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Published on the CFADD blog | Format: Formal open letter
To the Pastors, Elders, Denominational Leaders, and Seminary Presidents of the American Church:
Grace and peace to you in the name of Jesus Christ, the Chief Shepherd.
We write to you not as adversaries but as fellow laborers in the Kingdom—men and women who love the Church and believe it remains the most powerful institution on earth for the restoration of families. For generations, the local church was the anchor of the American family. Marriages were forged in covenant. Fathers were called to sacrificial leadership. Children grew up knowing they were held by something larger than themselves.
That legacy is real. And it is fading.
The Silence We Can No Longer Ignore
Today, more than 25 million children in America are growing up without a father in the home. Children from fatherless households account for 63 percent of youth suicides, 85 percent of youth in prison, and 71 percent of high school dropouts. Fewer than half of U.S. adults are married — down from two-thirds in 1950. Pornography addiction is ravaging marriages at an epidemic scale. Gender ideology has entered Sunday School curricula. Divorce among professing Christians mirrors the general population at roughly 18 percent.
These are not political talking points. These are the broken lives sitting in your pews—and the millions more who have stopped coming altogether.
And yet, from too many pulpits, there is silence. Not the silence of ignorance — the silence of calculation. A silence that asks, "What will this cost us in attendance?" In donations? A silence that has replaced prophetic courage with institutional comfort.
We call this the Empty Pulpit—not because no one stands behind it on Sunday morning, but because on the issues dismantling families, the pulpit has been emptied of its voice.
Where the Church Has Gone Quiet
Let us be specific, because vagueness serves no one:
On divorce, many churches have stopped teaching the permanence of the marriage covenant, settling for therapeutic language that avoids the cost of discipleship.
On fatherlessness, the crisis of absent fathers—the single greatest predictor of poverty, incarceration, and generational despair—is met with sporadic men's breakfasts rather than sustained ministry.
On cohabitation, pastors routinely marry couples who have lived together for years without addressing the spiritual cost, afraid the conversation will drive them away.
On pornography, a plague that destroys intimacy, too many churches treat it as an awkward footnote rather than a pastoral emergency requiring open teaching and accountability.
On gender ideology, a framework that denies the Creator's design of male and female is capturing children and adolescents, while churches debate whether to address it at all.
Each silence is a concession. And every concession feeds what we at CFADD call the Great Family Deconstruction — the cultural and spiritual dismantling of the family unit that God ordained as the foundation of human civilization.
Silence Is Not Neutrality—It Is Surrender
Brothers and sisters, we understand the pressures. Pastors face threats of lost membership, social media backlash, denominational politics, and personal exhaustion. We do not minimize these burdens.
But we must speak plainly: when the shepherds are silent, the wolves do not rest. Every year the church declines to address this crisis is another year that hundreds of thousands of children lose their fathers and young people absorb a worldview that tells them the family is an outdated concept.
Research from Harvard's Human Flourishing Program shows that church attendance is associated with a 50 percent reduction in divorce. Eighty percent of adults in church on any given Sunday grew up with continuously married biological parents.
The data is unambiguous: the church, when it engages, is the most effective family-strengthening institution in existence. The tragedy is not that the church lacks power. The tragedy is that too much of the church has chosen not to use it.
The Great Family Reconstruction Begins Now
This letter is not a condemnation. It is a call.
CFADD—Christian Families Against Destructive Decisions—exists to mobilize the body of Christ for the Great Family Reconstruction: a biblical, unflinching movement to rebuild what has been torn down. We are not asking the church to become a political organization. We are asking the church to be the church—to preach the full counsel of God on marriage, family, sexuality, and parental responsibility without apology.
We invite you to respond:
Preach it. Commit to a sermon series on the biblical family within the next 90 days.
Partner with us. Join the CFADD Pastoral Alliance and gain access to resources, research, and a network of leaders who refuse to be silent.
Assess your congregation. Use our Family Health Diagnostic to understand where your church families are struggling—and build ministry around the real needs.
Sign the Reconstruction Covenant. A public declaration that your church will prioritize family restoration as a core mission, not a side program.
Visit cfadd.org/pastors to take the first step.
The pulpit was never meant to be empty on the issues that matter most. Fill it. The families in your community — and a generation of children — are waiting.
In service to families and His Kingdom,
[Apostle Tommy E. Quick] Executive Director, CFADD — Christian Families Against Destructive Decisions Rebuilding the Family, Restoring the Nation.