#146: 1/3 Less Marriages Today Are Making Us Lonely | JP De Gance
At the root of our culture’s many problems is the breakdown of marriages and families. My guest shares sobering statistics, such as that “there are 31% less marriages annually now than in the year 2000” and there are “65% less marriages now than in the year 1970.”
He says this is hugely contributing to the loneliness crisis today. Thankfully, there is a cure, which we discuss in this episode, plus:
How the lonelinest group of people at church aren’t the old
Encouragement for young people from broken families who fear love and marriage
What a healthy relationship looks like and how to build it, including the 5 stages of healthy relationships
If you’ve been affected by the breakdown of marriages and families, this episode is for you.
Buy JP’s Book: The Church's Strategic Move to Save Faith and Family in America
Get Dakota’s FREE Guide, The Biggest Fitness Mistakes to Avoid
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TRANSCRIPT
Transcript produced by artificial intelligence. Please pardon any errors!
JP: [00:00:00] The loneliness challenge is largely a singleness challenge,
right? we wouldn't have an epidemic of loneliness in our country if, we had marriage rates similar to the early two thousands.
Joey: were there any other like shocking or really interesting findings for you when it came to marriage and, and divorce in particular?
JP: So that's one of the ways that we can start to know. How they may treat us later, right? When, when that person's not trying to impress us,
Joey: what are some of the tips and tactics that you guys teach in order to build those healthy relationships?
Don't
JP: place ourselves into a situation where , we don't yet have a deep trust with 'em. But now I have to rely, like, okay, moving in with somebody quickly in a relationship, cohabitate super early.
We're compromising our ability to be free
Joey: I'd never heard it like that sounds super helpful and I love that you're making it so practical and tactical.
how have marriage rates dropped?
JP: there are 31% less marriages annually now than in the year 2000.
Joey: Welcome [00:01:00] to the Restored Podcast. I'm Joey Pan. If you come from a divorce or a broken family, this show is for you. We help you heal your brokenness, navigate the challenges, and build healthy relationships so you can break that cycle. And Build a better Life. My guest today is JP Dickens. JP is the founder and president of Communio and the 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 actually raised and spent $20 million over. Three years in three different states seeking to identify the most effective strategies to boost marital health, family stability, and church engagement. And so from 2016 to 2018, they drove down the divorce rate.
Get this by 24% in Jacksonville, Florida today. Communal serves churches across the United States, helping them strengthen marriages and their communities. A husband and father. JP lives in Virginia with his wife and their eight children. At the root of our cultures many problems is the [00:02:00] breakdown of marriages and families.
A lot of us know this, and my guest today, jp, he shares some sobering statistics such as there are 31% less marriages annually now than in the year 2000, and there are actually 65% less marriages now than in the year. 1970. Now, thankfully there is a cure, which we discuss in this episode. Plus, he shares some really fascinating statistics from their 19,000 person study.
He talks about how the loneliest group of people in church aren't actually old people. He also shares some encouragement for young people from broken families who maybe fear, love, and marriage. We talk about. What a healthy relationship looks like and how to build it, including the five stages of all healthy relationships.
And finally, he shares a resource to help build strong marriages, families, and communities. And so if you've been affected in any way by the breakdown of marriages and families, I. This episode is for you. In this episode, we do talk about God and faith, and if you don't believe in God, you're totally welcome here.
Anyone who has been listening to this show for a while [00:03:00] knows that we're not a strictly religious podcast. And so wherever you're at, I'm really glad that you're here. If you don't believe in God, my challenge too would be this. Just listen with an open mind. Even if you skip or take out the God parts, you're still gonna benefit a lot from this episode.
And so with that, here's my conversation with jp. Dick hands.
welcome to the show, man. It's great to have you here,
JP: Joey, great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Joey: I've admired your work from afar and really glad that we're finally speaking. I, I wanna dive right in. You say that there is a crisis happening in our world.
What is that crisis and what are the implications? What are the dangers if we don't solve it?
JP: Yeah, ultimately, I think the enemy for the last, definitely the last couple centuries, but accelerated the 1960s has been a full on attack on the very idea of what is the human person. Right the attack on, marriage and the sexual embrace.
Right. I, I think you, you can see a, a clear line starting in the worst elements of the enlightenment and just you saw rejection and the [00:04:00] ideas of Christian anthropology and marriage and the family starting in the Revolutionary Republic of France. A lot of those ideas were limited in scope in so many ways because of technology.
You began seeing an unraveling of the Christian consensus on marriage and the human person more and more in the 19th century, but, uh, not until really around 1960, you see it start to explode onto a large scale retail level. I. Right. You, you have a lot of those ideas that long pre-exist. The 1960s can get unleashed with the advent of artificial contraception, the disconnection of people, really the separation of, of sex from parenting, sex, from partnering, and you start to see.
