The Daily Signal - Want a Faith-Filled Nation Back? Build the Family

Episode Date: April 19, 2024

There’s a direct link between being raised in a family with a mom and dad present and a commitment to faith, according to the president and founder of Communio, a nonprofit that equips churches to work for the renewal of healthy relationships, marriages, and the family. “Many pastors don't know that 80% of everybody sitting in the pews on Sunday morning come from a home where mom and dad stayed continuously married,” says Communio's J.P. De Gance.  After working in public policy and politics in Washington, D.C., De Gance says he began to see that “so much of what's going on wrong in our country flows from the collapse of family and faith.”  He started Communio to come alongside churches to help them identify how they can foster healthy families and marriages, and to equip singles with the tools to create those thriving relationships in the future, with a goal toward furthering the Gospel in America.   De Gance joins “The Daily Signal Podcast” to explain why an American revival of faith requires a restoration of the family.  Enjoy the show! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Daily Signal podcast for Friday, April 19th. I'm Virginia Allen. There is a direct link between being raised in a family with a present mom and dad and a commitment to faith. That's according to the president and founder of Communio, J.P. DeVance. So if the church wants to flourish, DeGant says that families need to flourish. And Communio is working towards that goal. They come alongside churches to help them identify how. they can foster healthy families and marriages and equip singles with tools to create those healthy families and marriages in the future. DeGance joins today's show to share how he came to

found Communio and to explain why a revival of faith in America requires a restoration of the family. Stay tuned for our conversation after this. Hi, I'm John Carlo Canaparo. And I'm Zach Smith. And we host Scotus 101. It's a podcast where you'll get a breakdown of top cases in the highest court in the land. Hear from some of the greatest legal minds. And, of course, get a healthy dose of Supreme Court trivia. Want to listen? Find us wherever you get your podcasts or just head to heritage.org slash podcasts.

Case is submitted. It is my pleasure to welcome to the show today. J.P. DeGantz, he is the president and founder of Communio. He joins us now. J.P., thanks for being here. Hey, Virginia. Thanks for having me. Excited to be with you.

Well, I would love to begin by asking you to share a little bit about how the founding of Communio came about and where that name comes from. It's very unique. Yeah. Well, it really, I came to, the way Communion got started came by way of both personal and professional transformation in my life. I had come to Washington, D.C., motivated by my faith, wanted to try to save the country, began working in public policy. and worked for Morton Blackwell, worked in what you would typically call the conservative movement, and became more and more clear to me professionally that what we're dealing with in our politics, and our public policy frequently is the collapse of the family,

that so much of what's going on wrong in our country flows from the collapse of family and faith. And so we got to be strategic in our work to bring about a great renewal in faith and family. And about 15 years ago, I had a personal tragedy in our family. I've had a close family member whose family failed that was in an abusive marriage. And my wife and I ended up taking in her kids. and we saw what happens when families fail in such a powerful way. And so the combination of seeing this both professionally and personally got me going in a journey that ultimately created Communio, we got started in an experimental project

to try to measurably improve family structure and marriage outcomes and church participation and worked in a place, actually got started in Jacksonville, Florida, with a major pilot project that ended up successfully lowering the divorce rate by 24% in three years through these interventions. And we had independent researchers evaluate our work and realize that there was no demographic explanation for that sharp divorce rate decline other than our intervention in the county. And so principally through churches. And so we took a go-forward. We created a go-forward business model, which was we wanted to serve and equip the local church to share the gospel through the renewal of healthy relationships, marriage and the family. And so we're 100% a B-to-B. We work directly with churches and support churches.

