In this episode of A Reasonable Response, Robert Bosley makes the biblical case for families worshiping together in the local church and challenges the modern practice of routinely separating children from their parents during corporate worship.
Drawing from the pattern of Scripture, church history, and his own experience in a congregation filled with families and young children, Bosley argues that age-integrated worship is both biblical and entirely practical. The presence of little children may require patience and grace, but it does not prevent the church from worshiping together.
Rather than accepting age segregation as necessary, Bosley calls churches and parents to recover the historic pattern of bringing children into the gathered assembly of God's people: Bring your children to church.
Join the movement of worshipping together as a family here: https://churchandfamilylife.com/worship-together
I don't think that we should be legalistic about our views about children in the worship service. We agree. We shouldn't be legalistic where God has not spoken about what to do. We're simply calling people to obey the pattern of scripture. That's not legalism, that's just Christian obedience.
Welcome to A Reasonable Response. I'm Robert Bosley, and the purpose of this podcast is to give a reasoned response to issues related to the Christian faith from a Reformed Baptist perspective. And remember, this is not meant to be a replacement for the instruction you should receive at your local church. Rather, this is meant to be an additional resource that we hope is a help and blessing to you. Today we're going to look at an episode of Pastor Grant Castleberry's podcast where he addresses what is known as the Family Integrated Church movement.
Anytime this topic comes up, A consistent pattern is seen where the arguments against family integration boil down to pragmatism. They're not scripturally based arguments. And I think we'll see that today. Especially, we're going to address his charge of legalism, and we want to reveal and show that the idea that this is legalistic is not correct. We're simply calling people to obey what the Bible has said.
The seeker ideals of trying to bring people into the church by entertaining them has infected not only the main worship services, but also the programs that involve youth and children where so much of what happened, I think in the nineties, the eighties, the seventies was not instructing children in the, in the truths that they needed to know. But so much of it was entertaining them and, and, and playing games and trying to gather a crowd as a response to that. A movement came along called the Family Integrated Church. And the movement really was a reaction, I say was in the past tense, it's still a movement, but it was a reaction to the mass apostasy of children being raised in the church, renouncing their faith. And I'm sympathetic to several of the concerns that the people who advocate for a family integrated church are concerned about.
I'm sympathetic to the understanding that the evangelical church has completely mishandled the discipleship of children? There's a lot to respond to here, but I want to focus in primarily on his characterization of the family integrated church model as a reaction. So is the FIC model a reaction to what's happened over the last 30 years or so? Yes and no. Is it a reaction to the issues he points out, the bad emphasis on entertainment and so on and so forth?
Yes, of course. Those are major problems and there needs to be a correction, which he agrees. However, it's more than simply a reaction to the issues that have developed over the last generation. It is also a retrieval. It's a retrieval of the historic Christian churches practice throughout all of history, going back to the very beginning.
Age segregation simply is a modern innovation. It is a modern fad that really appeared on the scene in the middle of the last century, and it is a failed innovation. So family-integrated church, is it a reaction? Yes, but we're also retrieving what Christians have done from the beginning up to the mid-1900s? For that reason, Vodi Bakum, who is now with the Lord and other names, advocated for what was called the Family Integrated Church.
And basically the idea was, is that we should never separate parents and their children in what you might call, and this is their terminology, age segregated ministries. They're taking that idea of integration and segregation, obviously segregation being bad. We should never segregate children from their parents. So this means we shouldn't have a children's ministry, we shouldn't have a junior high ministry, we shouldn't have a high school ministry, we shouldn't have a college ministry, but rather we're going to have the whole church together and we're going to have the whole church together all the time. And in this way, the parents can remain the primary disciple makers of the youth, of the children, and the parents can fulfill these responsibilities.
And we're not going to get sidetracked by youth groups that are entertaining the goats, so to speak, where all sorts of these issues have happened. When Pastor Castleberry summarizes the family-agreed church position, he says, he defines it as, we should never separate parents and the children in age-segregated ministries, so that we shouldn't have children's ministry, junior high ministry, high school ministry, college ministry. And honestly, that's a decent enough definition, I suppose. And he's right, that is the conclusion of the FIC model. You won't have those ministries as a regular part of the gathered church.