Fatherlessness, uh, start to grow. You see infidelity start to grow. You see men and women, uh, less and less being able to, at least in the, in the divorce numbers in this country, less and less staying in lifelong [00:05:00] commitments, right? You have the no fault revolution. That follows that in the 1970s, right? You see a sort of a final, you'd say transformation of marriage law in this country in a, in a certain sense.
And, and so then you start to see, gosh, 25 years after that, you start to see the um, the fruit of the. Of the sexual revolution, right? Those who've grown up most frequently in homes where, where mom and dad weren't able to stay married. You see that woundedness show up in different ways in our society, in our culture.
One of the ways I think you see this is in the phenomenon of religious non affiliation. My study, which is the nationwide study and faith and relationships, links the disintegration of the married home to religious non affiliation. They appear to be in some way related and, um, it doesn't, we're not determinists, right?
It doesn't determine anything, but it does seem like God has made marriage and the family a, a vital ingredient for the transmission of faith. And when it breaks down, it makes it harder, not [00:06:00] impossible for faith to transmit. And, and so you start, start to see that. So when I say, uh, this, uh, you know, you, you talk about.
Attack the enemy, the, you know, shift of our culture. That's what I'm referring to, this couple hundred year march, but then this acceleration beginning about 60 years ago. Wow.
Joey: It's so fascinating. And what I hear you saying is yeah, there's just this whole cascade of things starting with ideas and then I.
Being codified into law and then, you know, kind of becoming commonplace that effectively just deteriorated marriage and family life and led to so many families breaking apart, becoming very dysfunctional. And um, it led to kind of the mess that we're in today where we see people very unhappy, very unhealthy, you know, obviously not, like you said, not practicing any sort of faith and disconnected from meaning and God and kind of falling into despair.
I mean, even we probably. You know, could talk about suicide rates and things like that. So it is really fascinating and with our audience of course, too, we see so many of these just really, um, heavy problems that they carry with because of the breakdown of their [00:07:00] families. And so I'm curious to go a little bit deeper into that survey.
So you studied, what was it, like 19,000? I. People.
JP: Yeah. There was 19,000 completed surveys of folks on Sunday morning. Okay. Those, uh, that would speak about the survey is that it's just folks who are in church on Sunday, Protestant and Catholic, across 13 states, 112 congregations. And what we found was that 80% of everybody sitting in the pews on Sunday morning grew up in a home where mom and dad stayed continuously married.
And, uh, what surprised us, and we were sharing this with some social scientists, we were working with collaborating on the, on the study. What surprised, uh, the sociologists we're working with is that that trend held regardless of age, once you get, you know, age 60 and below. Right. So if you look at, if, if you're a married guy and you're born in 1964, so you're the oldest baby boomer.
Joey: Mm-hmm.
JP: And, um, I'm sorry, you're the youngest baby boomer actually. Or if you're born in 1999, right? And both of you are, [00:08:00] and you're single married guy, born in 1964, single guy born in 1999, and you're in church on Sunday, 81% of both groups peers. Who are in church on Sunday, grew up in a home where mom and dad stayed continuously married.
Right? And so folks want to wonder why there aren't a higher number of people in church on Sunday. It's because there's less, I would argue there's, there's less people born in 1999 who have experienced the health of a married home, right? And we know that if you're less likely to have grown up in a married home, you're less likely to have experienced the love of an earthly father on a day-to-day basis.
Right? Uh. Because vast majority of those who are raised in a home where mom and dad aren't married, the large majority of those are, are being raised by mom. So we think there's this connection and, and I go into it in the, in the study, that it's becomes more challenging for individuals to accept the love of the Heavenly Father if they haven't experienced the love of an earthly father and I, and I think [00:09:00] there's some profound.
Inferences for all of us in both healing and in evangelism, where more frequently we don't always know. I think the research bears us out. We don't always know why we don't go to church or we don't always know why, and we can't give a logical set of explanations why I no longer believe or believe for a while.
Then maybe fell away because a lot of what's operating. These deeply held beliefs are, is operating on a much deeper psychological level, uh, a site In the, in the study, uh, Dr. Paul Vz, who's who had become, has become a friend over the years. He's now retired. He's the founder of the Institute for Psychological Sciences and Divine Mercy University.
He himself, Dr. Vz. Is a former atheist who was a, uh, professor at New York University, NYU, and was a, a chair in their psychology department. And his research identifies frequently within agnosticism and an atheism, a failure to [00:10:00] have healthy attachment to dad. And, uh,
Joey: interesting.
JP: Uh, you know, this has been subjected to peer review.
He's got, uh, some scholarly papers on this. He, he wrote a popular book on this called, uh, faith of the Fatherless. So I, I raise that to note that, you know, I think one of the things that we're seeing in church data is we're seeing the phenomenon of family breakdown and impacting and interacting with faith and makes it so important for us to seek one.
