Key Takeaways

• J.P. DeGance sat down with Family Life News’ Sarah Harnisch on Faith Under Fire to discuss the 3-year, $20 million research study he led before launching Communio — designed specifically to find out what actually moves the needle on marital health, family stability, and church engagement.

• The central question the study was built to answer: how many church kids actually stay Christian in their 30s and 40s? The findings were both sobering and clarifying — and they shaped everything Communio does today.

• The research confirmed that the home is the single most decisive environment for faith formation, that parental marriage quality directly shapes children’s religious outcomes, and that the local church is the institution best positioned to strengthen both.

• Before the study, DeGance was working in public policy. The data convinced him that policy alone could never produce the outcomes families and communities needed — and that the church, equipped with the right strategy and tools, was the real lever of change.

• The Passing the Torch report, produced by Communio and the Institute for Family Studies, represents the public culmination of this research — and is now available for every pastor and church leader to read and act on.

The Story: A $20 Million Question — and the Ministry It Built

Most ministries start with a vision. Communio started with a study.

On August 18, 2026, Family Life News’ Faith Under Fire — a news feature examining the religious battlegrounds in America and the efforts to protect religious freedom — aired a six-minute interview between host Sarah Harnisch and J.P. DeGance, founder and president of Communio. The conversation covered the research foundation that preceded Communio’s launch: a 3-year, $20 million study designed to answer questions that most people in ministry assumed they already knew the answers to.

What actually moves the needle on marital health? What actually improves family stability? What actually drives church engagement — not for a season, but for a lifetime? And most urgently: how many kids who grow up in church actually stay Christian in their 30s and 40s?

The findings from that research shaped Communio from the ground up. And the Passing the Torch report, released this year in partnership with the Institute for Family Studies, represents the most comprehensive public presentation of what that work revealed.

► Listen to the full Faith Under Fire interview → shows.audiocdn.com

The Core Finding: What Moves the Needle Is Not What Most Churches Are Doing

DeGance came to this research not from a ministry background but from public policy. He had spent years working at the intersection of government, economics, and family welfare — and he had reached a conclusion that the data kept confirming: policy alone could not produce the outcomes families and communities needed. The levers that most shaped the long-term wellbeing of children, the stability of marriages, and the vitality of faith communities were not in Washington. They were in homes and churches.

So before launching Communio, he invested three years and $20 million in finding out exactly what worked — not in theory, but in practice. What programs, what approaches, what relational structures actually produced measurable improvement in marital health, family stability, and the kind of church engagement that lasted into adulthood?

The answer the research returned was consistent and, for many in ministry, counterintuitive. The most powerful predictor of whether a child raised in church stays Christian in their 30s and 40s is not the quality of the youth program, the style of worship, or the strength of the church’s apologetics curriculum. It is the health of the marriage at the center of the home. When parents stay married, practice faith together, and discuss it openly in the rhythms of daily life, faith transmission is dramatically more reliable. When those conditions are absent, even the best church programming struggles to close the gap.

The Passing the Torch report, drawn from surveys of more than 60,000 Americans raised in Christian households, puts the data behind this conclusion in detail. Children whose parents attended church weekly together were significantly more likely to attend as adults. Children in homes with regular faith conversations were more than twice as likely to remain religiously active. Adults with strong father-child relationships were 73% more likely to believe in God.

This is not correlation. It is a pattern replicated across multiple major longitudinal datasets, consistent across denominations, regions, and demographics. The home is the primary environment of faith formation. And the local church is the institution best positioned to strengthen it.

The Counterintuitive Angle: The Church Spent Decades Investing in the Wrong End of the Problem

Here is the reframe that DeGance’s $20 million in research keeps pointing to — and that the Faith Under Fire interview captures in a form accessible to any listener.

Churches have historically invested the majority of their ministry energy in children and youth. The logic is intuitive: reach them young, before the world does. But the data reveals a structural limitation in that approach. No matter how good the children’s ministry, no matter how engaging the youth group, the primary formation environment for a child’s faith is not the church building on Sunday morning. It is the home — specifically, the marriage at the center of it and the daily faith practices embedded within it.

A church that invests heavily in children’s programming while leaving the marriages of its adult members largely unsupported is, in a very real sense, reaching for the fruit while leaving the roots untended. The fruit may look healthy for a season. But if the root system — the marriage, the father’s engagement, the family’s daily faith practice — is weak, the transmission breaks. The child grows up, leaves home, loses the external structure that church attendance provided, and has nothing underneath to hold.

