Latest / Christian Mix 106 On Demand / Upright Christian Parenting - Treehouse Storytelle... - Can We Save the Family? J.P. De Gance on Marriage, Parenting & Revival

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Upright Christian Parenting - Treehouse Storytelle... - Can We Save the Family? J.P. De Gance on Marriage, Parenting & Revival · Christian Mix 106 On Demand

• 0:09
  Hey friends, welcome to the Upright Christian Parenting Podcast,
• 0:13
  season four, part of the Treehouse Storyteller family, and I'm your host, Hannah Peru.
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  This is your place for upright parenting in today's sideways culture.
• 0:23
  We don't tiptoe around hard truths around here. We tackle cultural issues head
• 0:27
  on, build a bold biblical worldview, and equip you to lead your flock with courage.
• 0:33
  Our kids are being discipled by something, so let's make sure it's us.
• 0:36
  Grab your coffee, lace up your shoes, and let's raise Kingdom Eros.
• 0:43
  Hey guys, welcome back to Upright Christian Parenting. We are in Nashville,
• 0:48
  Tennessee at the National Religious
• 0:50
  Broadcasters. And sitting down with me today, I have J.P. DeGantz.
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  And I am so excited to talk to you, all things family, ministry,
• 1:00
  marriage, all the things. Good, fun topics.
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  Let's dig in. Yes, totally. Nothing controversial ever there.
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  No arguments or conflict whatsoever. easy breezy conversation uh so why don't
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  you tell us a little bit about your background a little bit about yourself yeah yeah well
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  dad of we have eight kids my wife and i four boys four girls ages 21 to six,
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  the six-year-old runs the house
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  of course my six-year-old runs my house yeah for sure for sure and um,
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  uh we homeschooled because you know we didn't think our kids are going to be
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  weird enough so we're like hey what can we do you're too normal increase increases
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  so we did the homeschooling thing.
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  And, uh, I used to work in the political and public policy world,
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  came to DC, like a lot of people to save America.
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  So I was going to do it through politics. So you're welcome.
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  I finished that. I was like, what else, what else can I do?
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  Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, but, uh,
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  17 years ago, I, uh, I got started to redirect my life, my wife's life.
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  We had, uh, uh, a family tragedy that hit us and.
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  A close family member, her friend, I'm sorry, a close family member's marriage
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  failed and failed in a way that was in an abusive marriage.
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  And we didn't know about it. And, you know, folks who know people who've been
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  in abusive marriages know that,
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  That, um, they don't share it with their family members and loved ones.
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  No, it's usually a secret and it's too late. Right, right, right.
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  And so she had found herself in a, in a shelter at that point and asked us to
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  take in our four kids, 10, 11, 14, and 15.
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  They, they showed up at the Quantico train station, uh, years ago and,
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  and we saw what happens when families fail in that kind of tragic,
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  tragedy, uh, tragic way.
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  And we ended up being a situation where we had to take permanent custody.
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  Just because of the situation. And God started to use that to redirect my heart
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  on what I cared about most.
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  And it wasn't overnight. A few years later, I started to,
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  look at what was going on in the political world, what we're working on,
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  and realizing that very frequently politics is working to mitigate the effects,
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  of the collapse of the family, really. And,
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  I spoke to the chief of staff of Governor Doug Ducey some years ago,
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  and he said, just sort of a back of the envelope estimate, said that he felt
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  that 80% of Arizona's state spending was the result of the breakdown of the family.
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  And we typically do it in three ways through...
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  Education, medication, and incarceration. And.
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  So I ended up leaving the public policy world with trying to figure out what if we took
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  a lot of the discipline that lives in the private sector and in the campaign
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  world, baptize it, sanctify it, bring it to the service of the church to see
• 4:01
  if we can improve the health of families, the health of churches.
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  It started a big initiative that created Communio. We worked in several pilot
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  cities. Jacksonville, Florida was one of them.
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  Before we got going there, it was the sixth worst city in America for marriage,
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  ranked by Men's Health Magazine.
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  The Huffington Post said it was, I had an article that said,
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  this is one of the 10 cities where marriage goes to die.