Uh, you know, I have. Those who've known me know that I got into this work because of some major family tragedies in my life. I, my wife and I raised a close family member's, uh, children due to a broken family and Wow. The of marriage. And, uh, we raised them when they were, started raising 'em from the age, age of 10, 11, 14, and 15.
And so just. Being aware of this, of these phenomenon are, are really important and important for us to uncover and seek healing because often consciously we're not [00:11:00] aware of how these wounds are interacting with us and shaping a lot of our, our decisions and, and shaping our lives and, and in invisible, invisible ways.
Joey: Yeah. No, it makes so much sense. And I, I totally understand what you're saying about you. You know, we can see trends, we can see correlation. We can't always like determine causation, but we can speculate. I think like your reasoning makes so much sense to me. And man, I love how data driven you are. It's so impressive.
And I'm curious, like, I think I understood it, but like, what about that 20%, the one in five people? Talk about that a little bit.
JP: Yeah. I love bringing this up, right? Um, it doesn't mean, uh, this is why I say it's a, a vitally important ingredient. It's not determinative. There's actually a lot of people in church on Sunday who came from a home where mom and dad didn't stay married.
Right? Yeah. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands on a day-to-day basis. Right? So this is important for us. We'll have some new research coming out. We're not principally a research organization. We're ministry that serves the local church. To equip the church to share the gospel through the renewal [00:12:00] of healthy relationships, marriage, and the family.
We, we want to come alongside everybody to have healthy relationships. And regardless of knowing that we all hunger for this, we all hunger for connection. We all hunger to know and to be known, to love and to be loved. And we think the local church should be a school of love that equips each of us to be able to do that.
Right? So it just so happens through our work naturally, we, we survey. At a church before we get started, we gather a lot of really useful data, Joey, that allows us to give some good insights back to the churches that we work with. And then when we gather enough of those surveys allows us to do a lot of fun things that you can't do in a 200 person survey at an individual church, and we'll have some new, new data out.
Gosh, later this month we'll have it probably be released in May on faith transmission. One of the big things that, that we see that that's a, a real positive that regardless of the family that you come from, that any parent can do and [00:13:00] should do, is it looks like having regular conversations and open conversations with your kids about faith.
That's super important. So it appears that not just get in a church with your parents as a kid, particularly getting to church with dad, but when dad has open conversations with you up. About Faith Weekly, and there's a huge, it appears to be a very significant lift, faith transmission from parent to child.
And when you, when you do it daily, it's much more frequently. And so knowing that we, as you know, single parents, you know, when we're picking up our child, running them, uh, to different errands or running. Kids to practice or school or what have you. Any parent, we can always just, you know, what, what, you know, Joey, what's God doing in your life today?
You know, what, what, what are you grateful for today that's happened? And just let, let our son or daughter marinate in that question and answer it, and in his own words. These are little things that we as parents can and should do. [00:14:00]
Joey: That's so good. I, I'm so excited today. See the new research to, to see what you guys find.
We'll definitely keep an eye on that. I'm curious, kind of going deeper into the data, whether it's this new study or the previous survey, were there any other like shocking or really interesting findings for you when it came to marriage and, and divorce in particular?
JP: Some good news 'cause I, I think we oftentimes focus on, on bad and that's.
There's good reasons to focus on bat for a variety of reasons. One, I think some people are motivated to run fast for gold medals, but others are motivated to run faster from German Shepherds. So like, I think in some ways, so bad news sometimes motivates people more than than good news. But on the good news.
Right. Uh, 82% of every married churchgoer said that they're very satisfied or completely satisfied in their marriage. So that's great. It's great news, right? We'd say so close to one in five weren't, you know, there. And that's okay. We know from our data that if you came from a family that wasn't intact through.
[00:15:00] Age 18, you're more likely to be struggling. What? It's not determinative. There's lots of people in church on Sunday who came from a home that was divorced or never married that are very happy or completely satisfied in their marriage. One of the, the big ahas to us is we, we added in our last survey the what's called the UCLA Loneliness index.
Okay? For those geeks who follow such things, loneliness has become a big topic. Uh, for folks to, in fact, if you are considered lonely by the public health measurement of it, you're, it's the equivalent. It's the health equivalent of a smoking 15 cigarettes a day, or in other words, it shortens your lifespan by about 15 years.
And there's a long 20 questions survey that's used by, by actually health insurance companies. To, to measure this to, for actuarial purposes, I'd like to help you, uh, you know, measure, you know, if you're a health insurance company, you want people to stay healthy 'cause that means you're collecting premiums without having to make payouts.
So you're trying to understand this [00:16:00] stuff. And so the fascinating, there's a three questions summary of that larger 20 question survey that's been proven to be very predictive of how you answer these three questions from. It largely predicts how you'd answer the full 20 question survey. So we added that.