we've supported more than 250 churches around the country in 20 different states, equipping them with an evangelizing approach, a smart and sophisticated targeted marketing outreach approach, drawing folks in from the surrounding community around a church, into life-changing ministry that can affect change in marriage health and relationship health. Wow. Okay, so walk us through a little bit of how this works, for Communio, what's the model? What have you all seen that's worked? And if you walk into a church, you know, let's say my church is about 300 people in Northern Virginia. We have maybe about 50 young

adults, by and large, the rest are families. If my church came to Communio and said, hey, we want to strengthen our relationships within families. We want to grow that. We want to make it stronger. What would be the things that you all would do to bring that about? Yeah, so our framework is called the data-informed full-circle relationship ministry, right? And so by data-informed, we mean data to analyze what's going on amongst your 300 or so attendees, families, and then using data to analyze the surrounding community, invite and invite those in from the surrounding community into the church around felt needs. Okay, full-circle relationship ministry means applying ministry best practices. in every stage of relationship life, what we call, sometimes called the remote stage, meaning far from marriage, youth and young adult life, to those seriously dating,

to those engaged, those in marital crisis, or those just married and wanting to grow in health and wholeness in their marriage. So the big thing when we work with the church is we want them to see this ministry as a full church ministry, not something for a small ghetto, within the church, just a few of the married people. This is for everybody, from single to married, from young to old, okay? And so we walk through that we deploy that model in four steps, analyze, plan, implement, review. Those four steps, I'll, you know, very briefly unpack that, analyze. We have a proprietary software that allows us to survey everybody there, know what's going on in the church.

And then looking at, we've got 93% of U.S. consumers in our national database, Community Insights, and we can understand and give an analysis on the surrounding community. Then we take that data into the planning phase through a series of planning meetings with the church's leadership. We help the church interpret the data and then create a plan around it with clear, measurable goals, okay, to grow Sunday attendance from X to Y over year one, your two, and your three of our partnership. And then let's normalize relationship skills ministry in the church, okay, by moving a quantifiable number of singles and marries through relationship skills practice so that everyone can get better at having a healthy relationship and a healthy marriage.

And then we, in that planning phase, create a written plan to achieve those goals. and then an implement. Each church has a church strategist who gets to know the church, works with the church over the course of three years, and walks with them, giving ongoing training, support, accountability. At the review stage, it's collecting data to know what's working, what's not working, and making adjustments. Sometimes churches, pastors might not be as comfortable with trying to track numbers and efficacy. see, we like to note that in the second chapter of Acts of the Apostles, somebody counted that 3,000 were baptized that day. And so the Holy Spirit also cares about numbers, and the church should

too. And to what end as far as, you know, the mission of implementing kind of these new strategies programs? At the end of the day, what are you all hoping is accomplished? And for the church, Is it somewhat based on the needs that they see within their own community? Or are you asking them to kind of, if you will, buy into, okay, as a whole, we can recognize within society. We have to strengthen marriage and family in order to build and grow the church. Yeah. Great question. Virginia, fundamentally, we want to maximize the number of people who have a life-changing encounter with the God man, Jesus Christ. Right. We want to attract more souls, more people to, to, to, to, to, to, to accept the gospel. That said, many pastors don't know that 80% of everybody sitting in the pews on Sunday morning come from a home where mom and dad stayed continuously married. If you were born in 1999 and you're a single guy and you're in church on Sunday or you were born in 1964 and you're a married guy born in church on Sunday, 81% of both.

groups grew up in a home where mom and dad stayed continuously married. Okay. So if we're wanting to understand why there's less and less people coming to church on Sunday, it's because the family structure of 1964 is very different than the family structure of 1999 and 2010. What's changed first was the number of adults who grew up in a home where dad was present through a marriage. And the best research, and in fact, any of your listeners are interested in this, we have we've published a study on it that goes into this. Okay.

The, the, and you can, you can download it for free at communio.org backslash study, commeno.comeno.org backslash study. But what we write in that study is that there's a lot of other research that shows the, The presence of dad and the relationship with dad has one of the biggest impacts on whether or not faith is transmitted from one generation to the next. Okay. And generally speaking, a dad who's not married is far less likely to be involved in the life of his children, right? 68% of them, according to Dr. Paul Amato's research, are very infrequently involved in the life of their kids, and an unmarried dad, that is.

