EXCLUSIVE: The Blueprint for Getting Christians to Marry—and Stay Married

For too many, the Christian church only steps into their marriage twice: To bless the wedding vows—and to talk them out of divorce.

Yet Scripture goes far beyond the usual pre-marital advice and last-minute intervention. The Bible casts marriage as one of the central callings in a believer's life, modeling it after Jesus' unbreakable union with his redeemed people. "Therefore a man shall leave his father and mother and hold fast to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh," the Apostle Paul writes, quoting Genesis. "This mystery is profound, and I am saying that it refers to Christ and the church" (Eph. 5:31–32).

J.P. De Gance wants to help the church reclaim that vision and turn Paul's mystery into a daily reality—even for non-Christians.

"Taking your wife to date night at the United Way or the Y says 'our marriage is struggling.' But taking her to a fun date night at the local Baptist church says 'we're building a healthy marriage,'" De Gance explains. "It just doesn't raise eyebrows in the same way."

It's also a powerful way to bring newcomers into the body of Christ.

"If I happen to connect with someone at a church date night, I'm more likely to spend time with them socially outside that program. The local church is simply the best vehicle for getting both Christians and the unchurched to have better marriages."

De Gance is president of Communio, a parachurch group he founded in 2017 to help churches deliver the Gospel through marriage discipleship. He calls it "marriage enrichment": Making it normal, even laudable, for couples to actively nurture their relationship the way they do their kids. That requires centering Communio's work on pastoral leadership.

J.P. De Gance

The problem is not that churches aren't doing enough, he explained. It's that they're not taking an expansive view of their role in nurturing marriages after vows have been exchanged.

De Gance estimates that American churches spend $4–6 billion annually on youth ministry, but for 85% of churches the yearly budget for relationship ministries is $0. Nonexistent. And while plenty of other parachurch groups run vital skill development programs, few churches are deploying this content.

According to a 2019 Barna Group study commissioned by Communio and shared with Restoration News, the main reasons for this sad reality are simple: Few volunteers, tight budgets, and little interest from the flock. One in five Catholic and Evangelical churches say they won't fund a relationship ministry because "there are already other options available."

A Nation in Decline

Unfortunately for many, that means turning to secular psychologists and therapists for help instead of God's ordained clergy.

It didn't used to be this way. The medieval church prioritized pastoral care and spiritual duties for couples. Parish priests and church courts, not civil magistrates, were tasked with resolving ongoing domestic disputes from infidelity to physical abuse. European cities promoted piety through confraternities where married people met for prayer and moral support.

"Marriage is a school for character," Martin Luther declared. The Reformers saw the Christian household as a "little church" for living out self-sacrificial faith through mutual love and parenting. In New England, colonial Puritans—far from being repressive—actively involved the church in congregants' sex lives. Pastors uniformly rejected ascetism and preached frequently on the goodness of sex in the marriage covenant. In Hartford, Connecticut, church elders even excommunicated a husband for sexually abandoning his wife, considering it a serious sin against the marriage bed.

As with so many things, the church's pursuit of marriage discipleship became another victim of the 20th century. Secularism silenced churches as the arbiters of public virtue by turning faith into a private, personal affair. No-fault divorce "reforms" led to sharp increase in divorces in the 1970s. Worst of all, the rise of moralistic, therapeutic deism as America's dominant religion reduced God and clergy into a hope-for-the-best crisis management team—the guys you turn to when all other options fail.

Churches responded by dropping marriage ministry as a priority.

" The result: Jacksonville's divorce rate fell a stunning 24% over three years. By the end of Communio's experiment, Duval County ranked the lowest among Florida's largest counties for divorce. "

Fully 85% of America's pastors report preaching on marriage and divorce at least once per year, according to the Barna Group survey, and most far more frequently than that. Yet only 41–49% of pastors feel "very qualified" to provide effective guidance to married couples struggling with divorce, infidelity, or financial issues. Less than half (49%) feel very qualified to counsel unmarried couples living together. A scant one-third are confident in their ability to counsel effectively on pornography addiction; one-quarter on spousal abuse.

Why this disconnect?

"The peak gap in marital dissatisfaction for husbands and wives is in their 30s," De Gance told me. "Married woman in their 30s are twice as likely as their husbands to say they're struggling with their marriage." That's when life pressures crest: A home full of children, aging parents to care for, and mounting financial stress, to name a few common challenges. Unsurprisingly, national divorce rates are highest among couples age 18–44, two to three times higher than couples age 50 or older. Couples whose friends get divorced have a 75% chance of their own marriage ending.

This is largely true of nominal Christians, too. But as my colleague Jeff Reynolds has pointed out, just 26% of regular churchgoers end up divorced. Among couples who pray together daily, the divorce rate falls to less than 1%—the fruit of consistent, faithful discipline.

In contrast, the rotten fruit of divorce is atheism, out-of-wedlock births, and misery. Nonmarital births have more than doubled since 1980 from 18% to 40% nationwide. Boys who grow up with divorced parents are considerably less likely to attend church as adults, widening the massive gender gap in the pews. Research shows "closeness to fathers matters more than closeness to mothers in religious transmission," that is, in determining whether children will carry on the faith of their fathers. One-fifth of churchgoers also report serious loneliness, particularly singles, exacerbating mental health issues and suicide rates.