To our church survey, and we wanted to understand how churchgoers are doing in loneliness and what we, we found was there's this massive, the loneliness challenge is largely a singleness challenge, right? We, we wouldn't have an epidemic of loneliness in our country if, if we had marriage rates similar to the early two thousands.
There's a reason why the epidemic doesn't start. And, uh, it's not first noted until the latter part of the first decade of, of the century. Wow. And so, um, the loneliest people in church on Sunday, uh, were not widows. Uh. We're not the elderly. Okay. What surprised us was that the loneliest group by on average were those that were [00:17:00] unmarried in their thirties.
Okay? That was the loneliest group. They were significantly more likely to be lonely than the loneliest group of widows. Which for those who were interested, the loneliest group of widows, based on the, the survey research were those in their widows widowers in their fifties. Okay. And so the never married and the divorced are substantial in, in their thirties, are substantially more likely to be lonely than those, than those widows.
So that is a big, it's a big deal. And, and at, at the local church level, you know, we talk about that pastorally, like right. There's stuff that we can do, particularly as married people try to be intentional about, I know my wife and I, we, we frequently will invite couples over for dinner. We, we try to go be intentional about inviting some of our friends that are single and divorced over, uh, for dinner.
Awesome. Uh, because we just know one, we've become friends with them. So it's just natural. We're not. We're forming fellowship. We're not conducting ongoing social science experiments, so it's great fellowship, but I've started in diving into this, this research, right? You just start [00:18:00] to realize, right? Uh, married people, my wife and I, we, we have eight kids.
We're a lot of, you know, we've got a lot of shares and plates and what have you on a very practical basis, you know, having a couple of our friends over, it's not very, it's a rounding error for us. And so we try to be intentional about. Opening up our home for Christian hospitality, and that's a great thing to do, you know?
Um, so a lot of ways that at the local church we should be thinking in terms of building heterogeneous community friendships with people at different age groups, uh, marital status, single, widowed, divorced, married, you know, we can, and married people. I, I think there's a gift that we have because, you know, the gift of family life is, you know, my wife and I were frequently making dinner for a number of people and just throwing a few extra isn't.
For us, you know, a huge logistical challenge. Whereas if you're a single person and you want to have my family over, it's 10 of us, it's not gonna happen in all likelihood. So it's also understanding reciprocity is less likely to happen in, right. [00:19:00] So, so oftentimes you ask a couple over, then they ask you over, and, uh, it's important for fellowship not to be seen as transactional in, in terms of reciprocity and friendship that way, right.
There's, I think a lot of things that we can do to inculcate a culture of Christian fellowship in our churches that break down l uh, the phenomenon of loneliness. Right? Um, and, and, and we can all do that, but then it's also, I think, important Joey, that we as at the local church level and then as parents, equip our, our young people for what does healthy relationship look like and to, you know, it's not a great mystery.
We don't have to be fearful. Even if we've experienced great trauma in our background, right? And there's reason to, there's obviously, you know, it's logical to be, to be fearful of that, of that trauma, but actually we've got great agency to overcome that and to know how to overcome it, know what a healthy relationship looks like, and to develop a new rhyme scheme in our life that allows us to enter marriage.[00:20:00]
A, in a healthy way and to discern what a healthy relationship looks like so that, you know, I can know, like this is not, you know, this is not a relationship that will allow me to break a generational cycle. Right. And know that early on and, and to be able to exit it. In a healthy way.
Joey: So good. There's so much that I wanna hit on.
Let's start with the healthy relationship piece. So, yeah, yeah. What do you guys teach in terms of like what a healthy relationship looks like, and then what are some of the tips and tactics that you guys teach in order to build those healthy relationships? Okay. Real talk. If you've been trying to get in shape so you feel better physically and emotionally, but nothing is working, you're not crazy.
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And he gives really simple, practical tips that you could actually use, you can implement today. And so if you're tired of feeling like you're never gonna [00:21:00] get in shape, just click on the link in the show notes and grab the guide today. It's totally free, and it might just be the thing you need to start feeling healthier physically.
Emotionally,
JP: so I'd encourage, so I've co-wrote a book with, with John Van App, who's a, a psychologist and really I co-wrote it with him because he's probably the country's leading expert on healthy relationships around the single life and dating his curriculum, uh, how to avoid falling in love with a jerk.
Or jerk at is the most commonly used curriculum by sailors, airmen, and Marines in the, by the military chaplaincy teaching these habits. Okay. And, uh, uh, so the book is called End Game and, uh, section two of the book goes into these in much more detail. But I'll, I'll touch on these. So if you think about, so John goes into the science of attachment.
Okay. And there's five dimensions of healthy human attachment, okay? Imagine a soundboard, okay? Going from left to right and each knob can go up or down. You got no trust, rely, commit, touch. Okay? And those can go [00:22:00] up and down. Okay? Think about what does. The world tell us that relationships, which knobs should go up first of those five knobs, right?
