Key Takeaways
Communio founder and president J.P. De Gance joined Tammy and Jay Daughtry on the ModFam Traffic Jam podcast — available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube Music, and iHeart Radio — for a 22-minute conversation on building stronger families through faith.
The ModFam audience represents one of the most underserved groups in church life: blended families, co-parenting households, and modern families navigating complex relational dynamics with limited support from the communities around them.
J.P.’s core message: the local church is not just a place of worship — it should be a hub for healthy, transformative relationships at every stage of life, including the hardest and most complicated ones.
The episode is a reminder that marriage and family ministry cannot stop at the wedding. The church that serves families well is the church that shows up for every chapter — including the ones no one talks about from the pulpit.
Three social media reels from the episode are available and worth sharing with your congregation and leadership team.
The Story: A Conversation the Church Hasn’t Been Having Enough
The ModFam Traffic Jam with Tammy and Jay Daughtry isn’t your average family podcast.
Tammy Daughtry is one of the leading voices in America on co-parenting and blended family life — founder of CoParenting International and a nationally recognized advocate for families navigating the real, complex terrain that follows divorce and remarriage. She and her husband Jay created the ModFam podcast to speak directly into the everyday “traffic jams” of modern family life — the moments of friction, confusion, and exhaustion that most people navigate quietly, without a clear map.
Episode 12 brought J.P. De Gance into that conversation.
As founder and president of Communio, J.P. joined Tammy and Jay to explore how faith and community can strengthen families — not just the traditional two-parent household that is often the assumed audience of church programming, but every kind of family: the blended household, the co-parenting relationship, the single parent, the remarried couple trying to build something new out of something broken. The full episode is now live and available wherever you listen to podcasts.
► Listen on Apple Podcasts → Episode 12 — Building Stronger Families Through Faith
► Listen on Spotify → Episode 12 — ModFam Traffic Jam
The Core Finding: The Church Was Never Meant to Serve Only the Easy Cases
Here is the uncomfortable reality that the ModFam conversation surfaces directly.
The majority of church marriage and family programming is built around one picture: two married biological parents, together, raising their children in a stable home. That picture is worth celebrating and worth fighting for. Communio’s own research makes clear that children raised in intact, married households are significantly more likely to develop the relational and spiritual foundations that shape a flourishing life.
But that picture does not describe everyone in the pews.
Tens of millions of American families are blended. Millions of children are being raised across two households by parents who are no longer together, trying to co-parent with grace and intention in circumstances that nobody planned for. Millions of adults are navigating remarriage — building new family structures while carrying the weight of what came before.
These families are in your church. They are sitting in the third row, volunteering in children’s ministry, leading small groups. And in many congregations, they are doing it without any specific support, formation, or community designed for the particular challenges they face.
J.P.’s message on the ModFam podcast is a challenge and an invitation: the local church was never meant to serve only the easy cases. It was meant to be a hub for healthy, transformative relationships at every stage and every season of life — including the complicated ones.
The Counterintuitive Angle: Blended Families Aren’t the Problem. They’re the Opportunity.
Here’s the reframe most churches haven’t made yet.
When a congregation encounters a high percentage of blended families, divorces, and co-parenting households, the temptation is to see that as a sign of cultural decay — evidence that the church’s message isn’t landing. But there’s another way to read the same data entirely.
These families didn’t show up in your church despite their complexity. They showed up because of it. They are looking for exactly what the Church is uniquely designed to offer: a community that tells the truth about how hard relationships are, that holds out a vision of covenant love that endures, and that provides real, practical tools for navigating the relational terrain in front of them.
Tammy Daughtry has spent her career making the case that co-parenting and blended family life, done well, requires extraordinary levels of commitment, forgiveness, and selflessness — the very virtues that Christian formation is designed to cultivate. The family that has been through rupture and is trying to rebuild is not a ministry failure. It is a ministry opportunity. And the church that learns how to serve these families well becomes one of the most trusted institutions in its community.
That is the church Communio is helping to build. Not just a church for the intact family — but a church for every family, at every stage, in every season.
What This Means for Your Church
At Communio, the ModFam conversation points to something we see consistently across our church partnerships: the churches that grow in depth and in reach are the ones that expand their definition of who they’re serving.
A church that only invests in newly married couples is a church that misses everyone else. A marriage ministry that doesn’t have a pathway for the remarried, the blended, or the co-parenting family is leaving a significant portion of its congregation without the support they need — and without the formation that could change the trajectory of their family’s story.
Building a full-circle relationship ministry doesn’t mean having a separate program for every family type. It means cultivating a church culture where relationships matter at every stage — where the newly married couple, the long-married couple navigating an empty nest, the blended family trying to find its footing, and the single parent doing it alone all feel seen, supported, and equipped.
That is the vision J.P. brought to the ModFam conversation. And it’s the vision Communio brings to every church we partner with.
Take the Next Step
Communio partners with churches to build relationship ministry for every stage of family life — from singles and newlyweds to blended families and everyone in between.
► Listen to the full ModFam Traffic Jam episode on Apple Podcasts → podcasts.apple.com
► Listen on Spotify → open.spotify.com
► Explore Communio’s Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationships → communio.org/study
Credit: This post draws on Episode 12 of the ModFam Traffic Jam with Tammy and Jay Daughtry, featuring J.P. De Gance, and Communio’s Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationships. Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.
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