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  That's where we walked into. And within three years, we worked with 93 churches,
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  moved 58,000. Those churches moved 58,912 people through four hours or longer
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  relationship skills programming.
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  We saturated the county with digital outreach, inviting people in that weren't otherwise there.
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  The net net was the divorce rate dropped 24%. Oh my goodness.
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  Across the whole county.
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  In three years. What an impact. Yeah. And we had some business guys that were
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  skeptical that we had anything to do with it.
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  Weren't donors and funders of our work. They funded an evaluation of what we did.
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  Dr. Brad Wilcox from UVA led that.
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  And they concluded there was no other demographic explanation for the decline
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  other than our intervention in the county. Wow.
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  So we came out of that 2019 with the idea of let's try to scale this. Yeah.
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  And originally it was all philanthropically paid for and we're a nonprofit,
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  but we had to try to scale it sustainably.
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  And so over the next few years, we developed systems to support individual churches,
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  where we take philanthropic capital, make our services really affordable for
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  churches, combining that with kingdom capital to replicate.
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  So we've now worked with well over 400 churches. We just signed a new statewide
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  agreement with the Texas Baptists and have a great statewide partnership with
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  the Arizona Mission Network in a number.
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  Of states now where we've got big partnerships with big church networks.
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  Wow, that's incredible.
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  There's so many statistics that I know you are well-versed on,
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  you know, with fatherless homes or, you know, breakdown of the nuclear family. Yes.
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  Let's talk through that stuff a little bit from your perspective.
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  I'd love to get your insight on, you know, really like,
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  Why is the nuclear family under so much attack? Like, really, really why? Yes. Okay.
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  So stepping back, I'm an ideas guy, right?
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  So some of the worst parts of the Enlightenment, late 18th century,
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  you have these ideas, radical ideas of reinventing and reimagining the family.
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  Everyone's probably heard of this quote from Jean-Jacques Rousseau where he
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  said, man is born free, yet everywhere he's in chains.
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  He was not writing about the French monarchy principally or the state.
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  He was really writing about the bonds and the responsibilities that come from
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  marriage and family life. Oh, interesting. Okay.
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  And so he bore this out of his own personal life.
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  He fathered five children and put them all in orphanages.
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  Okay. So this is one of the intellectual forerunners of where we are today. Now.
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  There was a reinvention of family law in the 1790s.
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  Those ideas start to metastasize across the West, spread in the U.S.
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  Gradually, and those ideas develop and give rise to radical feminism, okay?
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  Now, big change happens, technological breakthrough in 1960.
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  1930, invention of latex. 1960, artificial contraception, and you have the decoupling
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  of sex from marriage, right? And that, on a practical level,
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  allows for the decoupling of marriage from parenting and parenting from partnering.
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  So the ideas that had been on the shelf and grew in the academy were limited
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  and constrained by reality.
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  Now, the technological innovations allow those ideas to explode out onto the
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  scene in a way that it never could before. Right. And so, so, um.
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  The, in, in other, you know, today, a lot of, um,
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  Radical thinking oftentimes, you know, whether it's Marx or Engels or other
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  thinkers on the, you know.
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  Thinkers on the left, see the family as an obstacle to their philosophical worldview
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  and their philosophical end.
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  So that's kind of a super crash course. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I think maybe—
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  It doesn't meet their agenda.
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  Right, right. And look, the family, when the family is healthy,
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  the family has a level of sovereignty, right?
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  Abraham Kuyper uses the expression, sphere of sovereignty, the idea that God
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  has created society in such a way that there's different spheres of sovereignty.
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  And one of them is the family. There's three original institutions that God
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  created, the family, the church, and the state, really.
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  And in different ways, there's different locuses of human organization.
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  And each of those, whether it's the school board or your local HOA,
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  They all have different authorities, and when the family's.
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  Functioning properly. It protects its own, helps to raise effective and good
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  citizens with good, robust human capital, and is a check on the sovereign, essentially.
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  It's a form of a check where when families fail, the state grows.
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  And in a lot of ways, that happens bilaterally, Right. So it goes both ways.
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  So the state also does create from time to time incentives to replace the family.
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  Right. Where dad may not be, you know, having a provider isn't always necessary.