And if the very best and most involved dads that aren't married on average, the top 38%, that's the top 38%, are unable to maintain. more than once a week contact with their child within two years of separation. So armed with that kind of data, right, as a Christian, this shouldn't surprise us that God's revealed himself as father for all eternity. And what we're seeing is that when people less and less experience the love of an earthly father in childhood, they're less likely to believe in the love of the heavenly father as adults. And unless churches become really strategic and interested in increasing the health of the marriages in their pews and increasing the number of marriages and health of those marriages

in the community and increasing the effectiveness of dads, okay, if we don't, if we don't move the needle on those three things, we're not going to see revival. We're not going to see great renewal absent an otherwise miraculous intervention from the Holy Spirit, which of course is always possible. But it appears that this, God's the author of human history. He's the author of sociology, any of the truths within sociology that sociology uncovers. And he's obviously the author of scripture. And so what we're, uh, what the science is is increasingly uncovering is that, uh, that, um, that if we're, if we're going to get serious about, um, if we're going to get serious about, uh, faith renewal, we got to get serious about marriage and family renewal.

Yeah. Yeah. It makes so much sense. I mean, I, I think many people would guess that, that there is a strong connection between healthy and whole families and faith-filled individuals, but it's really interesting to see that the numbers confirm it, the data confirms it. Yeah, you know, Virginia, and this is our, you know, there's instinctively church leaders, pastors know this. There's a bit of a cognitive disconnect. Okay, 85, we commissioned a study with the Barner group, 85% of all churches report spending $0.00. annually in marriage and relationship ministry. What I think is present in a lot of the minds of church leaders is that if you focus on

discipleship and holiness, it produces by itself better marriage and family outcomes. And there's so much truth in that, that I think what we don't wrestle with is that our culture has so destroyed the idea of healthy marriage, monogamy. we've got a culture saturated with pornography, that there's a lot more attacks on marriage, just the idea of being faithful than ever has existed previously in at least American culture. And so that requires a new and adjusted pastoral response responding to this moment, right? We need, there's a good reason that in the 1880s, there wasn't a lot of work being done to, on marriage ministry. Okay.

And that's because the whole culture, whether it doesn't mean all the marriages were healthy. They weren't in the 1880s. But the entire cultural edifice of America reinforced the idea of a monogamous commitment to marriage. That's no longer there. Okay. And so the church needs to stop ministering as if we're living in the 19, 40s and 50s or the 1880s, we have to minister and lead our people in our present moment around the real threats to holiness, the real threats to our health around Christian marriage.

Yeah. I'm going to ask a question that is a little bit selfishly motivated because I'm fascinated to see that you all are not only working with faith. families within the church or with married couples, but also singles. And so speaking as a single who's in the church, how do you all address this? How do you work with singles and encourage a healthy dating culture within the body of Christ? So first, it's in the analyzed phase. We bring the data to the church of what's going on with their single people and the dynamics within the church. And in what Virginia, what you see is, is nationally amongst single never marrieds who attend church. There are 42% more women than men in the local church.

Okay. And so first, we note to the church's leadership, you have to own that gap. And you have to own resolving that gap because you got to have more. We have to have the kinds of smart outreach that draw. they draw in single never married men into the life of the local church to grow in holiness and health. Okay, so that there's that. We have data that we then provide around loneliness and gathered from everybody in the church and that you see in general and on average, while there's certainly plenty of single people not lonely in the church, they are far more

likely to fit into the group that would be considered, that would be considered lonely from a public health perspective, meaning there's going to be worse health outcomes, shorter lifespans amongst your own people in the church, unless you become motivated by it. So part of this is a mindset shift where we help the leadership of the church understand this is a big deal, and we need to be focused here. Okay. Then secondarily, then in terms of implementation, We have this idea of the ministry engagement ladder. It's inviting people from the surrounding community into the local life of the local church. It's invitation into outreach, into ongoing engagement and into what we call the growth journey.

Okay. Invitation, we are a world-class marketing company on behalf of the local church. Okay, we do everything that a large company can do to reach customers or a large political campaign can do to reach potential voters. Okay, we can do on behalf of the local church to reach those who could never otherwise reach so that we could actually attract in the, for instance, a larger groups of never married single men as a, for instance, to draw them in. And then the outreach event is 90% fun, 10% enrichment, drawing folks first into something

fun and engaging. The coaching is the idea of you're trying to attract those who aren't already coming, so it needs to be attractive to young men, as a, for instance. Okay, so what is the activity that draws them in, activities that are more competitive in nature. You know, we worked with the church that had a fund outreach in Kansas City. It was a craft and draft night. It was around the NFL draft. It did a great, great job of drawing in late 20-somethings, early 30-something single men into the church.