DeGance’s research convinced him that the strategic priority had to shift upstream: strengthen the marriages, engage the fathers, build a family culture of active faith — and the next generation’s religious outcomes would follow. That conviction is what Communio is built on. And it is what the Passing the Torch report gives every pastor the data to act on.

What This Means for Your Church

At Communio, the Faith Under Fire interview is a six-minute window into the research foundation that has shaped everything the ministry does. For pastors who want to understand not just what Communio recommends but why — grounded in three years of research and $20 million of investment before a single church partnership was signed — this conversation with Sarah Harnisch is the right starting point.

Think about the families in your congregation right now. The children in your Sunday school who are being formed, for better or worse, by what they see at home between now and the time they leave for college. The parents who are present in the pews but whose marriages are quietly under strain. The fathers who are physically there but spiritually disengaged. The families who are doing all the right things on Sunday morning but have no consistent faith practice the other six days of the week.

These are the families the Passing the Torch report was written for. And they are the families Communio helps churches reach — not with a program added to an already full calendar, but with a data-informed strategy that addresses the upstream conditions that determine whether the next generation of believers is formed or lost.

The $20 million question has an answer. The Passing the Torch report puts it in your hands.

Take the Next Step

In the Faith Under Fire interview, J.P. DeGance references the work of John Van Epp — co-author of End Game alongside J.P. and the researcher behind the RAM model — to explain why the order of commitment matters so deeply. Couples who honor that order don’t end up behind. They end up with a dramatically stronger foundation.

The RAM Series is one of the resources Communio recommends to its church partners for exactly this reason. If your church works with couples in the pre-marriage season, it is worth knowing about.

The no to cohabitation is not a no to love. It is not a no to the relationship. It is a no that protects the yes that matters most.

► Listen to the full Faith Under Fire interview with J.P. DeGance → shows.audiocdn.com

► Explore the RAM Series → ramseries.com

Frequently Asked Questions

What was the $20 million study that preceded Communio’s launch? Before founding Communio, J.P. DeGance led a 3-year, $20 million research initiative designed to identify what actually moves the needle on marital health, family stability, and church engagement. The study tested programs and approaches across real congregations to find out what produced measurable, lasting results — rather than relying on assumptions or anecdote. The findings shaped Communio’s entire ministry model and are reflected in the Passing the Torch report.

How many church kids stay Christian in their 30s and 40s? The Passing the Torch report, which draws on data from more than 60,000 Americans raised in Christian households, reveals that the answer depends heavily on the home environment. Children whose parents attended church weekly together had a 41% likelihood of attending as adults. Children in homes with regular faith conversations were more than twice as likely to remain religiously active as young adults. The quality of parental marriage and father-child relationships were among the strongest predictors of adult faith retention.

Why did J.P. DeGance move from public policy to ministry? DeGance spent years working at the intersection of government, economics, and family welfare before concluding that policy alone could not produce the outcomes families and communities needed. The levers that most shaped long-term family wellbeing and faith transmission were in homes and churches, not in Washington. That conviction led him to invest in research and ultimately to found Communio as the vehicle for bringing those findings to local churches at scale.

What is the most important finding for churches from this research? The most consistent and significant finding is that the home — specifically the health of the parental marriage and the quality of daily faith practice within the family — is the primary environment of faith formation. Children’s and youth ministry programs matter, but they are most effective when they reinforce what is already happening at home. Churches that invest in strengthening marriages are directly improving the conditions under which faith is transmitted to the next generation.

What is the Passing the Torch report and how can I access it? The Passing the Torch report is the most comprehensive public presentation of Communio’s research on intergenerational faith transmission, produced in partnership with the Institute for Family Studies. It draws on four major national longitudinal datasets covering more than 60,000 Americans and identifies the specific parental practices, relationship qualities, and family structures most strongly associated with children retaining faith into adulthood. It is available as a free download at communio.org/passing-the-torch-report.

Credit: This post draws on J.P. DeGance’s interview with Sarah Harnisch on Faith Under Fire, produced by Family Life News, published August 18, 2026, and the study “Passing the Torch: How Faith Moves Across Generations” by the Institute for Family Studies and Communio. Listen to the full interview here.