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  And so in different ways, our policymakers either intentionally at times,
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  accidentally at other times, motivated by good intentions, have done things
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  that diminish the formation of new families and the maintenance of an ongoing family.
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  Just for a couple stats to put it, keep in mind, if you go right now today,
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  there are 31% less people getting married now than in the year 2000 and 65%
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  less than in 1970. Wow. Right.
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  We've never had a time in our history where there's more, uh,
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  unmarried adults. Yeah.
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  And if we think just one, one second order consequence. Yeah.
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  Right. Yeah. Crime. Yeah. Right.
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  The share of married households are the biggest predictor of the level of safety
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  and crime in a particular community. Yeah. Right. So, so the old expression
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  is, you know, marriage civilizes men.
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  Well, I know Mrs. DeGantz agrees with that. And and and so if that's true,
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  there's never been a time in our history where there's more uncivilized men
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  walking the streets of our communities. And that's what we're that's what we're seeing.
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  That's crazy. That's crazy. I mean, you've seen clearly the stats tell you exactly
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  the theme that has happened and where we have come.
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  Is this something that you feel like is going to continue to trend that direction
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  or do you see any hope and any swivel? Yes. OK, so.
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  The term progressive Charlie Kirk go get married get married young go find a
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  wife I mean do you do you feel like that influence is there I think I think uh.
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  History does not move linearly. It moves cyclically. Any good student of history
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  knows there's rises and falls of societies and civilizations. There's arcs.
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  Not a singular arc, but there's an ongoing arc of history.
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  And so, look, as a Christian, we have hope. It's a theological virtue.
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  And it doesn't mean we have to be optimists. That said, I am still optimistic
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  because God has hardwired us.
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  For relationship got as hardwired us for marriage uh,
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  it's literally into it's crazy this has to even be said but men and women are
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  biologically created to fit together yeah okay we're we are in some way not fully complete right,
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  without uh right right right and and and look um there are great um not everyone's
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  called in the married life the apostle paul is the best example of the single christian Okay.
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  And as is said in the scriptures, you know, that celibacy for the sake of the
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  kingdom, that's certainly a good.
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  But the norm is the married life because it points, it's God's covenantal sign
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  of salvation. He wired it. It's a gift to all of humanity.
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  At the beginning of salvation history, all of salvation history points to the
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  eschatological wedding feast of the Lamb.
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  And it's over, it's saturated.
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  The nuptial meaning of scripture is throughout it.
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  From the minor to the major prophets, from Hosea to Isaiah, and you see it in
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  Ephesians 5, where Paul lays out that great mystery, right?
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  And when God knew that, he's the author of human life.
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  And so when he created human love to be well, when it's well lived, it's sacrificial,
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  you know, being subject, as Ephesians 5 says, to be subject to one another out
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  of reverence for christ and so that that,
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  sacrificial love for one another images it is an icon of christ's love for his
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  church yeah and and and so when we think about okay charlie kirk,
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  and and i think and over the last year of his life he became much more dialed
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  in to the enduring things yeah
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  the important i'm not saying he wasn't committed before but his public,
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  uh talking on it was uh was really great And.
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  I think we're seeing, you know, with high engagements of young people are getting to church.
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  Those who go to church are going to church more frequently than older generations.
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  It doesn't mean there are more young people in church.
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  Statistically, some people misunderstand the data. But those young people who
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  are going have greater levels of zeal. That's what the data shows.
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  And men are becoming more, young men are engaging at levels that historically
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  have only been seen amongst young women.
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  So that's also very encouraging. And our churches are anecdotally seeing higher
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  numbers of new members and folks getting baptized and entering their membership than in past years.
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  So I think those are all the seeds for something that can be a renewal and a revival.
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  Objectively, I always say we're at the beginning. We're at the signs of a revival.
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  We're not yet at a revival.
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  Okay. Okay. The most encouraging sign is that Pew, which measures religious
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  non-affiliation and has done so for many decades.
