Those churches moved 58,000 people. It was just a great, diverse group of churches that held to a biblical idea of what marriage is, and we got to work.

Like I said, almost 60,000 people through skills ministry in three years. We saturated the county with digital outreach, and that's what produced the decline in divorce. Since then, we have been working to scale those learnings. In 2019, 2020, and 2021, we were trying to figure out how to replicate it per church.

We've developed our ministry business processes so that we could support churches. Thanks be to God, we've worked with now more than 400 churches in 32 states, and there's just been some transformative ministry that's been able to take root.

Natalie Jones: What are the key pillars that these 60,000 people learn as they go through this? How did Jacksonville happen?

JP DeGance: There's an entire field called marriage and relationship education. It's an academic discipline that's really taken off and accelerated substantially at the turn into the 21st century. The research shows there are five interpersonal skill areas and five intrapersonal skill areas that if you're good at them, you have a significantly greater likelihood of having marital success.

A big part of what we did there was bring great resources directly person-to-person through the local church to practice those skills. One of the most effective ones used to be called Adventures in Marriage and now has been rebranded as Navigating Us, created by my friend Richard Albertson.

Most of those skills are taught through four different tools over the course of eight hours. In these retreats or classes, there isn't group sharing. Couples learn the ideas behind the skills, both the Christian motivations behind them, the biblical motivations, and then the psychological foundations of them. They see those skills practiced, and then couples go and do it themselves.

There are some trained coaches who go around and observe that being done. With these kinds of tools, couples can frequently get themselves out of their own challenges. 70 to 80% of divorces are what would be considered low conflict. In the research, it means there's no infidelity, there's no physical abuse.

Frequently, this is the low-hanging fruit. If you provide folks with the right skills through a process of coaching, a lot of couples can find their own solutions. I contrast that with counseling. Some people do need counseling, but most people don't in terms of fixing their marriage.

Natalie Jones: I think people immediately jump to counseling like you have a problem.

JP DeGance: That's accelerating too quickly. The analogy I would say is the counselor is going to be their sage, their Yoda. You're on the journey and Yoda will teach you and tell you what you should do to fix your life. The coach is different. The coach is giving you skills to train, and then you go fix your own challenges through the right skills that you learn and practice.

A couple is able to learn how to communicate well, set healthy expectations, and resolve conflict in a healthy way. Oftentimes, a lot of the biggest challenges in fights and arguments that couples have can emanate from an inability. One person is expecting one thing and the other person is expecting another thing, then that problem metastasizes and the couple can't solve the problem because they have different ways of sharing their concerns and that escalates the conflict.

Really good skills ministry helps to give the skills to solve those problems. What we want to see is the local church to be a place where it's a hub for healthy relationships where people learn the skills, learn the vision of what a healthy Christian marriage looks like, and live in a community where that's all reinforced.

Natalie Jones: You have on your website that the future of the church is around the dinner table. Explain that to me.

JP DeGance: We're all deeply concerned about the rise of religious non-affiliation, young people oftentimes leaving the faith. What's misunderstood oftentimes about that whole process of religious non-affiliation is something that social scientists call generational succession. Basically, the older generation is more faithful than the younger generation. But the question is, why is that?

On average, the key driver of that is the fragmentation of the married family. 80% of everybody sitting in church on Sunday, regardless if you're looking at people under the age of 60—this all comes from our nationwide study on faith and relationships, about 19,000 completed surveys across denominations and across states—80% of everyone under the age of 60 who is at worship on a Sunday morning grew up in an intact married family.

That holds regardless of their age. If I'm a single man born in 1999 or a married man born in 1964 and I'm in church on Sunday from either of those backgrounds, 81% of both male populations grew up in a home where mom and dad stayed continuously married until they became an adult.

If we're worried about why there are so few men born around the year 2000 who are in church on Sunday, then we have to ask ourselves what families did they come from? On average, the average family of a guy born around the year 2000 is very different than the man born in 1964.

If we want to know how we get more of them, we have to help folks live the covenantal sign of salvation. That's marriage. Live that well in a healthy way. When we do that better, more people experience the love of an earthly father in the home, and when more people experience the love of an earthly father, there are more people who will accept the love of the heavenly father.

In our study, I unpack some more of the data around this. There's a peer-reviewed thesis by a former atheist named Paul Vitz. He's a psychologist from NYU, and he published a popular book called Faith of the Fatherless about his peer-reviewed research. He finds that very frequently, atheism and agnosticism are oftentimes rooted in a failure to attach in a healthy way to a father.

