Key Takeaways
Communio founder J.P. De Gance appeared on WORLD Radio’s The World and Everything in It — one of the top 100 news podcasts in America — to discuss how simple communication skills can save struggling marriages.
His central claim: 70 to 80% of divorces are considered not high-conflict. Most couples don’t need intensive counseling — they need practical coaching in the skills that make marriage work day to day.
The biggest threat to most marriages isn’t a dramatic crisis. It’s the slow accumulation of unaddressed tension, miscommunication, and emotional distance that goes unnoticed until it’s too late.
Churches that wait for couples to come forward in crisis are already too late for most of them. The opportunity is in proactive, skills-based ministry that reaches couples before the damage is deep.
Communio’s model is built around exactly this insight — equipping churches to offer the kind of practical, accessible coaching that most couples need but rarely receive.
The Story: A National Audience, a Simple Truth
On May 6th, Communio founder and president J.P. De Gance joined the hosts of The World and Everything in It — WORLD Radio’s flagship daily program and one of Apple Podcasts’ top 100 news shows — to talk about one of the most pressing and least-addressed challenges facing the Church today: the quiet crisis happening inside marriages that look fine from the outside.
The conversation was framed around a deceptively simple idea: that communication skills — basic, learnable, practicable skills — can save marriages. Not therapy. Not dramatic intervention. Not a weekend retreat at a critical breaking point. Just the ability to stay engaged, listen well, navigate tension, and keep showing up for each other in the ordinary stress of daily life.
It’s a message that resonated — because it named something millions of couples already sense but haven’t had language for.
De Gance also previewed a deeper conversation set to air on a special weekend edition of The World and Everything in It that Saturday. Together, the two appearances represent one of Communio’s most significant national media moments — and one of the clearest articulations yet of why the local church is the right institution to lead the response.
The Core Finding: Most Divorces Aren’t What We Think They Are
Here is the number that should reshape how every pastor thinks about marriage ministry: 70 to 80% of divorces are considered not high-conflict.
That figure, cited by De Gance in his WORLD Radio appearance, cuts against the mental model most people carry about why marriages end. We tend to imagine divorce as the endpoint of dramatic failure — infidelity, abuse, addiction, a rupture that leaves no doubt. And those cases exist. But they represent a minority of the divorces happening in American households, including in the households of churchgoing families.
The majority of marriages that end do so not with a bang but a slow diminishment. Couples who stopped knowing how to talk to each other. Resentments that were never addressed. Disappointments that calcified over years into emotional distance. A slow drift that neither partner could fully name — until one day, the gap felt too wide to cross.
These couples don’t need a crisis counselor. They need someone to teach them the skills they never learned: how to listen without defensiveness, how to repair after conflict, how to stay connected when life gets hard. Skills that are learnable. Skills that, if introduced early enough, can change the entire trajectory of a marriage.
The tragedy is that for most of these couples, no one ever offered them those skills. Not the church. Not a premarital program. Not a community that took their marriage seriously enough to invest in it before it was in trouble.
The Counterintuitive Angle: The Church Is Waiting for the Wrong Moment
Most churches are designed to respond to marriage crises. Pastoral counseling when a couple is on the edge. Referrals to therapists when things get serious. A sermon series on marriage when the calendar allows. These are good things. They are also insufficient — because they are structured around a model of marriage failure that only accounts for the dramatic 20%.
For the other 70 to 80%, the church’s response arrives too late — if it arrives at all. By the time a couple in a low-conflict, slowly deteriorating marriage asks for help, the relational deficit has typically been building for years. They didn’t show up for counseling because nothing felt bad enough to warrant it. They didn’t raise their hand in a small group because the marriage wasn’t in crisis — just quietly struggling. And then one day it was over, and everyone was surprised.
De Gance’s point is both diagnostic and strategic: if the Church wants to actually reduce divorce, it has to stop organizing its marriage ministry around the crisis moment and start organizing it around the formation moment — the ordinary seasons of marriage when skills can be built, habits can be formed, and couples can be equipped before the pressure comes.
That is not a counseling model. It is a coaching model. And the distinction matters enormously for how a church structures its ministry.
What This Means for Your Church
At Communio, this is the insight at the heart of everything we do.
The couples in your congregation who are quietly struggling are not going to walk into your office and ask for help. They are going to keep showing up on Sunday, smiling, serving, giving — and slowly drifting apart in the minutes and hours and years when no one is watching. The church will never know until it’s too late.
Unless the church has built something proactive. A culture where investing in your marriage is normal, not stigmatized. A pathway that reaches couples in their first years — before the patterns that lead to divorce have time to set. Events and programs that create low-stakes opportunities for couples to engage with practical skills and find community with other couples who are taking their marriages seriously.
That is the model Communio brings to churches. Not a crisis response system — though we help with that too — but a full-circle approach to relationship ministry that starts before couples are struggling and stays with them through every season. Because the goal isn’t to rescue marriages after they break. It’s to build the kind of church culture where far fewer of them do.
The majority of divorces are preventable. The skills exist. The research is clear. What’s missing, in most churches, is a strategy to deliver them at scale — before the slow drift becomes a chasm.
That is exactly the gap Communio is built to close.
Take the Next Step
Communio partners with churches across Evangelical, Protestant, and Catholic contexts to build proactive, skills-based marriage and relationship ministry that reaches couples before crisis — not after.
► Listen to J.P. De Gance on WORLD Radio’s The World and Everything in It → wng.org
► Explore Communio’s Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationships → communio.org/study
Credit: This post draws on J.P. De Gance’s appearance on WORLD Radio’s The World and Everything in It, May 6, 2026. Listen to the full episode here.
Latest Articles
What Solo Mio Reminded Me About Marriage, Loss, and Ordinary Love
Joe Heasley watched Solo Mio expecting a comedy — and left thinking about emotional drift, ordinary love, and two church event ideas your congregation needs.
America Turns 250. The Church Has a Role to Play — And It Starts With the Family.
Rev. Samuel Rodriguez says America’s crisis isn’t political or economic — it’s a crisis of identity. As the nation turns 250, here’s why the local church’s most powerful act of renewal starts with strengthening marriages and families.
The Hidden Reason Young Men Are Struggling — And Why Marriage Is the Answer
New IFS research shows marriage doesn’t just reward mature men — it creates them. When marriage disappears from a young man’s horizon, so does his motivation to grow. Here’s what that means for your church.