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  Showed consistent growth for over for about 40 years every every time they came out with a new uh,
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  measure of it it moved it jumped up three you know two three percent four percent
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  the last four years it has held flat wow that that's a that's a significant
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  change yeah right from the
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  trajectory has been meteoric right it's hit about the 28 of all americans threshold
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  yeah and when you peel out the religious nuns,
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  it doesn't mean they're atheists it just means they don't identify with any
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  religion whatsoever, and once
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  you uncover it, there's a lot of openness amongst the nuns, so to speak.
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  And so it gives the local church a great—there's an opportunity because we've exhausted.
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  I think what we're seeing is the exhaustion of what post-modernity has sold
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  us, that we've been told that life is meaningless, just a bunch of abstract,
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  raw material, go make your own purpose. You're an accident.
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  Right. And define your own purpose. And they say, even optimistically,
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  you know, the existentialist would have said, go out and, you know,
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  you can be whatever you want and do anything you want. Right.
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  Including a guy becoming a girl or a girl becoming a guy or whatever. Yeah.
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  And it's led people to a level of recognizing the meaninglessness of where they are.
• 16:29
  We're seeing a rise in mental health crises, the suicide epidemic.
• 16:34
  All of these things are the fruits of it. I think you're starting to see this,
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  shift back to a more mimetic approach to life with this purpose-driven life
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  that is found external to ourselves.
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  And that's found in, typically, it would be found in that hero's journey of
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  going off a woman, finding a husband, finding a wife, and forming a family.
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  And, you know, this is why a man leaves his father and mother and cleaves to
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  his wife. The story is as old as time.
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  And then going off sacrificially on an adventure and finding deep meaning and
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  purpose in that, I think that calls to us.
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  But there's a lot of work that we need to do if we're going to succeed in helping
• 17:19
  our young people live that out, because there's a lot of cultural headwinds.
• 17:40
  Spirit. You know, when I thought about college, I knew that I wanted to do something that I was ambitious.
• 17:46
  CVO opened my eyes to the opportunities that were out there for me.
• 17:51
  Our model of providing a Christian liberal arts education to those facing economic
• 17:56
  hardship hasn't wavered since 1906.
• 17:59
  Our students graduate debt-free through our work education program.
• 18:03
  They learn how to live a life guided by their faith.
• 18:07
  And as they begin their careers, they've learned how to take their seat at the
• 18:10
  table of influence and open the door of opportunity for others.
• 18:16
  Being an assistant principal has allowed me to pour into kids the way that people
• 18:20
  have poured into me and open up doors and opportunities to things that they
• 18:23
  didn't know were possible.
• 18:25
  We're reawakening the American spirit in the next generation. Will you join us?
• 18:37
  Wow. Wow. That's good. That's good. So I want to back up for a little bit and
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  talk about the kind of the sovereignty structure that you mentioned.
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  You kind of said when a family is operating correctly, it kind of self-preserves or self-protects.
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  And I think what's hard for, you know, especially kind of your more women's
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  lib view or whatever, if you have not experienced that true form, the Godhead,
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  the husbandhead, if you will, the wife submitting,
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  the children underneath that, if you have not experienced that in a beautiful way.
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  I mean, we started off the conversation with the abusive story.
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  And so that's, you know, the opposite.
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  And that submissive never is abusive. No, Christ is never doing that to his church. Yes, never.
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  And so when you really fully experience God as the head of your family and that,
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  unity, the triune of husband, wife, and the Godhead.
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  Everything underneath, your children have more peace.
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  Your marriage is more peaceful. You don't necessarily have, you know, unified every idea.
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  I mean, we were talking off the record of things, you know, you don't agree
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  with, but you're going to be able to come together in a different way.
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  And I think our culture never tells that story.
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  And so like we don't, you know, from the masses don't realize what you're missing or,
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  when you actually have that function properly. Yes. And, you know,
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  sometimes you get pushed back, Christians get pushed back.
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  So you just want the 1950s to come back or you want to go back to some throwback.
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  No, you know, as a Christian, we know that on this side of the eschaton,
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  every person and every period is a work in progress and always can be and should be improved upon.
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  Yeah. So that's the nature of the spiritual life. Yeah.
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  And so there are certainly great goods that existed in the 1950s.
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  There's great goods that exist today.
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  What we want to do is always improve upon wherever we're at.
