Welcome to the Eric Metaxis show with your host, Eric Metaxus. Hey there, folks. You're instructed to go to my website, Ericmetaxis.com. Please pre-order my book is atheism dead at one of the extremely low prices there.

Speaking of books, in my hands, I hold the book.

We've been talking about this.

The title is Endgame.

The Church's Strategic Move to save faith and family in America.

The author, J.P. DeGance, he's the founder and president of Communio, and he designed and oversaw.

You ready for this?

The largest privately funded community marriage project in U.S. history, which lowered the divorce rate in an entire U.S. city by 24% in just three years.

Jay P. DeGans, first of all, congratulations on the book. And tell us this story. This is so great.

Oh, thank you so much, Eric. Yeah, we got started on a big, trying to answer a big question. Can churches act as cultural change agents in a big way at a citywide scale? And knowing and recognizing that marriage is the central piece for society and really for the faith. I get into it in the

book. We were able to work with more than 50 churches moving 58,912 folks through four-hour

or longer relationship education and lowered the divorce rate in Jacksonville, Florida by 24

percent and had independent evaluation of our work by scholars out of the University of Virginia and Florida State,

confirmed there was no demographic explanation for that decline other than our intervention.

And then the churches themselves grew in the process, a group of 33 churches who baseline their attendance and giving saw

attendance grow by 23% and giving grow by 28%.

So even if you're doing this for utterly selfish reasons, you want to grow your church, you don't care about marriages, this will grow your church.

On the other hand, if you care about marriages, I mean,

honestly, the fact that you did this in such a buttoned up way and you had people from the outside

come in to say yes, in fact, and again, we're not talking about a little town. This is Jacksonville,

Florida. This is a big city. And you're telling me that citywide divorces went down by 24% over the course of three years.

Yeah. I guess the idea is that the book Endgame will help folks do this in their churches.

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