Key Takeaways

1. Communio founder and president J.P. De Gance joined Jared Cornutt on The Baptist Review podcast — a trusted voice for Southern Baptist pastors — to discuss the marriage and family resources Communio is making available to local churches.

2. Communio is already partnering with SBC State Associations in Arizona, Texas, and Ohio, giving over 6,000 Southern Baptist churches direct access to Communio’s tools, coaching, and data-informed relationship ministry resources.

3. The family crisis facing Southern Baptist congregations mirrors the national picture: declining marriage rates, rising family instability, and a generation of young adults who are spiritually disengaged — in large part because healthy family transmission has broken down.

4. Communio’s model is not a curriculum add-on. It is a strategic framework that helps SBC churches move from reactive pastoral care to proactive, measurable marriage and family ministry.

5. Churches partnering with Communio for 12 to 24 months average 24% growth in Sunday attendance — with many first-time guests coming directly through relationship-centered community events.

The Story: A Conversation Built for the SBC Moment

The Baptist Review exists for one reason: to give Southern Baptists a trusted space for good-faith engagement on the issues that matter most to the Convention. When host Jared Cornutt — pastor of North Shelby Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama and a key voice in SBC life — sat down with J.P. De Gance for Season 3, Episode 6, the topic was both timely and practical.

The conversation centered on what Communio is doing, how it works, and what it means for the pastor sitting in a Southern Baptist church who knows his congregation’s families are under pressure — and who wants to do something about it that actually produces results.

For SBC pastors specifically, this episode is worth a careful listen. Because Communio is not just a national ministry with a compelling vision. It is already embedded in the Southern Baptist world in a way that makes the resources immediately accessible to thousands of churches across the country.

► Listen to the full episode on The Baptist Review → thebaptistreview.com

The Core Finding: SBC Churches Are Sitting on an Untapped Opportunity

Here is what the data shows — and what the conversation with Cornutt makes concrete.

Southern Baptist churches are among the most trusted institutions in their communities. They have the relationships, the infrastructure, and the theological conviction to lead meaningful family renewal. What many of them lack is a strategic framework — a clear, proven pathway for moving beyond occasional marriage events and reactive pastoral counseling into something that actually changes the relational culture of a congregation over time.

Communio’s Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationships, drawn from over 150,000 surveys of Sunday churchgoers across the country, makes the stakes plain: approximately 80% of people in church on any given Sunday were raised in a home where their biological parents stayed married. Faith transmission runs through the family. When marriages weaken and families fragment, the next generation disengages from the Church — not in one dramatic moment, but in a slow, generational drift that shows up in attendance data a decade later.

Southern Baptist churches are not exempt from that drift. The family instability visible in every American zip code is visible in SBC communities too — in the couples quietly struggling in the third row, in the young adults who grew up in the church and are no longer there, in the singles navigating a dating culture that has made commitment harder than it has ever been.

The opportunity is equally real. And the resources to act on it are now directly available to SBC churches in three states.

The Counterintuitive Angle: The Best Evangelism Strategy for SBC Churches May Not Be What You Think

Southern Baptist churches have always taken the Great Commission seriously. Evangelism is in the DNA of the Convention. But here is a finding that should prompt every SBC pastor to reconsider where the most effective evangelism opportunity in their community actually sits.

Communio’s model is built around what J.P. De Gance calls a “non-threatening on-ramp” — community events designed for couples and families that draw people who would never consider walking into a Sunday service on their own. Date nights, block parties, family gatherings hosted by the church but designed for the neighborhood. Events where the stakes are low, the welcome is genuine, and the bridge to faith begins not with a gospel presentation but with a relationship.

In Communio-partnered churches, this approach consistently produces first-time guests — many of them unchurched — who come back. Who join small groups. Who find their way to Sunday worship. Who bring their friends. Not because they were reached through a traditional outreach strategy, but because a church showed up for their marriage and their family in a moment when the culture offered them nothing.

For SBC churches with a deep evangelistic instinct, this is a reframe worth sitting with. Strengthening the marriages and families in and around your congregation is not separate from the mission. In many cases, it is the most effective front door to it.

What This Means for Your Church

If you are a Southern Baptist pastor in Arizona, Texas, or Ohio, the resources J.P. De Gance discusses in this Baptist Review episode are already available to your church through your state association partnership with Communio. More than 6,000 SBC churches across those three states now have direct access to Communio’s tools, data, and coaching — meaning the barrier to getting started has never been lower.

If you are an SBC pastor outside those three states, the conversation is still immediately relevant. Communio works with Southern Baptist churches across the country, and the model translates across church sizes, demographics, and contexts. The question is not whether your congregation has the need — it does. The question is whether your church has a strategy to meet it.

Think about the families in your congregation right now. The couples in their first years of marriage, still building the patterns that will shape everything ahead. The mid-life households carrying pressure they haven’t named out loud. The young adults who grew up in your church and are drifting — not because they rejected the faith, but because no one helped them build the relational foundation that makes faith stick. These are not abstract statistics. They are the people who showed up last Sunday.

Communio exists to help SBC pastors serve those families with intention, with data, and with a proven pathway that produces measurable results. The Baptist Review conversation is the right place to start — and the resources are already within reach.

Take the Next Step

Communio is partnering with SBC State Associations in Arizona, Texas, and Ohio to equip over 6,000 Southern Baptist churches with data-informed marriage and family ministry resources.

► Listen to J.P. De Gance on The Baptist Review → thebaptistreview.com

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

Credit: This post draws on Season 3, Episode 6 of The Baptist Review podcast, hosted by Jared Cornutt, featuring J.P. De Gance, and Communio’s Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationships. Listen to the full episode here.