Key Takeaways

• Communio’s Kurt Blake joined hosts Ben and Meg on the Legacymakers podcast to discuss how intentional marriage and family ministry can transform a church’s impact — and why programs alone are never enough.

• The most effective churches are not the ones running the most ministry programs. They are the ones using meaningful data to understand their congregation’s actual needs and building strategies around what they find.

• Targeted discipleship, focused on the marriage and family as the primary unit of faith formation, produces results that generic church programming rarely achieves: stronger homes, deeper engagement, and lasting growth.

• The question every pastor needs to answer is not “what programs are we running?” but “what is actually happening in the families in our congregation?” Data makes that question answerable.

• One family at a time is not a slow strategy. It is the most durable one. Churches that strengthen families build congregations that endure across generations.

The Story: A Conversation Built for Pastors Who Want More Than Activity

The Legacymakers podcast exists for one purpose: to help pastors, ministry leaders, and anyone passionate about strengthening families think more clearly about the work in front of them. When hosts Ben and Meg invited Communio’s Kurt Blake onto the show for an episode titled “Targeted Discipleship and Data-Driven Impact Through Marriage and Family Ministry,” the conversation that followed was exactly the kind churches across the country need to be having.

The episode is available now on Apple Podcasts and wherever you listen to podcasts.

► Listen on Spotify → creators.spotify.com

The central question driving the episode is one that gets to the heart of what most churches are getting wrong: how can a church move beyond programs and create lasting discipleship within families? It is not a subtle distinction. Programs can be measured in headcounts and calendar slots. Discipleship is measured in transformed lives, strengthened marriages, and children who carry their faith into adulthood. Most churches are very good at the former. Far fewer have cracked the latter.

The Core Finding: Data Is Not a Corporate Tool. It Is a Pastoral One.

One of the most important contributions Kurt Blake brings to the Legacymakers conversation is a reframe of what data actually means in a ministry context.

For many pastors, the word “data” carries connotations of boardrooms and business strategy — something that belongs in the corporate world, not the church. But Communio’s approach to data is fundamentally pastoral. The purpose of understanding your congregation through data is not to optimize a program or track a metric. It is to listen to your people at scale — to understand what families in your church are actually experiencing, where they are struggling, what they need, and where the relational health of the congregation is strong or fragile.

Communio’s Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationships, drawn from more than 150,000 surveys across hundreds of congregations, is the foundation of this approach. It gives pastors a picture of their congregation that weekly attendance and casual conversation rarely provide. It surfaces the quietly struggling marriage in the third row. It identifies the patterns of loneliness, disconnection, and family pressure that families carry through the door on Sunday morning and take home with them afterward.

That information is not a threat to pastoral ministry. It is a gift to it. A pastor who knows what his congregation actually needs can build a strategy that actually helps them. A pastor who is guessing — however wisely — is limited to what intuition and anecdote can tell him.

The Counterintuitive Angle: The Church That Does Less — but Does It Better — Will Outgrow the Church That Does Everything

Here is the reframe that the Legacymakers episode points to, and that Communio’s work confirms in church after church across the country.

The instinct when a congregation wants to serve its families better is to add more: more programs, more events, more groups, more initiatives. The activity feels like progress. But the families who most need help are often the least likely to show up for a new program. And the churches that pile on initiatives without a clear strategy often find that busyness substitutes for impact rather than producing it.

Targeted discipleship works differently. It starts with a clear understanding of who is in the congregation and what they actually need. It focuses energy on the relationships that shape everything else — marriages and families — rather than distributing it across a broad surface area of programming. And it measures success not by how many events filled the calendar but by whether the people who showed up were genuinely formed, equipped, and strengthened in the relationships that matter most.

Churches that have adopted this approach through Communio consistently see the same results: marriages restored, families stabilized, first-time guests who came to a community event and stayed because they found a church that took their lives seriously. And because stronger families produce more engaged members, more consistent attendance, and children who grow up in faith, the impact compounds across generations rather than resetting with each new program cycle.

What This Means for Your Church

At Communio, the Legacymakers conversation captures something we see confirmed every time a pastor makes the shift from program-first to discipleship-first thinking: the clarity that comes with that shift is itself transformative.

When a church decides to treat marriage and family ministry as a strategic priority rather than a secondary program, it is not just adding a new initiative. It is reorienting its entire ministry philosophy around the unit of formation that the research consistently shows matters most. The family is the domestic church. The marriage at its center is the most formative relationship most people will ever have. And the congregation that invests in those relationships — with intention, with data, and with the long view — is the congregation that builds something that lasts.

Think about what targeted discipleship could look like in your church. Not a new program on the calendar. A clearer picture of what your families are actually experiencing. A strategy built around what they need. A community culture where investing in marriage is normal and families feel genuinely supported at every stage. One family at a time, strengthened from the inside out.

That is the vision Kurt Blake brings to the Legacymakers conversation. And it is the vision Communio helps churches build — not with a generic template, but with a data-informed approach tailored to the specific congregation, community, and context God has placed in each pastor’s care.

Take the Next Step

Communio partners with churches to build targeted, data-informed marriage and family ministry that produces lasting discipleship and measurable results.

► Listen to the full Legacymakers podcast episode → podcasts.apple.com

► Explore Communio’s resources for churches → communio.org

Frequently Asked Questions

What is targeted discipleship and how is it different from general church programming? Targeted discipleship focuses ministry energy on the relationships and life stages where formation has the greatest impact, particularly marriage and family. Rather than running a broad range of programs and hoping people engage, targeted discipleship starts with a clear understanding of who is in the congregation and what they actually need, then builds a strategy around those specific needs. The result is deeper impact with greater sustainability than generic programming typically produces.

Why does data matter for church ministry? Data in a ministry context is a pastoral tool, not a corporate one. Communio’s approach uses congregational surveys and relational health assessments to give pastors a picture of what families in their church are actually experiencing — surfacing patterns of struggle, disconnection, and need that weekly attendance and casual conversation rarely reveal. A pastor who knows what his congregation needs can build a strategy that genuinely helps them.

How does strengthening marriages and families help a church grow? When marriages are strong, families are stable. When families are stable, parents attend consistently, children engage, households have the margin to serve and give, and the church becomes a trusted anchor in its community. Churches partnering with Communio for 12 to 24 months average 24% growth in Sunday attendance, with many first-time guests coming through relationship-centered community events. Stronger families are the upstream driver of almost every downstream church health metric.

What does “one family at a time” mean as a church growth strategy? It means that durable church growth is built relationally, not programmatically. Each marriage strengthened, each family stabilized, and each couple equipped with the tools they need produces ripple effects across a congregation: more consistent attendance, deeper community, children raised in faith, and a church that is genuinely trusted in its neighborhood. That kind of growth is slower to count but far more durable than attendance spikes driven by programming or marketing.

How can a pastor get started with data-informed marriage and family ministry? The first step is understanding the relational health of the congregation through a structured assessment. Communio provides churches with the survey tools, data analysis, and coaching needed to move from a general sense of what families need to a specific, actionable ministry strategy. From there, Communio helps design and implement a full-circle relationship ministry that reaches couples and families at every stage of life.

Credit: This post draws on the Legacymakers podcast episode “Targeted Discipleship and Data-Driven Impact Through Marriage and Family Ministry,” featuring Kurt Blake of Communio, hosted by Ben and Meg. Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.