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  And Christ gives us the ideal example of his sacrificial love for the church, right?
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  And when you unpack, folks who read today Ephesians 5, they either get really
• 21:10
  offended by what Paul directs to women and back gets up.
• 21:16
  I want to put a double click on it, though, because in the ancient world,
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  we don't fully grasp how revolutionary Paul's theology was.
• 21:28
  It's a theology of complementarity.
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  We're equal in dignity before God. We're complementary. We're not the same.
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  And anybody who just grasps the basics of human anatomy knows we're not the
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  same. So we don't need to pretend that we're the same.
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  God has given us a complementary role where we ought to, in a healthy way, depend upon each other.
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  And within Christ's example of his sacrificial love for his bride,
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  like there's a great icon for men to be able to live that out well. And.
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  There's a great icon for women to live this love out as well.
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  A huge thing I think that's a challenge in Christian circles sometimes is that,
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  when we think about this, we engage in the dialectic,
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  kind of reacting to the culture where there's sort of a normative feminist dialectic
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  where we kind of, you know, dump on men.
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  And then pastors engage in that way in a winsome way to then also dump on men.
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  And the reality is running out of this, none of us are getting out of this alive, but none of us are.
• 22:43
  The way that we get out of this is through a re-embrace of complementarity that
• 22:49
  we need each other. We have to get away from the adversarial dialectic between men and women.
• 22:54
  And we'd be willing to name it and point it out on each side because it exists
• 22:59
  on both sides, whether it's Andrew Tate or feminist ideology,
• 23:04
  right? Like there's challenges on both sides.
• 23:07
  One of the most alarming stats recently that came out from Pew is the sea change
• 23:13
  in how young women are thinking about marriage.
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  Okay, this is very recent data that you had a,
• 23:21
  over 20 point reduction in when asked the question of do you something to the
• 23:27
  effect of do you prior to do you aspire to and how important is marriage in your life?
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  We're going from about an 80% to about a 60% of college, I'm sorry,
• 23:38
  high school graduating senior girls saying that it's a priority.
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  Whereas young men, it stayed almost the same over the last 30 years.
• 23:46
  And so that's an example of where.
• 23:51
  Our young women are hearing the words of the world and being discipled by the
• 23:55
  culture on that marriage is a bad idea.
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  Parents accidentally reinforce it. I was just speaking to a group of mostly
• 24:05
  Christian Ivy League college students in D.C. recently.
• 24:10
  And I asked them, you know, how many of you heard from a family member that.
• 24:16
  You know, now's the time to buckle down, get serious about your school, get a great...
• 24:20
  Degree, get maybe an advanced degree, get a career, get your career going.
• 24:23
  Okay. Get, get settled. Yeah. Then look around for, for a spouse.
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  Yeah. About close to 70% of the room raised their hands. And this is,
• 24:31
  this is, these are generally the elite who should hold our general worldview. Yeah. Okay.
• 24:39
  And the re the reality is that that decision delays marriage and increasingly
• 24:46
  makes it likely that you never marry.
• 24:48
  And I shared with them, look, I'm not telling you you need to marry someone
• 24:51
  you meet in college, but I am telling you, you ought not to go into college
• 24:54
  with the decision that you will not marry anybody that you meet in college.
• 24:58
  Yeah. The five-year plan, the 10-year plan. No, you just, you,
• 25:00
  you, there's never a time in your life where you'll meet more,
• 25:04
  you'll be around more young people your age who you can find,
• 25:06
  who share your values, who you will have the time to actually date.
• 25:10
  Yeah. You know, as busy as you think you are where you're 15 credit hours and
• 25:14
  studying really hard, it gets a lot more real when you get out on the other
• 25:18
  side of, you know, when you're collecting a paycheck and you're trying to make
• 25:21
  partner. It'll be a lot harder to date.
• 25:24
  It'll be surrounded by a lot less people your age. And then we get funneled.
• 25:31
  Into, say, a dating app culture. And this is not a moral judgment on dating
• 25:37
  apps in the sense of like, not inherently, there are problematic dating apps
• 25:42
  morally, but there are dating apps that aren't, you know, Christian dating apps.
