NC Family Staff | August 31, 2024 | SHARE: 
In our current age, many people underestimate the value of marriage. However, a closer look at our most predominant social problems reveals that strengthening marriages could significantly improve our country as a whole.
This week on Family Policy Matters, host Traci DeVette Griggs welcomes J.P. De Gance, founder and president of Communio, to discuss a new initiative he’s working on in Charlotte, North Carolina to help churches help strengthen marriages and families.
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TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Thanks for joining us this week for Family Policy Matters. Have you ever thought that your healthy little family might be the most important tool we have in saving our culture and society at large? Well, J.P. De Gance has built a lifetime of research in how to help churches help families and thereby revolutionize communities. He once initiated a program in Jacksonville, Florida, and the divorce rate dropped by 24% in two years. He’s the founder and president of Communio, and he’s here to talk about a new program they’re starting here in North Carolina. J.P. De Gance, welcome to Family Policy Matters.
J.P. DE GANCE: Traci, thanks so much for having me. It’s great to be here.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: With all the pressing issues in the world, why should we be focusing on marriage and divorce, do you think?
J.P. DE GANCE:: Everything that any of your listeners really care about ultimately flows from the health of our families, right? No matter, if you’re concerned about poverty, upward mobility, you’re concerned about incarceration, you’re concerned about happiness, you’re concerned about your children’s happiness, you’re concerned about their mental health and their mental well-being, if you’re concerned about their faith and their faith in Jesus Christ, all of it, all of it, flows from the health of our marriages and families.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: All right, so let’s talk about this pilot program in Jacksonville, Florida. What was that? And why do you think it was successful?
J.P. DE GANCE: Yeah, so when we got started, we were trying to figure out what could be done. How could philanthropists, how could churches produce improvement in marriage and family stability, knowing that the health of the family is so critical for flourishing in a community, and we got started in Jacksonville, we hadn’t seen large city-wide transformation around marriage in the family. We wanted to see, could we do it? Could it be done? So, Jacksonville, we partnered with a really great friend of mine, Richard Albertson, and Live the Life Ministries. We helped organize the participation of 93 churches ecumenically across Duval County, worked to move 58,912 people through four hours or more relationship skills ministry across the county, we saturated the county with digital outreach, really trying to find folks who may be at risk, or heightened risk, for divorce through that digital outreach. And the net net was the divorce rate dropped by 24% as you noted, ultimately sustained over the full three years of the initiative. And so, what we found was this wasn’t only good for the community, it was also good for the churches themselves. Churches who baselined their attendance grew by 23% in Sunday year over year, average attendance over two years. And so, we realized there was something there that was not only good and transformative on a citywide scale, but it was actually transformative for faith on a church wide scale. And so our ministry has now taken this per church model, taking our learnings to churches and 21 different states, 250 churches from coast to coast, and we were invited into a partnership with a phenomenal couple organizations for Charlotte, which is a church network in Mecklenburg County, and then the Greater Charlotte Marriage Initiative, which has sought to strengthen marriages, and we’ve entered into a partnership with them to bring our support and our services to churches, any willing church that qualifies, that is in Mecklenburg County, we’ll be able to provide our support for at a an incredibly affordable level for our church, our services are donor supported, donor provided, and because of these great partners, they’re made even more affordable to the local church.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, so we all know that churches, of course, are interested in telling more people about Christ and their faith. So, is there a connection between these strong families and marriages and evangelism?
J.P. DE GANCE: Absolutely, you know, this is our message to pastors: if you care about sharing the gospel, right, as we started our conversation, yes, the breakdown in the family has led to lots of social pathologies. Increased incarceration, increased mental health challenges, the explosive growth and loneliness and the suicide epidemic, but it’s also led to the rise of religious non affiliation and what some would describe as secularism in our country, right? The family began to break down in the 1960s and religious non affiliation doesn’t start to grow until late 1980s, about 25 years later, and in our own survey research, any of the listeners can download it, the nationwide study on faith and relationships. You can download it at communio.org/study. We found four out of five, 80% of everybody sitting in the pews on Sunday morning, regardless of age, grew up in a home where mom and dad stayed married. So, what’s shifted first was the typical family that somebody grows up in, and about 20 to 25 years later, you start to see the practice of faith diminish as the number of adults who grew up in a continuously married home diminishes.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So Communio is identified as a data informed full circle relationship ministry. What does that mean?
J.P. DE GANCE: Yeah, by data informed, ultimately, our services are provided to the local church. No couple or individual will ever come to a Communio program. And so, when we say data informed, we equip the local church with an approach that analyzes what’s going on in your own community, with your own people. Okay, using survey research and commercially available data, and then we go through a process of helping that pastor and his leadership team interpret the data, and then use that data to do targeted outreach so that we can help the church bring people who never would otherwise be able to know about that church to be reached and invited in. And then by full circle relationship ministry, we mean making it normal that the individual church applies best practices for every stage of relationship life, for those who are single and all the messiness that single life means today. For our young people to help them aspire to and know how to actualize a healthy Christian marriage. But then for the engaged and the seriously dating, good ministry and effective ministry there, and then ministry for the already married, right for helping those who are in a healthy marriage become enriched, and then those who are struggling to get out of being stuck in a struggling or crisis situation.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: So how are we doing? How are churches doing in marriage ministry, in the US? What do you think?