My question to him is, where did you learn that you need these ministries? Where did this concept come from that you need to have these different Ministries geared towards these particular age groups and particularly especially dividing up the people so minutely It's separating junior high from high school from college age so on so forth Where did you learn this because it's not scripture The arguments he gives for it that we'll get to here shortly aren't scriptural arguments. But fundamentally, the reason that we here at Church and Family Life advocate for A family integrated church isn't just history, the tradition of the church, though that's important, or simply reacting to the apostasy of the last generation as a consequence of age segregation, though that's obviously important. Fundamentally, the reason we advocate for family integration is because that is built on the question of what has God revealed in His word? What has scripture commanded and told us to do when we come together as a church.
Now, unfortunately, he goes on to make a little bit of a straw man of our position when he says that our position is that we should never segregate children off from their parents. That's a common misinterpretation, it's a common misunderstanding. I don't think he's intentionally misrepresenting us, but this is a common misunderstanding of what we're saying. Now, if you go to the Church and Family Life website, one of the documents we have available is titled, A Declaration on the Complementary Roles of Church and Family. And in this article, under Article 13, the title is, The Biblical Pattern is Age Integration, we read the following, We deny and reject that there is a clear positive and scriptural pattern or positive institution for creating distinct age segregated cultures in the church through age segregated worship and systematic and comprehensive age-segregated discipleship Now if you go to the website, comprehensive is emboldened and underlined because of this common straw man.
Our argument is against comprehensive age segregation. That is age segregation that is the normal, regular weekly pattern of separating children off from their parents and even dividing the children into these various age-based classes and meetings. This is clarified even further in that same document under the definitions section Where the writers define the word discipleship, they write, it is our understanding that it is not always necessary to ensure that every meeting for discipleship is age integrated. So our position has never been and will never be that every single meeting or every single gathering of Christians, whatever the situation, has to be age integrated. We do not say there is never a time for this.
Even right now in our own church, the elders at our church, Scott Brown, the president of Church of Family Life, being one of them who's been making this argument for nearly 30 years, our elders are doing a Friday evening book study through the book of James with the teens and young adults in our church. Our argument is against the regular comprehensive age segregation of the church, not occasional specific age groups or events. So those who advocate for this would say that the children should be, all the children should be in the worship service. Now, there's no scripture reference that directly states that. So this cannot be a Christian law, so to speak.
This cannot be something that we mandate. But yet in some ways, I think, and this is where I think those who advocated for the family integrated church went too far, is they told people, you must do this, you should do this, you should not ever separate your children from the parents in the worship service. And I think that's where it got dangerous because I never think that we should hold forth a law over people's head that is not directly or implicitly taught in scripture. Now, I agree, we must not make laws where God has not spoken. Yes and amen, absolutely.
We firmly agree that we cannot bind people's consciences over what God has not said. We agree with what our own confession, the 16 and 9 Confession says in chapter 21, paragraph 2, God alone is Lord of the conscience and has left it free from the doctrines and commandments of men, which are in anything contrary to His word or not contained in it. We hold to the regulative principle of worship. We don't get to make up things that God has not said. And He's right that there is no direct command for family integration in the Bible, at least in the sense that we don't read anything from like the apostle Paul saying, when you gather, you must have all the little children with you.
But the reality is that we do in fact see commands, especially in the Old Testament, for the family to be brought together, including the young children, which we'll look at a little bit more in a second. But however, he's simply wrong when he says that it's not even implicitly taught by inference in the scripture. We are going to look at a number of passages here in a second. And obviously Pastor Cassilary and I would agree on the necessity of parents, especially fathers, to instruct their children. So there are a ton of passages we can go to that deal with family worship and the family being a unit that comes together before the Lord in a private setting.
So we're going to skip over the passages that deal with what we would typically call today family worship or family devotions. But I do want to look at a few passages throughout the Bible that do show, at least we have to agree by inference, that the expectation is children will be with their parents when the congregation of the saints are gathered together. Starting with Deuteronomy 31, 10 through 13, we read, Moses commanded them, saying, at the end of every seven years, at the appointed time and the year of release, at the feast of tabernacles, when all Israel comes to appear before the Lord your God in the place He chooses, you shall read this law before all Israel in their hearing. Gather the people together, men and women and little ones, and the stranger who is within your gates, that they may hear and that they may learn to fear the Lord your God and carefully observe all the words of his law, and that their children who have not known it may hear and learn to fear the Lord your God. Part of the purpose of gathering together is so that the children may learn to fear God.