It's not the only reason. There are plenty of people who grow up in a healthy married family who fall away from faith, and there's actually at least one in five people in church on Sunday who grew up in a family where mom and dad didn't stay married and they're there. It's not determinative. What I'm talking about are broad social trends and averages. Fundamentally, faith is a gift and God gives that gift and we have to correspond to it and respond to God's gift.

Natalie Jones: Here's another one that you said: "Pastors are not just pastoring people through hard times, but they are actually shepherding a generation shaped by relational collapse."

JP DeGance: Today, the share of adults who grew up in a home that is intact, those who hit the age of 18, only 46% grew up in a home where mom and dad stayed continuously married. Today. Actually, that number we hit that threshold in 2015, and a little bit of a good news on that is we've been at that level for about 11 years. It's stayed stable, it hasn't gotten worse. We seem like we've hit a threshold for 11 years.

But this is a huge disintegration from say 1960, where you're talking about well over 90% were reaching adulthood in an intact married family. What happened was the sexual revolution was the decoupling of sex and marriage. Once you decoupled sex from marriage, you decoupled marriage from partnering and partnering from parenting.

I go into and unpack that in the book Endgame. What you start to have is the rise of folks growing up in not an intact family, and about 25 years later, what you would expect if this phenomenon was a leading indicator, you start to see the rise of religious non-affiliation for the first time in the United States on a statistically significant level about 25 years after you start to see marriage and relationships become more fragmented.

That's one of our messages to pastors: ministry to marriage is certainly important because when you do it, you're going to solve the problems that you referenced from our website, which is you're going to heal and break generational bondage to sin.

Folks who grow up without an intact married family are more likely to struggle academically, they're more likely to struggle with mental health challenges and loneliness. Boys are more likely to have behavioral problems in school, and girls are more likely to have an out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancy. All those things are true.

Then we turn to pastors. If you solve this problem, you're also going to solve those wounds and lead people to Jesus Christ. Because when people encounter marriage in a healthy way, the Apostle Paul calls marriage the great mystery in Ephesians 5. Scripture begins and ends with a wedding. In Genesis, and it ends at the eschatological wedding feast of the Lamb that we're all hoping to be at.

The covenantal sign of marriage is there over and over in the scriptures from the minor to the major prophets. God frequently describes his love in the spousal way. God is the bridegroom pursuing his bride, the church. When we help that be lived out well in a healthy way, it reinforces God's original design for all of humanity. He gave marriage as a gift for all of humanity to point to himself and point to his sacrificial love for his church.

When that happens, we're reinforcing the divine plan and we're also, as the local church, creating trust between those who may not yet believe in Jesus, but we're helping them solve a challenge in their life. When we do that, they trust us more. When they trust us more, we can share more about who Jesus is, why we love, and we can lead people into an encounter with Jesus Christ.

Natalie Jones: I believe people don't know the godly definition of marriage. Marriage is such a thing that's really before God. He ordained it, he desires for it to be the reflection of Christ and his church, which is a divine relationship. So all of us men and women are to likewise submit in love to one another and think of the others if not first, at equal love of ourselves. It's just such a beautiful thing. Obviously, it's the true love that we're talking about.

JP DeGance: The Apostle Paul in Ephesians 5:21 challenges us to be subject to one another out of reverence for Christ. We hear it in our modern sense and when we read all of Ephesians 5, sometimes it gets our backs up here and there. But you have to place yourself in the first century and what kind of cultural dynamite that was because of the second-class nature that women were treated in the first century AD.

In the ancient Greek world and the ancient Roman world, women held very few rights. Examples Rodney Stark in his book, The Triumph of Christianity, notes that for instance, in pagan graveyards, male graves were always marked, and female graves were almost never marked. It's not until you get to Christian graveyards.

Christians left the necropolises of the pagan world and had the catacombs and had their own burial grounds. In the Christian burial grounds, women and men were equally marked graves. Women flocked to Christianity because of its preaching of the equal dignity between men and women. It was that proclamation of the gospel, the equal dignity and the elevation of marriage that really converted the ancient world.

We shouldn't be surprised that the evil one has so sought to destroy the sexual embrace and destroy marriage because when you do that, you obscure the gospel message.

Natalie Jones: I find the statistics overwhelming for marriages over the past 20 or 30 years.

JP DeGance: We are in a marriage crisis today. The bigger crisis is not divorce. That's a problem and it's reduced a lot since 1980. Today, a majority of first-time marriages will last a lifetime. Somewhere between 60 and 65% of first-time marriages will last a lifetime. So that's an important message for folks to know.

Natalie Jones: Is that whether Christian or not?

JP DeGance: Yes.