Typically, what the world will tell you is move, touch right to the top as fast as you can, right? Like, um, why not start with a sexual embrace or a sexual relationship? And now we're doing that, that knob goes up for those who can see what might move my hand up and down, so that knob goes up. But we don't yet really know the person.
We don't yet trust the person. We haven't yet been able to build enough trust that where we can reasonably be expected to rely on 'em. And that reliance. Then is not sufficient to really commit to 'em. And so what then ends up happening is we've moved to a level of, of intimate attachment to somebody where none of those other four dimensions are there.
And when that happens, what what ends up happening psychologically is, is even if the most committed. Sexual anarchist [00:23:00] who believes that, um, sex is just a bodily function and it's just, you know, a little different than sneezing. Okay. Even when you try that, pursue that to its logical conclusion, that person can't really explain why when they see the person that they engaged in that.
Meaningless sexual encounter goes and has sex with somebody else. There's something there where they feel betrayed, even though they don't want to admit that they feel betrayed. It's because we're actually biologically made for attachment. Our body creates chemicals that, that fuel love. And then when there's that betrayal, it, it actually creates a, a feeling of jealousy.
And that's, that's a biochemical response. And so you go, okay, well then what's the right way to order it? Right? Well then the right way to order it is those, think back to those knobs, no, trust, rely, commit, touch. Right? So we, we, we go in steps and, and when you meet somebody, think in terms of, of discernment of a relationship.
As a one [00:24:00] to two year process. Right. We don't want to accelerate it. It's a process of you've gotta learn to know somebody going on a date and, and we, we want to go through a process of getting to know somebody. Okay. And there, there needs to be a level of emotional chastity, right. Just kind of. If we don't need a bear our soul on the very first date, okay?
There's a get to know, uh, a person's likes, dislikes, getting to know what motivates them, what, what their hopes and dreams, what their close friendships are. That's all through the process. That's all that first column that to know. Right. And the more we get to know someone, the better the, you know, the, the more we can trust them, but we never trust them more than we know them.
Okay. And one of the parts of that no process is that we should, how does the person treat those friends that are closest to them? How do they treat? They're closest family members. Right. Okay. What's the nature of those relationships? Okay. That should tell us over time, over a long time horizon. I will not be treated better than that [00:25:00] person treats their closest relationships.
Joey: Hmm.
JP: Okay. So that's one of the ways that we can start to know. How they may treat us later, right? When, when that person's not trying to impress us, when that person's not trying to win us over. Okay? So as how we see that person treat his or her closest relationships, friends, okay? That can help us think into the future, how they may treat us, and then we can move us up, the trust knob, right?
And then, then as we start to trust more, right, we can start to rely on them more. But we never rely on them more than we trust them. Hmm.
Joey: Don't
JP: place ourselves into a situation where , we don't yet have a deep trust with 'em. But now I have to rely, like, okay, moving in with somebody quickly in a relationship, cohabitate super early.
Now I'm, I've maxed out reliance, right? I'm literally tying myself financially to this other person.
Joey: Totally. Okay.
JP: And, and I'm relying on them at a level where the person is saying at the beginning, Hey, the reason we're gonna move in is I'm gonna try to get to know whether or not this person is good [00:26:00] for me when, no, that's, we're outta sequence here.
Okay. We're not able, we're compromising our ability to be free, free to enter into deeper areas of that relationship by compromising my financial independence and my emotional independence. Because I'm physically placing myself in super close proximity to that person at all times where I can't step away and discern what's happening in the relationship, right.
And then commit, right? That commitment never should. Sometimes, uh, particularly active churchgoers can err on the side of becoming very emotionally unchained in the sense that they commit and behave like their spouses when they've just started dating. And, you know, we don't wanna move a level of commitment beyond, as a, as a knob on that sort of soundboard, so to speak.
We don't wanna move that to the top. And so one of the ways I think this manifests itself is when we start to see some red flags in the relationship, in the know and trust space. Some early red flags, we're [00:27:00] overly committed and won't exit the relationship at a time that's probably appropriate, uh, because we're overly committed very early on.
Right. So those are, so those five dimensions, I think really good. John, his book, uh, his, he's got a series called the RAM series that we bring to churches, uh, which is a, a, a small group model, uh, that we help churches deliver. We've got some churches using, he's got a facilitator led program that we get our churches to use for singles, help him teach, you know, healthy dating habits and relationships.
And the cool thing is if you know these, these tips, there's some basic things that we can start to do to. Avoid relationships aren't gonna be healthy for us.
Joey: Totally love that. Thanks for sharing and thanks for going into such depth. I think it makes so much sense. I'd never heard it like that sounds super helpful and I love that you're making it so practical and tactical.
I'm curious, um. I wanna go back to something you said, changing gears a little bit about marriage rates. So you mentioned how marriage rates have fallen, and we certainly see that a lot with our [00:28:00] audience, that there's just a ton of fear around, you know, maybe repeating the cycle of dysfunction and divorce in their own lives, repeating the patterns they saw in their parents' marriage, and they just don't want that.