The children gather with the parents. And Joshua 8, 34 and 35. And afterward he read all the words of the law, the blessings and the cursings, according to all that is written in the book of the law. There was not a word of all that Moses had commanded which Joshua did not read before all the assembly of Israel with the women, the little ones, and the strangers who were living among them. In Joel chapter 2, 15 and 16, blow the trumpet in Zion, Consecrate a fast, call a sacred assembly, gather the people, sanctify the congregation, assemble the elders, gather the children and nursing babes.
Let the bridegroom go out of his chamber and the bride from her dressing room." So the picture here is a time of national repentance and they gather together at this extraordinary solemn assembly. And he even specifies, bring the nursing babies. There's no thought that they're going to be a distraction to the people's hearing the word or even a distraction to their repenting. It's expected that the children will be there. This is a solemn assembly to gather the people before the Lord.
And we could go to other passages, Ezra 10, Nehemiah 12. There are all sorts of other passages. In the New Testament we've got Ephesians 6, 1-4, and it's parallel in Colossians 3.20 where the Apostle Paul directly addresses the children. Children obey your parents in the Lord. He doesn't say, parents, tell your children to obey you.
He directly addresses the kids. And this is significant because when the apostle wrote his letter, he knew it was going to be read in the gathering of the church. And so he writes directly to the children because he assumes that the children will be present to hear it read and hear the Apostles speaking to them directly. The pattern is clear and unmistakable. Children, even nursing babies, are present with the people of God in gathered worship.
And this hasn't changed in the New Covenant. As I said, the Apostle Paul directly addresses children. If this isn't an implicit teaching of family integration, I don't know what could be. And also, Pastor Castleberry does not hold to this standard consistently. If we're going to toss out everything that is merely taught by inference in Scripture, then we have to throw out large sets of systematic theology because there are a number of things that we agree on that are taught in Scripture by inference, at least in the sense that there's no single verse that lays out everything in a doctrine.
For instance, the fact that we gather and worship on Sunday, which our confession calls the Lord's Day, that is an inference and I think a right one drawn out from the New Testament, but there's no specific command that we must meet every Sunday morning. Or something even more substantial like the doctrine of the Trinity, the absolute foundation of our faith. There is no single verse that says you must worship God as three persons existing in one essence. But we look throughout all of scripture and we see bits and pieces that come together and by inference the Only real conclusion we can come to is that God exists as a Trinity. So making your doctrine and deriving your practice based off of inference is a perfectly valid and even necessary part of theology and the life of the church.
And if we hold age segregation to the same standard, we have to ask, where is it directly or even indirectly and inferentially taught? The answer simply is nowhere. You will search in vain in the pages of Scripture to find a passage that gives a clear defense of separating children from their parents. And this is why the arguments used to positively support the age-segregated ministries of the Church are almost always pragmatic arguments supported by anecdotes and emotion, not Scripture, which is what we see in the upcoming arguments. We believe children that are six and under are better served by being taught the truth of scripture at their age level.
In other words, when I'm preaching on Sunday morning, I'm preaching primarily to an adult. I'm really probably teaching at a high school level. So I'm teaching to where the average high school educated person can understand what I'm saying. So obviously in that people that are college educated or have a master's, PhD, it's more basic than their level of education, but for children and youth, it's higher up. So I'm trying to teach at that level.
And for that reason, what I'm teaching is most likely over the heads of what most three, four, five, and six year olds are going to be able to understand. That doesn't mean, listen, when I say that, I know some people are going to are going to say, well, my four year old is picking things up from from the sermon. And that's true. I hope so. I pray so.