• 25:45
  Fundamentally, they're all problematic because they all make a consumer good
• 25:51
  out of relationships and create a feeling of optionality that's always there.
• 25:57
  There's always a swipe another time and it reduces commitment.
• 26:01
  So as you've seen an explosive growth of people meeting online,
• 26:06
  the amount of marriage keeps getting less and less because we're sort of imagining
• 26:10
  that there's this perfect person out there. And the reality is none of us are perfect.
• 26:14
  And there's a lot of good and great marriages that can exist if we don't think
• 26:16
  that there's something perfect out there. No, wow. That's good. That's good.
• 26:20
  My husband and I are coming up on 18 years, I think.
• 26:25
  I think that's right. I hope that's right. We'll fact check it.
• 26:28
  Yeah, we'll fact check it later. We can edit this, right?
• 26:31
  Yeah, 18 years. And man, there's been so many times that it's very clear to
• 26:36
  me, he's very not perfect and very clear to him that I am very not perfect.
• 26:41
  And it's just, it is something that without putting God as the center,
• 26:47
  that every marriage is always going to fail.
• 26:50
  You know, at some capacity, something is going to happen if we don't have God at the center.
• 26:55
  I mean, there's crazy situations where they get through life and they're married
• 26:59
  50 years without the Lord, but it's just, it's a sad thing knowing maybe the
• 27:03
  striving that had to go through or the sacrifice of,
• 27:08
  you know, maybe setting their own needs aside and not fully coming together
• 27:12
  and in perfect unity with that.
• 27:15
  Yeah, and just reflect on one dimension of why that, what can fit...
• 27:21
  How the Christian life can influence the health of our marriages.
• 27:25
  In the Christian walk, a big part of a spiritually healthy Christian is cultivating gratitude.
• 27:32
  We're grateful for all the blessings in our life. We're grateful.
• 27:36
  We spend time in prayer, hopefully at the end of each day, and we reflect on
• 27:41
  all the goods that have occurred.
• 27:43
  And even learning spiritually to be grateful for the challenges and for the
• 27:47
  setbacks and the hardships and the suffering, that these are all,
• 27:51
  God also can use these and uses these for great good.
• 27:54
  Well, think about that in our own marriage, right?
• 27:58
  A huge skill that the, there's an area of marriage and relationship education,
• 28:02
  it's an academic, secular field,
• 28:04
  would say like one of the keys to successful marriages is the skill,
• 28:10
  intrapersonal skill, an inward skill of appreciation.
• 28:14
  Okay? And.
• 28:17
  Like, if I cultivate that appreciation of my spouse, right, you know,
• 28:22
  taking a moment instead of immediately going, he didn't unload the dishwasher,
• 28:26
  or didn't get that into the,
• 28:30
  into the, into the washing machine or didn't pick up, you know, his socks or vice versa.
• 28:35
  Stuff that a woman might do. Okay.
• 28:38
  Um, if that is, if that is, uh, seasoned daily with like the things that I reflect
• 28:45
  on that I'm so grateful for in my wife, in my husband,
• 28:49
  you know, I'm so glad he got, you know, he, he, he's working hard,
• 28:53
  uh, to contribute to the family.
• 28:56
  He's, he's, he is, uh, I'm, I'm, I'm grateful that he, he grabbed that,
• 29:00
  you know, he picked up the kids from after practice when I couldn't, or I did.
• 29:05
  But that is an example of a skill that the Christian walk naturally reinforces.
• 29:12
  And so people that don't have the gospel don't practice gratitude in the same way, right?
• 29:20
  And it can have a spillover. And actually, it's also a singular example of how,
• 29:25
  good ministry around marriage can take someone who's not fully on board yet with the gospel.
• 29:31
  Okay and maybe a a new christian or not yet a christian and and by cultivating
• 29:37
  these skills you can start to point people to the gospel right so that they start to cultivate this,
• 29:44
  this skill of appreciation and realize that it's actually this is good because
• 29:48
  it's pointing to something uh greater yeah and and so uh.
• 29:53
  No that's amazing um i think i i read that you share kind of the same ideas,
• 29:58
  Mia, the importance around the family table.