And as a result, they just. Give up on love, give up on marriage, give up on commitment. And so I'm curious, um, two things. One, how have marriage rates dropped? I'm curious if you know any of the numbers there. And then two, what would you say to those young people who are like, I just, like, I kinda wanna get married.
I have that desire to for love, but I'm really scared.
JP: Yes. First question first. Right. Uh, there are 31% less marriages annually now than in the year 2000. Wow. Okay. There are 65% less marriages now. Then the year 1970. In 1970, the late sixties, something like 90, about 91% of college graduated men, 8 88, 9% of college graduated women, 85 to 7% of high school educated men and women were married before the age of 30.
[00:29:00] Okay. Um, in the late and, and certainly much before that, uh, in the sixties and seventies, and, uh. Today, uh, it's plummeted for both groups. Um, the college educated is hovering around 70%, which is objectively a major reduction, but it's, it's, uh, far, far worse, uh, for those who don't have a college education.
And so what we know about those folks in. The non-college educated orbit, they're more likely, uh, to have suffered from, come from a home where mom and dad didn't stay married. And there is reasonably right, the, it's not irrational. Folks who struggle, who came from a non-intact home are more likely to, uh, struggle in their marriages and, and to end up divorced.
That said, it's actually, that leads to the fear and paralysis and what we see. Is that there's actually, there's intentional steps that we can take to both heal and there's intentional steps that we can take to have a great marriage and a great [00:30:00] relationship. So what oftentimes happens is there's this idea that a great marriage is just sort of like a bolt of lightning.
It's sort of sort random chance. I hear pastors and preachers say that talk in this way, half of all marriages end in divorce and sort of reinforce this. Coin flip sort of fortune, you know, favors the brave kind of mentalities, which is I, I believe, is reckless and foolish. And so if you're a preacher or a pastor and you, you've repeated these lines, uh, I think you're, you're doing your people a disservice even though it's well intended.
Okay? The reality is, is, is the divorce rates actually never hit 50%. 50% of all divorces have never ended in divorce. And I would refer you to a, a book written by Shanti Feldon, uh, called the, the Good News About Marriage. And the, the best source for that is that in the early eighties at the peak of the divorce revolution, the trend in divorce was so high that scholars began to say in the early eighties that half of all marriages will end in divorce.
And it was implied on. The trend [00:31:00] continued to grow and it, it didn't continue to grow. Okay? First time, we're probably looking at somewhere around between 35 and, and 38% of all first time marriages will end in divorce, which, which may not seem like a significant difference, but the big differences is talking about well over six.
You know, the vast majority of first time marriages will last a lifetime. Okay.
Joey: Wow.
JP: That's if we don't know anything and don't do anything. That's just everybody. And then, then there's things that you can do to increase your aunt substantially. Okay? And, uh, you know, it turns out if, if, if you go to church regularly, okay?
If you pray regularly, okay, as a couple, that has a huge, uh, medicinal impact and a great impact. Pray as a couple. Has a, has a huge impact on a, on the health of a, of a relationship. There's also skills, uh, for those are, there's going to church and, and prayer. These are examples of spiritual skills, but there's also human skills to have a good relationship.
There's five interpersonal, five intrapersonal skills [00:32:00] that are known and knowable that we, when we work with churches, we help them build out. An ongoing ministry to help singles and marrieds practice these skills and, and be good at them. Okay. And then for, for the singles, we can ask ourselves questions, right?
There's questions in the discernment process, right? Does this person make me a better version of myself or am I a worse version of myself? Okay. Does this person in matters of faith, do they help me grow in my faith or make it harder for me in my walk? My faith walk. How does the person get along with his or her parents right now?
I say that knowing a lot of people listening might come from a home, right? Who do come from a home where mom and dad didn't stay married. The question is, is you know, to the extent that it's appropriate, does the person treat each parent with, with honor? Even when, uh, there's been some woundedness, right?
So that is an interesting and an important, right? We can know how [00:33:00] that person will treat us over time by understanding how anybody treats their closest relationships.
Joey: If you come from a divorce or broken family, or maybe you know someone who does, we offer more resources than just this podcast. Those resources include things like a book, free video courses, speaking engagements, a free assessment online community, and much more.
All of our resources are designed. Help you heal from the trauma that you've endured and build virtue so you can break that cycle and build a better life. And so if you wanna view those resources for yourself or someone that you know, just go to restored ministry.com/resources or click on the link in the show notes.
JP: And so, so this is in our own lives. This is why healing is so important, right? It doesn't mean, right. There's, there's forgiveness, but then there's also obviously setting up healthy boundaries, which is important, right? So do we, can we get ourselves to a place where there's forgiveness and there is a, a treatment of our parents with a level of honor?