I certainly know that that I was picking things up when I was three, four or five. But but what I'm saying is, is that what is being taught in the children's church, so to speak, is being taught at their level. And so that the child, I believe, is gonna take away a lot more from the children's church than they are going to take away from my sermon just because what is being taught in our children's church is being taught at their level. I hope you notice that he's inconsistent even with his own standard. If he is doing as he says and including all the kids that are seven years old and older, but teaching at a high school level, then isn't his teaching largely going over the heads of the seven to 15 year olds, just as much as the six year olds.
Why arbitrarily make that dividing line between the six and the seven year olds? It's very strange to me. And he also just kind of waves his hand and dismisses the assertion that the young kids are going to hear some parts of a sermon that's even at a much higher level than they can understand. But he acknowledges that that is true. And in acknowledging that, he is really refuting his own point that there's no reason to have the kids in the church Our argument is never that young kids are going to understand everything in a sermon Our argument isn't that the adults understand everything in a sermon.
That's not the point. How do you determine what level someone is at, what level the sermon is at, and what people are going to understand? You don't know that. How are you going to make this determination? How Do you not see that some kids are perhaps more advanced for their age than you might expect?
Why are you going to punish them by removing them from the congregation? What about adults who aren't high school educated and you're still speaking over their heads? Should they be removed? If you're gonna be consistent, I would think you'd have to be. It's all incredibly arbitrary.
And also, I'll just say from my own experience, I have yet to see children that consistently go to children's church who grasp the Bible and its doctrines as well as the children who have been raised in family integrated churches. The idea that children are going to get more out of a children's church session that's supposedly at their level, I've not seen any evidence of that. Now, ultimately, Pastor Castleberry is presenting simply a pragmatic argument, but even pragmatically, his argument fails. The last 50 years or so has seen a dramatic collapse of Bible literacy in America, which he asserts he agrees with. And this is at least partially, if not primarily due to, age segregation and attempting to teach children at their level, which usually simply involves and devolves into playing games, having snacks, and doing a short devotional that merely skims the surface of the biblical text.
This isn't teaching kids at their level, it's setting them up for apostasy. And I can also speak from personal experience. I accepted Christ as a young boy and that's because of the death of my father. But I remember being bored out of my mind when I was four or five, six years old, because I did not understand what was being said from the pulpit. And I remember it just, you know, when you're that young, you just don't have the vocabulary to even understand what's going on.
Obviously, if you hear a story that stays with you, I remember hearing a story about a pastor, this is when I was four or five, he was out mowing the yard and he wanted some lemonade and he saw what he thought was lemonade, but it was really pesticide that his wife had put out and he drank it. I remember that story. I don't remember anything else. Boredom isn't the worst problem for a kid. Kids can learn to be bored.
That's okay. When you're saying that the problem with church and the reason that kids aren't learning the Bible is because they're bored, you're functionally equating learning with being entertained while at the same time rightly criticizing the entertainment culture of much of the modern church. He's really talking out two sides of his mouth. I don't understand how he doesn't see the inconsistency. But at the end, your own sin, if you think boredom is a sin, and the failure of your parents to discipline you to make you sit still isn't the standard by which we just reorganize how the church functions.
But also, you'll not find a single family in a great church advocate who thinks preachers shouldn't be engaging the children during the service. The sermon should be crafted to speak to all ages, including the small children. And this doesn't have to be a separate children's directed sermon like he and his wife talk about, though it can, but I think it's probably better when it's just a natural part of the preaching where the application and even calling attention to the children to listen to the preaching, it's directed to everyone because they're all together, just like the apostle did when he wrote to Ephesus and Colossae. One of the things that I hear from those that do advocate for the family integrated church is that they need to be the only ones teaching their children and then obviously the pastor. What you miss with that is that God has gifted in his church, and you can read about this in 1 Corinthians 12, Romans 12, Ephesians 4, various members of the body of Christ with different gifts.
So again, he mis-represents or misunderstands the FIC position. We never say that only parents and only pastors can ever teach the children. That's not what we believe. We readily recognize that many people have teaching abilities and some are even uniquely gifted to teach children. That doesn't then mean that we make the next jump that he's making and say that we create new church offices or new meetings of the church out of thin air and give these people titles in order for them to exercise these teaching gifts.
Teaching happens in other circumstances than just the sermon. Teaching can happen in times of fellowship, after the service, before the service, meals, even just times of families getting together. There are many times and many different ways that people can exercise their gift of teaching, even little ones, youths, teens, all this, that doesn't require separating them from their parents. Parents also need to be taught. Parents also need to be taught.
