Welcome to the Eric Metaxus show with your host, Eric Mettaxas.

Hey there, folks. You may have already heard. Today marks 25 days until the launch of my book is atheism dead.

You're instructed to go to my website, Eric Mataxis.com. Please pre-order the book 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.

J. Pete 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 percent and giving grow by 28 percent. 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.

Right.

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