That is biblically morally [00:34:00] asked of us doesn't mean we think that mom and dad were right in all the things that they did right and, and in the hurts that they caused. But in the role of mom and dad, are we able to get to a, a place of enough healing where, where we're able to pray for them and to honor them for giving us life.
If we can do that, and if the person that we're dating or in a journey and discerning whether or not they're a good spouse, uh, that's a really helpful data point, right? For somebody as we're discerning a spouse, right? And so there's things that we, that we can do in that regard. And then of course, avoiding riskier steps like cohabitation.
What it does is it prevents us from being able to. Actually better know someone beforehand, even though it, you, you think it's going to cause you to quickly get to know somebody. Actually, it hinders our freedom. It's because one of the parts of being able to know is you have to be able to step back and, and process.
Right. And [00:35:00] when we're physically in the same dwelling, it makes it. It's harder for us to be able to step back and really, and really reflect on what we're learning about that person. Okay. And, and that's a, an important part of, of our discernment process. Right. So, so anyways, I say, you know, some good news, uh, for all of the listeners is that the skills to have a healthy relationship, both spiritually and, and on the human side are known and knowable.
We can practice them and become good at them, can discern and make an in an informed choice that will allow us to enter marriage well. Right. And then. And the vast majority, the happiest people in America are married people and married people with kids. Okay. And married people with kids who go to church.
When you add up all those things, they're, they tend to be, on average, the happiest. Brad Wilcox's. New, new research shows that actually, you know, things like that. The secular world tells us, right. A good sex life, right? The people who report having the most frequent sex are married. Churchgoers, okay. On average are, have [00:36:00] sex more frequently than their secular counterparts.
Right? So like any way that you have, slice it. Okay. There's a lot of good news and good reasons to be intentional about pursuing marriage. Just it's, it's not a great, it's not a great mystery. How you can live marriage. Well, and I think that's a, we have agency and that's what I would encourage your listeners.
Joey: I love it. No, and it sounds like just the resources you're offering at community as well as your book and game has more specific tactics and principles that they can employ, which I love. And, um, quickly, one question. Um, you, you mentioned there was a group of people who came from families where the parents weren't continuously married yet they were not necessarily struggling or they were very happy, satisfied in their marriages.
Did they basically just do everything that you said or were there any other like hallmark data points? I. That's like, okay, this is why they're different.
JP: Oh, so our survey wasn't longitudinal, so we couldn't go back in time to ask 'em and we didn't ask. We've got, in the new set of data that we've collected, we have asked some additional questions [00:37:00] on faith practice that could allow us to answer that question better.
But we do know, look, people who pray together as a couple do better together as a couple, right? People who, who go and worship together as a couple do better together as a couple. Okay. That, that's known and knowable. Okay. And that's from the general social survey, which is a federally run survey every other year.
Okay. That has a battery of questions that any, anybody can dive into the book, get married by. Brad Wilcox goes into, goes into that and unpacks some of this stuff. And he goes, he interviews individuals who've come from homes where mom and dad weren't married or didn't stay married. Have been successful in their own marriage.
So I think there's, you know, knowledge is power and then, you know, sometimes we just make people, we can, especially in the church, make folks think that, you know, there's one of the things that I see as this phenomenon of, of sort of, there's just this one person out there for me. And, and so there's, you know, however many billion people on the planet.
So I guess if [00:38:00] there's this one person, hopefully that person's not in like, you know, outer Mongolia or something like, hopefully, you know, closer to my zip code. And, um, you know, I, I tell people, and this, none of this is intended to be at anything determinative on, on my views on God's sovereignty. And, and man's free will.
But, but I will say my wife could have married any number of other guys and been happy and thrived in her marriage. And I could have probably married any number as hard as it is to, to imagine, could imagine married any number of other people and been happy and thrived in my marriage. So sometimes we, we can make this perfect, the enemy of something great.
Okay. Nobody's perfect. No relationship is perfect. There's a lot of great relationships out there, and we can have a great relationship that leads to marriage. Right? And once I think we let our, let go of this idea of, of perfection and the perfect one that's out there, right? Uh, I was deficient in a variety of areas.
My life, and thanks be to God. I, I met my wife and she helped me grow in areas that I was weak in. And, and she would tell you, I, I helped her [00:39:00] reciprocally and we're better as, as a result, complementarity is a great thing.
Joey: Amen. No, so good. I could go on forever with you, but I wanna, I. Kind of bring us to the end here.
And one of the things I wanted to say, I love that point you made of like, knowledge is power and like learning these skills and then, you know, learning how to do them, learning the knowledge and then putting them to action is so key. And I would say what's been helpful for me and just the, you know, countless young people that we've served is the mentorship component.