And then there's always about 10% enrichment, some skill activity that causes folks to stop and think about relationships. Ultimately, you're trying to draw those folks into something next, the next step, ongoing engagement, forming real authentic Christian friendships and community where now there's 70% fun or 60% fund, 30 to 40% concrete enrichment that's skills based in relationships. for singles and marries, drawing them ultimately in to small group, large group, skills, relationship skills, activities, retreats, classes. So we curate some of the best resources that exist in this area. Okay, so some of our churches are running. For instance, the Ram series, which is a great series for small groups, large groups, singles, married, there's skill activities.

presented. What does, what do the dynamics of healthy Christian dating look like? How do you discern well, whether or not somebody is a good potential spouse? And how do you have just good friendships, right? Really, the funny thing about marriage is that the skills to be a good spouse are actually, really the skills frequently are adapted from the skills of just being a good friend. And in our world with too many smartphones and too many screens and too much technology thrown at us, we can all benefit from learning to be better conversationalists, being better friends, being better listeners, learning skills that elicit empathy, that kind of thing. And the local church should be a school to teach those things.

So when we think about solutions around either singles or marries, we want to push the church beyond a programmatic one and done. We did this one thing once. We did this six-week sermon series. We did this one weekend retreat. We did this one-time class. No, no, no. The idea is this needs to be a holistic, full church solution, long-term and enduring.

one of the hardest things you can do is to get a grown adult to go to a class on anything, okay? And then trying to get a guy, let's say a married guy to go to a class to be a better husband or a single guy to go to a class to learn a date. Well, that's orders of magnitude harder. Okay. And so being, solving that challenge takes a full-throated, larger strategic approach by the church. the cast's vision and makes the engagement fun and engaging.

You know, we say relationship ministry should have these three ingredients. It should be appealing to men because they're the least likely to show up, either for married or for single engagement. Number two, it needs to be fun, okay? Something that if you say marriage ministry or relationship ministry doesn't sound fun and people frequently want to run from it. So you've got to make it fun and attractive. Okay.

And then number three, those skills and resources taught need to be timely and relevant to the moment that we're in, okay, and the current cultural dynamics that we're dealing with. And so if you hit on those three, you're far more likely to hit a home run. J.P., for anyone listening who is either in ministry, is a pastor, or who attends a church and is thinking, gosh, my church could really benefit from this. Or I'm just curious to learn more. How can they do that? Yes.

So we produce regular resources that are free and available to churches just by downloading, just by signing up for our email list, right? So you can go to community.org. Okay. And on our main page, you can sign up to start receiving the Communio Minute, which is a one-minute hit on both ideas and concrete ministry suggestions. We provide webinars on the topic and produce resources for churches like the nationwide study on faith and relationships. I've shared some of the findings here.

You can download that on our website, community.org, backslash study. We would definitely encourage that. And then if you're interested in getting really strategic and effective at sharing the gospel at this present moment through the renewal of healthy marriages and relationships, then definitely contact us. Get in touch with one of our church engagement officers. You can do that through questions at communio.org. You can email us questions at communio.org. And then we could start a conversation.

You might just be listening to this and just be attending a church, or you might be a volunteer. Oftentimes those are some good ways. ways to be connected to the local church, but there's some who are listening to us who are pastors, staff, elders, and you can certainly, if you are, I would encourage you to email us and begin receiving our resources as you think more strategically about this area. Yeah. And again, the website is communio.orgi that's c-o-m-m-unio.org. J.P. DeGance, thank you so much for being with us today. We really appreciate it.

Thank you so much, Virginia. And with that, that's going to do it for today's episode. Thanks so much for being with us here on the Daily Signal podcast. If you have not had a chance, make sure that you check out our evening show in the same podcast feed where we bring you the top news of the day. Also take a minute to hit that subscribe button so you never miss out on new shows. And if you would, leave us a five-star rating and review. Thanks again for being with us today. We'll see you right back here at 5 p.m. for our top news edition. The Daily Signal podcast is made possible because of listeners like you. Executive producers are Rob Blewey and Kate Trinko. Hosts are Virginia Allen, Brian Gottstein, Mary Margaret

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