Parents also need to be taught. And what I notice, and you see a lot when you're preaching, and it's amazing when you're preaching, every preacher knows this, is that there's multiple conversations that are taking place in your head as you're preaching. You're thinking about what you're gonna say, you're thinking about what you're saying as you say it, and you're also studying the congregation. And you notice things that are going on within the congregation. One of the things that I notice is that when parents sometimes, not always, but sometimes when parents have small children, they are spending all of their time trying to keep their children focused and not moving around and not making noise, so much so that they're not able to focus on the message.
Yes, parents need to be taught, absolutely. And this is a very real concern that we readily acknowledge. Children can be a distraction. Children can distract their parents. I have seven of them myself.
I'm well aware of that. I'm also well aware that there are many other things that can distract us from the preaching. The simple fact is no one has a perfect attention span or perfect recall. We all get distracted, we miss things, we forget parts of the sermon. That's simply natural.
We are human, we are finite, we are limited. Taking kids out of the service does not remove this problem, And it may not help at all when you consider how many parents are now gonna be sitting there wondering if their kids are behaving in children's church or something. Regardless, the sermon isn't meaningless if you don't catch every single word of it. The preaching is more than a lecture. And I know that this can be difficult, especially for women who are gonna be the primary ones taking care of little babies and who will require the most attention.
I know it's difficult, but it's not impossible. I also don't see how the proposed solution to distracted parents missing part of the sermon is to cause multiple adults to go out and miss the sermon entirely because they're working the nursery or children's church. It, That doesn't seem like a real better situation to me. And again, the preaching is not all that there is to worship. Of course, that's central to our worship.
We believe that The scriptures are our primary purpose for gathering the church together, but that's not all there is to worship. Everything that we do should be what God has appointed and what God has ordained to be means of grace to his people. We are partaking of God's grace when we are gathered together and singing and in prayer, the recitation and reading of Scripture, not just the preaching, and of course, the ordinances or the sacraments. All of these things are ways that God strengthens His people. We are not only receiving God's grace when we have an uninterrupted attention span on the sermon.
I was thinking about this. When you look at the Old Testament saints, when they would gather, There's evidence that they would not bring in the real little children that they knew could not listen and follow along because they understood that those who were there also needed to hear a word from God. So let me give you an example. This is Nehemiah chapter eight, verse two. Nehemiah records that Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly.
And he says, both men and women, and all who could understand what they heard on the first day of the seventh month were assembled. So both men and women and all who could understand what they heard. That's because the parents needed to be taught. They needed to be able to listen. Of course he brings up Nehemiah 8 and It's simply astounding to me to hear this argument over and over again.
I guess Pastor Castleberry is not the only one who appeals to Nehemiah 8 as a justification for age-segregated ministry. This is consistently the only passage of Scripture that advocates for dividing the family go to as a scriptural basis for their view. And it's absolutely wild to me that he says there's evidence that the Israelites wouldn't bring the quote, really little children to the gathering when, as we read earlier, there's passage after passage that says exactly the opposite. And when you actually read this passage, it doesn't say that the children weren't there. And the reason he gives is that the children are not here, he thinks, so that parents can pay better attention.
None of it's in the passage. Let's look at it. Nehemiah 8, 2 and 3. So Ezra the priest brought the law before the assembly of men and women and all who could hear with understanding on the first day of the seventh month. And then he read from it in the open square that was in front of the Water Gate from morning until midday, before the men and women and those who could understand, and the ears of all the people were attentive to the book of the law.
Now, right out of the gate, note that this entire argument he makes rests on a particular interpretation of the phrase, all who could hear with understanding, and those who could understand. The passage never mentions children explicitly. It never says that those who can understand are left out so that the rest would be able to understand. That the parents are leaving the children out so they can pay better attention to Ezra. That's not what's said.
