Key Takeaways
- The Daily Caller featured Communio in a national story on how one faith organization has found a surprisingly simple way to get people back in the pews — through marriage and family ministry.
- Father Matt, pastor of St. Helen Catholic Church in Vero Beach, Florida, told the Caller his church’s lowest Sunday attendance now exceeds its previous peak, and his new problem is figuring out where to put all the cars.
- Communio founder J.P. De Gance built the organization around a conviction: trying to change the world through politics is like trying to change the weather by playing with the thermometer. The foundational work is faith and family.
- The model is working. Churches partnering with Communio for 12 to 24 months average 24% growth in Sunday attendance, with many first-time guests coming from outside the congregation entirely.
- As of the end of 2025, Communio was working with approximately 440 Trinitarian churches across the country — Catholic, Protestant, and Evangelical.
The Story: A Priest With a New Kind of Problem
Father Matt has a problem most pastors would envy.
His church, St. Helen Catholic Church in Vero Beach, Florida, is overflowing. The lowest Sunday attendance his parish now sees is still higher than their highest attendance in prior years. And as he told the Daily Caller in a feature published June 1, 2026, the challenge he’s currently navigating isn’t how to get more people in the door. It’s figuring out where to put all the cars.
The Daily Caller story, which ran nationally, asked a straightforward question: how is this happening? What does Communio do that produces results this measurable and this visible?
The answer, as J.P. De Gance explains it, is both simple and counterintuitive. It starts not with a church growth strategy, but with a marriage and family strategy. And it turns out those two things are far more connected than most pastors have been told.
The Core Finding: Healthy Marriages Build Healthy Churches
Father Matt didn’t just offer attendance numbers when he spoke to the Daily Caller. He offered something more important: an explanation.
It isn’t just the quantity that is growing, he said. It’s the quality. Healthier marriages create healthier children. Healthier children build healthier communities, countries, cultures and congregations. The growth Father Matt is seeing at St. Helen isn’t an attendance anomaly. It’s the downstream effect of intentional investment in the relational health of the families in his parish.
This is exactly what Communio’s Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationships has documented across more than 150,000 surveys of churchgoers nationwide. Approximately 80% of people sitting in church on any given Sunday were raised in a home where their biological parents stayed married. Faith is transmitted through families. When those families are healthy, the church is healthy. When they fracture, the church eventually reflects that fracture — in empty seats, disengaged young adults, and communities that have lost their anchor.
Father Matt has seen this play out in two parishes where he has personally served alongside Communio’s model. “It really transformed a number of families and marriages,” he said — and that transformation, multiplied across a congregation, changes the atmosphere of the entire church.
The Counterintuitive Angle: Changing the World Starts Closer to Home Than Politics
J.P. De Gance told the Daily Caller something that should reframe how every pastor thinks about their role in the cultural moment.
“Trying to change the world by focusing on politics,” he said, “is a lot like trying to change the weather by playing with the thermometer.”
It is a line worth sitting with — because it names something many pastors already sense but haven’t fully articulated. Changing laws matters. But if the foundational units of society — faith and family — are left to decay, no policy win will reverse the trajectory. The thermometer doesn’t control the weather. The underlying conditions do.
What Communio offers is a strategy that works on the underlying conditions. Not a political platform. Not a culture war campaign. A practical, data-informed model for strengthening marriages, supporting families, and helping local churches become the kind of trusted community anchors that change the trajectory of neighborhoods, cities, and generations.
Father Matt’s overflowing parking lot is what that looks like in real life. It doesn’t start with a campaign. It starts with a couple whose marriage got stronger — and who told someone else, who told someone else, until the church became the place the whole community was talking about.
What This Means for Your Church
At Communio, Father Matt’s story is not an outlier. It is a pattern.
Across the approximately 440 Trinitarian churches Communio was partnering with as of late 2025 — Catholic, Protestant, and Evangelical — the consistent finding is the same: churches that invest strategically in marriage and family ministry don’t just see stronger families. They see stronger churches. More consistent attendance. Deeper engagement. First-time guests who keep coming back. A congregation that becomes a trusted anchor in its community rather than one more institution people have quietly stopped believing in.
J.P. came to this work, as he told the Daily Caller, after witnessing firsthand what happens when families fail. He took the skills he had developed in the private sector and in public policy and turned them toward the question that mattered most: what actually works to strengthen marriages and rebuild family life? The answer, tested over years and documented in Communio’s nationwide research, points clearly to the local church as the most capable institution to lead that work.
Think about the families in your congregation right now. The couples quietly under pressure. The young adults navigating a culture that has made commitment harder than it has ever been. The children who are watching their parents’ marriage and learning, for better or worse, what love looks like. Each of these families represents both a person in need and an opportunity for the church to do what no government program, no policy initiative, and no political movement can: offer genuine community, formation, and support at the moment it matters most.
Father Matt figured out where to put the cars. That’s a good problem to have.
Communio can help your church get there.
Take the Next Step
Communio partners with churches across Evangelical, Protestant, and Catholic contexts to build data-informed marriage and family ministry proven to strengthen congregations and renew communities.
► Read the full Daily Caller article → dailycaller.com
► Watch how St. Helen Catholic Church is transforming lives → communio.org/st-helen-church
Discover how St. Helen Catholic Church is transforming lives by strengthening marriages, supporting families, and building lasting connections between the parish, school, and wider community.
Credit: This post draws on reporting by the Daily Caller, published June 1, 2026, and Communio’s Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationships. Read the original Daily Caller article here.
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