• 30:01
  Let's talk on that for a second. Yes. Yeah. You know, family,
• 30:06
  you know, mealtime is the most important time for us as a family. And, uh,
• 30:13
  I grew up with it. You know, you could get in trouble for a lot of things.
• 30:18
  But if you miss dinner as a kid, that was like, there's like,
• 30:22
  you might as well have robbed a bank. I mean, it was, that was the worst thing you could possibly do.
• 30:26
  So, so we've tried to make a culture of always having family dinners,
• 30:30
  but knowing that there's seasons of the year, quite literally,
• 30:34
  where there's basketball practice and, you know, football practice and what have you.
• 30:37
  And it's not always easy. And so there's times where it doesn't happen seven
• 30:41
  days a week because of this and that. but whenever it can happen, it always happens.
• 30:46
  And so, and the cool thing about that is some of our newest research is reinforcing
• 30:52
  why this is so important.
• 30:53
  So we- It's not a new concept. No. Come to find out. No, no.
• 30:57
  Gather around the table, break bread together. I mean, it- No, totally.
• 31:02
  And this is how we can have a, it's a, you know, using the modern expression,
• 31:06
  a platform. It's a great platform to disciple your children.
• 31:10
  And it's also a great platform to reinforce not the child-led home,
• 31:13
  but the marriage-led home.
• 31:15
  So husband and wife can actually engage in conversation together in front of
• 31:18
  the kids, and then also engage in conversation with the kids.
• 31:23
  On our website, it's free to download. There's a pastor's guide based on some
• 31:27
  new research we co-authored with a group of scholars at Harvard University.
• 31:33
  And the guide is intended to help parents pass on the Christian faith to their kids.
• 31:40
  And so we had the survey instrument that we were able to borrow from the Harvard
• 31:45
  team from the Global Flourishing Survey that asked an adult in church about
• 31:50
  their childhood and about their parenting and about themselves.
• 31:54
  So in a certain sense, it was a snapshot on three generations.
• 31:58
  Their parents, themselves, and
• 32:00
  their kids. And we're trying to understand influences on faith practice.
• 32:05
  And one of the biggest ones, the biggest one that we found, was having frequent,
• 32:11
  open conversations with your kids that encourage their Christian faith.
• 32:15
  That is sort of like a superpower behavior.
• 32:18
  And it's a superpower behavior that a single parent, married parent,
• 32:21
  a grandparent can engage in.
• 32:24
  And you can start doing it today. Yeah. And there's fun ways you can do it.
• 32:27
  Yeah. I've been practicing, you know, having, you know, co-written the research,
• 32:31
  I've tried to put it to practice in my own family.
• 32:34
  And, you know, you ask questions and you don't need to be a theologian.
• 32:37
  You know, if your kids have Sunday school, just ask them after,
• 32:40
  you know, what were some of the things that you did in Sunday school?
• 32:42
  Sure, sure. It can be as simple as that. Ask them about it. Yeah.
• 32:45
  Okay. What do you think about the sermon today? Yeah. Right?
• 32:47
  That can be a simple thing if you're bringing them to church.
• 32:50
  So you're saying this novel idea to actually communicate with your kids.
• 32:53
  It's crazy. It is wild. Have an influence and involvement in their life? Yes.
• 32:57
  Yes, exactly. Exactly. This is crazy. It is wild. You heard it.
• 33:01
  Let me get back to my Twitter feed. Anyways, no, but yes, that's right.
• 33:07
  So one of the ones I've started to ask as just trying to be creative,
• 33:11
  I asked my kids, you know, if you could go back in time and be there for one
• 33:15
  biblical event, like you could see it.
• 33:17
  What would you? And I'll ask him a different time. So I was in the car with
• 33:21
  my 13-year-old, 10-year-old sons. And my six-year-old daughter.
• 33:26
  And I ask them. And the 13-year-old, oh, man, I'd love to, I'd want to be there
• 33:30
  for David and Goliath. That's like, great.
• 33:32
  Like, I'd love to see that David just take that guy out. That's a good one.
• 33:36
  And we were talking about it for a little bit.
• 33:38
  And then my 10-year-old says, I'd want to be there.