J.P. DE GANCE: 85% of all churches reported on a survey we commissioned with the Barna Group that they spend no money in the area of marriage and relationship ministry, right? And when you include volunteer activity, we see just 28% of all churches in the US having what we would describe as a substantive marriage ministry. So, there’s huge, this excites me, Traci, because there’s a huge opportunity here, right? The family’s in crisis. The best institution to solve the crisis is the church, and the church is not yet engaged here in any sort of strategic or effective way. So that gives us a great opportunity to align with our partnership through and with for Charlotte, and being able to support churches there, and then nationally, being able to support churches anywhere, to know how to bring a mindset shift through the local church about, right? So, one of the big things that we see, Traci, is that there’s a stigma associated with marriage ministry, a stigma associated with ministry for relationships. And a key here isn’t just deploying a program, it’s producing a mindset shift to make it normal that everybody in that church grows in health and holiness by investing in the skills of having a healthy marriage and healthy relationships. Well, we call it the donut test. If after services on Sunday, you’re having a donut and you feel embarrassed to share that you went to a marriage class last week because your concern is that someone else is going to think that you and your spouse are having problems, then that’s the stigma. That’s the enemy, and we need to overcome that. We need to make it normal that this is just in the Christian walk. Everyone knows that you gotta invest in the spiritual life. You gotta grow spiritually in your love for the Lord and for married Christians, a big part of that Christian walk is growing in health and holiness in your marriage, and that just needs to become normal. When folks hear the word or the phrase marriage ministry, a lot of people want to run from it. It doesn’t sound fun, does not sound attractive, so we coach churches on making it also feel and be fun and attractive, so that people are running toward that ministry rather than away from it.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay. So short of partnering with you, do you have some practical tips that churches can do to start to move in this direction? Are there some steps that they can take?
J.P. DE GANCE: First off, if anybody listening downloads our study at communio.org/study, there are 10 takeaways in there for the local church, and many of those are, are specific actionable steps, right? A key thing is, number one, is you become good at anything because practice the skill, right? Nobody became great at golf, became great at tennis, became great at any sport because they watched it on TV. You got to practice the skills. If someone’s going to become great at, say, golf, they got to go out to the range and shag some balls, okay? And you got to have a coach who teaches you how to swing properly, and marriage is the same way, right? So, in the church, a question is, is, how much of your ministry is based on sermons, right? And teaching versus practicing, right? Sermons are great and they’re important, but they’re a step in the right direction. They lay down key principles. But to become good at marriage, we gotta practice those skills. So, helping at the local church level, how normal is it, and how often are we offering ministry where couples can practice those skills? Another big thing is the local church is majority female, both amongst married people as well as single and never married people. This comes up in our own survey research. So how are we positioning marriage ministry and relationship ministry so that it is more likely to attract those who are least likely to come, so that you can solve that challenge. So, so, thinking about a masculine posture and orientation, so that it attracts in those less likely to come, because, on average, and in general, women are more likely to engage.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Tell us what your goals are in Charlotte, then. I mean, do you expect the change to be as dramatic as it was in Jacksonville, Florida?
J.P. DE GANCE: It’s a longer-term project. In Jacksonville, the budget is much lower, but fundamentally, we want to do this in a sustainable way. The goal is by the end of 2030 to see a greater than 20% reduction in the divorce rate over the trend line. And the way that that is going to be brought about is the next three years is focused on capacity building in a local church, so that we’re building local marriage and relationship ministry, ministry for both singles and for marrieds, that’s sustained and run by the local church, that those churches are ready to receive a large influx of non-members for the purpose of engaging in relationship ministry. So, we expect over the next three years, to get to 25 churches who have ongoing and robust, muscular relationship and marriage ministry in Mecklenburg County. And that’ll move us to phase two, where we’re going to see a significant increase in what we call marriage intensives for those who are struggling, and a proliferation of skills ministry through those churches, we want to see 75,000 people during phase two complete eight or more hours of relationship skills ministry in the metro area. So, so there’s some big goals there and fundamentally, this all works toward the goal of the local church, which is to share the gospel, bring people out of bondage of sin and into relationship with Jesus Christ. This is a means to do that. Historically, the church has always advanced ministry, advance the gospel through felt need. And there’s no greater felt need at the present moment than than the need of of healthy relationships, healthy marriages.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Okay, so we’re about out of time. Where can our listeners go if they want to learn more about the Charlotte initiative and of course, the other good work that Communio is doing in other parts of the country?
J.P. DE GANCE: And of the listeners can follow us and get our get info on Communio at communio.org you can sign up for emails locally. For Charlotte has a website forcharlotte.org We’ll have details on the on the Charlotte Marriage Initiative, as well as charlottemarriages.org Those are three different sites, communio.org, forcharlotte.org as well as charlottemarriages.org.
TRACI DEVETTE GRIGGS: Thank you very much. J.P. De Gance, founder and president of Communio, thanks so much for being with us today on Family Policy Matters.
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