Showing Results

It's crucial to understand that all of these problems are a result, not a driver, of family decline, De Gance told me. "The answer here is obvious: Marriage is a sanctifying process, so let's get churches stuck in it."

Communio works exclusively with trinitarian churches that hold to a biblical definition of marriage. De Gance calls their work "authentically ecumenical" because it works through the existing leadership structure rather than around it. Unlike other parachurch groups, Communio doesn't sell a "pastor's kit" or other frontline content to laity; it provides churches with data, tools, and consultation to weave marriage enrichment content into their ministry.

For pastors, it's a high-intensity, hands-on campaign with weekly consultation and a data-driven marketing strategy. De Gance likens his model to a "world-class" campaign consultancy geared toward a niche client: Churches. "We sign a three-year contract with the leadership, then assign them two staffers to help develop their vision for marriage evangelism and execute on it," he said. From the congregation's standpoint, all this new activity happens exclusively within the church—they won't see Communio branding on anything. That's intentional.

De Gance likens it to a John the Baptist model: "We want to decrease, and we want the local church to increase."

"We learned during our pilot period that when our brand shows up in front of the congregation, it communicates that we, Communio, are the hero," he said. "But the hero really is the local church. We just want to champion and equip it." That approach also smooths out any potential skepticism that comes with working across ecumenical lines, since the focus is entirely on the sanctity of biblical marriage.

The group put its model to the test a decade ago in Jacksonville, home to the highest divorce rate in Florida. From 2016 to 2018, Communio staff worked with 93 local churches to launch relationship ministries that put 58,000 people through four-hour or longer marriage-strengthening programs. Data experts used predictive modeling to identify couples whose marriage was coming unglued, and ran digital, radio, and billboard ads driving traffic to a clearinghouse where they could register for help.

The result: Jacksonville's divorce rate fell a stunning 24% over three years. By the experiment's end, Duval County ranked the lowest among Florida's largest counties for divorce.

"It works because we make it so people want to run marriage ministry, rather than run from marriage ministry," he quipped.

Past events include learning the five love languages for raising children, movie night, family appreciation night, Easter egg hunts, and trunk or treat nights. Some events are couples-only (i.e. date night, free babysitting included), others for families, and still others geared toward discipling single men and women. All are marketed toward the churched and unchurched alike. The idea is to hijack familiar programs as a springboard for a nurturing experience—one that draws couples in to learn and gets them to return. "We're seeing fuller pews on Sunday by people who are consuming 9 to 12 hours of direct marriage ministry," he said—learning the "spiritual and practical skills to be a great spouse."

De Gance highlighted an example of how this ministry redeemed one couple's collapsing marriage. "This mom was a teacher at a parish school where three of their kids were students. The husband and wife had both contacted divorce attorneys when Communio stepped in to help the pastors to launch a marriage retreat, which they attended.

"Before long, they'd called off divorce proceedings altogether. It really saved their marriage, it was incredible," he told me. Now the couple run their parish's marriage retreat ministry.

Communio aims to grow to 1,200 client churches nationwide, but is cautious about biting off too much at once. De Gance describes it as "growing deep roots." "We prioritize abiding, enduring relationships with our client churches, so we aim to scale gradually."

The cost for churches to join is $18,000 annually, or $1,500 per month, in addition to a marketing budget to drive people to its marriage and family events. "But that gets driven down by partnering with faith-based groups, which shoulder some of the financial burden," he pointed out.

In Ohio, for example, Communio has contracted with the Center for Christian Virtue, the state's largest Christian public policy organization, allowing any church in the state to join Communio's network for a reduced fee. The group has a similar arrangement with the Arizona Mission Network of Southern Baptists.

Multiply and Fill the Earth

If there's one thing that will save the United States from socialism and collapse, it's family formation.

Americans before the 20th century held that the basic unit of society is the family, not the individual. For centuries, Protestant denominations almost universally reported membership by families, not individuals (a few still do). That was true across the board—before the 19th Amendment, fathers didn't vote as isolated male individuals, but as representatives of their household, in keeping with the Bible's teaching on male headship.

Since then, however, feminism (among other things) has reordered the structure of our society toward radical egalitarianism and hyper-individualism. The Sexual Revolution delivered the coup de grâce. The church has yet to recover.

But there's reason to believe that's changing. In Catholic Hungary, 14 years of pro-natal policies have produced unbelievable results: Marriage rates have doubled, divorce dropped 25%, and abortions were cut in half, even as the national fertility rate became the highest in the European Union. Experts call it "one of the strongest family support systems in the world," built on the triune platform of "God, homeland, and family."

Under Viktor Orbán's Fidesz Party, Hungary has poured 5% of its annual GDP into family programs since 2010—offering mortgage assistance and interest-free loans to newlyweds, three-year paid maternity leave, expanded childcare, free summer camps for kids—and enshrined the right to life "at conception" in the national constitution. This isn't a welfare state or social safety net; it encourages mothers and fathers to raise their children, not the government. It's Christianity playing itself out in public policy. And it's saving Hungary from demographic eclipse.

There's a lesson here for American leaders. In trying to solve collapsing birthrates through mass immigration, they've instead hollowed out our economy and culture. But there's no quick fix. Earlier generations understood a deeper truth: Families are the wellspring of children, children are the crown of their parents, parents the lifeblood of the church—and together, they are the foundation of national greatness.  

(READ MORE: Churches Should Never Have Been Barred from Endorsing Candidates. Trump Just Righted That Wrong.)