• 33:43
  I'd want to be there. Storm. I'd want to see Jesus walk on the water.
• 33:49
  I want to see that. We should talk about that for a few minutes.
• 33:52
  And then, um, then my six-year-old says, yeah, I want to be there for Cain and Abel.
• 34:00
  Like, I go, wait, what? It's like, yeah. Like, I want to go,
• 34:04
  I want to go to Cain and go, why did you do that? What's wrong with you?
• 34:09
  And then I would slap him.
• 34:13
  So that's funny. It leads to, you know, there's different ways you can have,
• 34:16
  you don't have to have, have, you don't need to be a theologian.
• 34:22
  You can have these conversations.
• 34:24
  You can have fun with them. And then as when they grow up, they're going to
• 34:28
  remember this. And what it shows is in our research, if you have these conversations weekly.
• 34:34
  And by the way, nothing else in the survey had this kind of replicability.
• 34:38
  This, if you said you had it doing this weekly, you're two and a half time higher
• 34:42
  odds of doing that weekly with your own kids than all other churchgoers.
• 34:48
  Then if you reported doing it daily, it was nearly eight times higher odds of
• 34:54
  doing that same thing with your kids than all other churchgoers. Wow.
• 34:57
  So, and it's this kind of simple discipleship where the faith is actually truly shared, right?
• 35:06
  Where it helps our kids to be able to be formed in it and choose to follow Jesus as they grow up.
• 35:14
  Yeah, that's incredible. That's such a good reminder. It's such a tangible,
• 35:19
  easy thing that you guys can do right now.
• 35:21
  So I really appreciate that. The guide has some prompts too in it.
• 35:26
  So we suggest some ways for parents to be able to have these conversations.
• 35:29
  That's great. Spoon fed. That's even better. That's really awesome.
• 35:33
  Before we lose time, I want to make sure we talk about your latest book.
• 35:36
  Yes. Yeah. Yes. End game. The church's strategic move to save faith and family
• 35:41
  in America. I love that. And it's for pastors.
• 35:44
  It's for anybody who's very involved in their church.
• 35:47
  Okay. Because the church is a solution to the marriage crisis,
• 35:51
  the family crisis. Yeah.
• 35:52
  Has three parts. First part makes the case that religious non-affiliation and,
• 35:58
  the rise of that is all wrapped up in the decline of marriage.
• 36:03
  And the decline of the married family has caused it.
• 36:06
  And there's lots of good data on that.
• 36:10
  And then how Christianity spread was through a revolutionary treatment of women and marriage.
• 36:18
  That women and men had equal dignity in the Christian world where that didn't
• 36:23
  exist in the ancient world.
• 36:25
  Women flocked to it. Christian marriage changed the world.
• 36:28
  Okay. And so then it goes, okay, it's breaking down. Why?
• 36:32
  We're going to the decoupling and the second section goes into some,
• 36:36
  what does a healthy relationship look like, you know, for parents, kids?
• 36:40
  And then the last section of the book is, okay, what can the,
• 36:44
  what can the church do about it?
• 36:45
  What does a world-class ministry around relationships that encourage marriage
• 36:49
  and for marriage look like in the local church? Yeah. Yeah. That's great. That's great.
• 36:54
  All right. Where can everyone find you? Cominio.org.
• 36:57
  C-O-M-M-U-N-I-O.org. You can, one, buy our book, that book, Endgame there.
• 37:04
  You can download the pastor's guide that I referenced there for free.
• 37:07
  And you can follow me on X at JP DeGantz, and you can sign up for a free newsletter.
• 37:15
  Oh, that's wonderful. Guys, check out his stuff. I'm going to have everything
• 37:18
  in the show notes, make it easy on you.
• 37:20
  So man, it was such a pleasure having you. Great to meet you, Hannah.
• 37:23
  Thanks for doing this. Being in the tree house in Nashville.
• 37:25
  Yes, that's great. Love it, love it. Thank you.
• 37:29
  If today's conversation stirred something in you if you're craving a little
• 37:33
  more quiet a little more presence and a little more jesus in the everyday
• 37:37
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• 37:40
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• 37:45
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• 37:50
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• 37:57
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• 38:01
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• 38:07
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