Just being around people like you had mentioned before, who are living out the life that you wanna live. Like they have good marriages, they have, you know, good families, healthy families. That's just been, I mean, I'm, I'm sure you're not surprised by this, but that's just been such a clear trend even in these like dozens of interviews I've done with young people, you know, or even middle aged people from broken families who end up having really healthy marriages.
They all say, yeah, there was this one family I would spend a lot of time around and they were just, were like really inspirational and they kind of taught me by their example for me too. There were. Two families who are just really inspirational and they, I learned from their example by their modeling, like, oh, this is how you build a good marriage.
This is how you [00:40:00] disagree in a respectful way. This is how you, you know, show affection and all those things. Yeah. So, so I think there's just such a powerful lesson there, but I wanted to feel free to comment on any, any of that. But I'd love to hear more about communal, what you offer and any cool stories of transformation before we close down here.
JP: I can't agree with that anymore. Right. Uh, and this is why the church needs to be and can be such a powerful school of love and the school of love, right? It's living li one of the reasons we call ourselves communo. The word in Latin means community, right? We learn to love by example. And as, as married couples, we should be inviting folks into our lives, uh, just to be friends.
To let them into the messiness of our life and see the, the, the rhythms of marriage and family life. And I think if you're a person who has experienced trauma and challenge in your own life, seek out friendships in, in your church who are, uh, men and women who you, you look at and go, there's something, there's something there that I'd, I'd love to, I'd love to [00:41:00] emulate.
There's something there that I'd like to learn more about and, and seek conversations with them. Uh, seek friendships with them. Uh, so, so we, as a ministry, we operate, no, no individual or couple can ever come to a commun communal program because our customer, so to speak, is always the local church. So we've worked with more than 300 churches in 30 states across America from, uh, Montana to Florida, uh, California and Washington state, all the way, you know, out to Connecticut and Massachusetts.
So, and we work in Protestant churches, evangelical churches. Uh, we've worked in Catholic parishes. You have to be Trinitarian churches that hold to a Christian worldview on what is biblical marriage, a biblical worldview on what is marriage. And um, and so we coach churches provide a suite of services. We know that a lot of folks who work in the church don't have the time to go get a Master's of Divinity.
And frankly, there aren't. A lot of great programs out there that you can go and seek that make it practical how to do ministry well for singles and marriage. So [00:42:00] we've done the homework to bring that to the local church. Our work, uh, grew out of a, a successful initiative that lowered the divorce rate in Jacksonville, Florida by 24% in three years.
In 2016 to 2018, uh, produced nearly $70 million of of taxpayer savings, and, uh, worked with 93 churches across Duval County, and we took what we in that three year span, we moved 58. Those churches moved 58,912 people through four hour or longer relationship skills ministry. We invited people in who weren't members of those churches, into those churches into ministry.
Uh, when that project ended, we didn't yet have a, a business model of how to serve churches and scale that. So from 2019 to 2022, we really were refining that and we've begun to now scale that in churches across the country. I was just out in, in Arizona with the leadership of the Southern Baptist Convention.
We're working with on a statewide level with Baptist churches across Arizona, work at in large Catholic diocese, and we're equipping these [00:43:00] local churches to share the gospel. And I say that right, Jesus. Shared the gospel first. He performed signs and wonders. And those signs and wonders were not card tricks, they weren't magic tricks.
He solved real people's problems. And, um, the real problem that we have in this 21st century moment is the isolation and the loneliness that comes from broken relationships, broken marriages. And so there's a great. Place that the local church can enter into and equip people to love and be loved Well, and, and that's what we do in the, in the local church building community, right?
Uh, through fun, engaging events, things that people want to go to, young people want to go to, and while they're there and having fun and forming friendships, they're actually, uh, growing in their ability to have great relationships at, at great. Great marriages, God's blessed incredibly. I, I'm humbled by the provision that God's provided, uh, this ministry and excited by what's coming, uh, coming down the pike.
If folks who are listening wanna get involved, see how Communo can [00:44:00] come to your church, go to communo do org. You can sign up for, we've got free ministry tips. Uh, I've shared some data on this. There is a, a study that's downloadable that you can get. I heard you. That's a good place to start. Download the study.
Read it, share it with your church's leadership, share it with your small group, and there are 10 takeaways at the end of that. And then if you think it makes sense that we can bring us in, we can, uh, one of our church engagement officers can meet with your church's leadership and we can explore a potential partnership, uh, with, with, with your church.
Joey: That wraps up this episode. If this podcast has helped you, feel free to subscribe or follow us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or YouTube. You'll avoid missing future episodes and actually help us reach more people by doing that. And if you've already done that, feel free to rate or review the show. That feedback is super valuable.
We appreciate that and that also helps people find us as well. In closing, always remember you are not doomed to repeat your family's dysfunction. You can break that cycle and build a better life, and we are here to [00:45:00] help. And keep in mind the words of CS Lewis who said you can't go back and change the beginning.
But you can start where you are and change the ending.
