The church needs to lead a countercultural movement when it comes to encouraging marriage among young adults and do a better job of discipleship when couples do marry.
That was one of the main takeaways from a panel discussion featuring Roland Warren, President and CEO of Care Net, and authors Ryan Bomberger and JP De Gance at the Colson Center’s National Conference in Indianapolis, Indiana. John Stonestreet, president of the Colson Center for Christian Worldview, moderated the panel discussion, titled “What the Family Reveals About God.”
Watch the Panel: What the Family Reveals about God
The conversation centered on data (presented by De Gance) indicating that married couples share higher levels of happiness than cohabiting couples, and that children of married parents achieve better academically and have greater emotional and physical health. Despite these statistics and others that point to God’s design for the family as society’s best answer, the average age for marriage has crept up to 30 years old.
“For the last 60 years, the family has been in free fall,” De Gance said. “In the West, we are seeing levels of apostasy that we have never seen before.”
De Gance, the co-author of Endgame: The Church’s Strategic Action to Save Faith and Family in Americais the founder and president of Communio, a nonprofit that empowers churches to become evangelistic centers for healthy relationships, marriages, and families.
“The church is still acting like it’s the 1950s in terms of our approach to relationships and marriage,” he said.
De Gance taught a Barna’s study showed how 85 percent of all churches in the United States reported spending $0 annually on marriage and relationship ministry..
“Our churches should really be schools of love where we learn how to live well in relationships and how to live well in marriage,” he said.
Roland Warren laments the mixed messages the Church and the pro-life community send to young people and how career and financial security are often prioritized over marriage: “We don’t want our children to have sex, but we want them to wait until they are 30 before getting married. But we also don’t want them dating a lot of people at the same time. They have to bring the same person to Thanksgiving every year.
Warren shares her own marriage testimony to illustrate the point. As students at Princeton University, Warren and his girlfriend Yvette Lopez are faced with an unplanned pregnancy. When Yvette visited the university’s health services office, a counselor urged her to have an abortion, saying, “How are you going to graduate from Princeton and become a doctor (her dream at the time) with a baby?”
However, the couple decided to have a baby and get married while they were students. Today, Roland Warren and Yvette Lopez-Warren, alumni of Princeton, have two sons and three grandchildren. Yvette became a doctor. Roland earned an MBA.
“By the grace of God, we’ve been married 41 years,” Warren said. “We built it together. We did all the things people say you can’t do.”
Today, the Church needs to focus on marriage. Elderly couples should serve as counselors.
“We should be leaning in, supporting marriage, encouraging marriage,” Warren said. “We have bought the system of things in the world as the most important thing. It is not biblical.”
In his remarks, Bomberger, the author of Not Equal: Civil Rights Gone Wrong, agreed that the Church should be at the forefront of the marriage movement. There needs to be cooperation between the older and younger couple in the process, he said.
Bomberger is the co-founder of RadianceFoundation.org, an organization that sheds light that every human life has a purpose. He recalled how he was once frustrated in a collegiate debate when the pro-life side could not present valid arguments; The experience led his organization to delve into research on fatherhood and family issues.
“We started doing messaging, a billboard campaign [entitled] ‘Fatherhood begins in the womb.’ And we started messaging about the importance of fathers. It is simple but profound. Amazing how simplicity can resonate with people.
“As Christians, we must have answers for the questions that are out there.”
When it comes to marriage and family, Warren says that Christians need to be the keepers of the narrative that was commanded in the Garden of Eden with Adam and Eve, and then attacked by Satan.
“God has a design,” he said. “That was the first community of discipleship.”
“If we, as Christians, live out the Great Commission and the Great Commission within the context of marriage, it will be culturally beautiful.”