Now it's true that most commentaries do take those who could adhere with understanding as referring to small children, but I don't actually think this is right. If you look just a few chapters later you learn that because of the failure of the people to keep God's covenant stipulation and not intermarry with unbelievers, a significant portion, half of the children didn't know Hebrew anymore. Nehemiah 13, 23-24 speaks of this. It says that they spoke literally Ashtadite, the language of Ashtad, and this is a generic catch-all term it seems for non-Hebrew language, as verse 24 says that they spoke one or other of the languages of the people. Now, I'm all for family integrated worship, but no one's for language integrated worship.
It seems to me that the idea here is not that they removed the little ones per se. They didn't take out the children as such. Rather, they didn't include the children, or even the adults, who didn't know the language. But honestly, even if you don't buy that argument, and you do think it's talking about a level of intellectual development and their capacity, not their understanding of Hebrew. You still can't prove comprehensive age segregation from this passage.
If you appeal to this, the passage proves too much. By this standard, you have to remove not only the babies, but all the children who won't understand the message, and arguably a good number of the adults, since every preacher knows that not everyone understands everything that's contained in a sermon. And also, what about new converts? Are we going to have to remove them because they're not going to understand everything that's contained in a sermon. Ezra was reading from the law of God how many Christians today by this standard would have to be removed because they wouldn't have the right categories in their mind to really understand what Ezra is speaking about.
If you remove everyone who won't perfectly understand what is being said in the sermon, you're going to have a very small congregation. Now, I know the argument that will be made against me is, well, those who could hear with understanding is simply referring to young children. Okay, even if you grant that, though it's never said, that phrase is never used to describe children anywhere in the Bible, I'll even grant that to you. At best then, what you can defend is the practice of separating children in extraordinary situations, not the regular meeting of God's people. Consider what's happening here.
Ezra has gathered the people out at the gate and is teaching them and reading from the law for something like six hours straight. This isn't the normal weekly gathering of the saints. You cannot justify recurring weekly age segregation, Sunday school, children's church, whatever, from this one extraordinary singular event, especially in light of other passages like Joshua 8, 30-35, or Joel 2, 15-16, that explicitly call for the children, even nursing babies, to be brought to the gathering of the people. So justifying aid segregation from so-called Nehemiah's nursery just doesn't work. I love the fact that we have so many young families, so many young families with a lot of kids.
It's wonder, it's a blessing and I love it. I love it, I love it, I love it. So I say all that before I say this number four, but I think it needs to be said, is that loud children can also distract those who desperately need to hear the word of God. So again, he makes another common pragmatic argument, but again, this is an argument that doesn't really prove what he needs it to to justify comprehensive age segregation. We agree if a child is being a distraction and being disrupted to the service, take them out.
No one that I've ever seen, met, or heard from a family integrated perspective would say, no, children can never be taken out of the gathered worship, even if they're crying and throwing a fit. That's simply not what we believe. For us at our church, we have a nursing mother's room, not a nursery, but a room where mothers can bring babies or children who are being loud. And we also have a foyer, like at the King's Chapel, where you can still hear the sermon. The audio is being brought in so those who go out can still hear what's being said.
Now I get this can be difficult for the church to get used to if this is a new idea, and it can be difficult for the parents even to recognize when it's time to remove their children. I get it. But it's not part of our position to say that loud children just need to be left in no matter what. No, if the kids are making a racket, take them out, speak to them, give discipline as appropriate, calm them down, and get them back into the service as soon as possible. And this is where the elders of the church need to step in, older wise saints need to step in and gently instruct parents on being better at promptly responding to their kids outbursts and to instruct the rest of the church to be patient with these new parents and their noisy kids.
Now he describes seeing the whole church lose its focus and start looking around at kids making noise and parents who are slow to bring them out. And I simply have to say here, pastor, instruct your church. Your people need to learn to be gracious and patient with these children and with these parents. And he does go on to talk about that. So I understand his point, but he says this is an element of thinking of others more highly than yourself for bringing the kids out of service.
Well that cuts both ways. Those people who are so easily distracted by these children who are making noise, they need to think more highly of others than themselves and recognize that the gathered church isn't only for you to sit and have your uninterrupted time. There's more to the worship of God than you sitting undistractedly. I don't think that we should be legalistic about our views about children in the worship service. What I mean by that is I don't think, let's say that you have the opinion that the family must always worship together.
You've bought into the family integrated mindset. Or you believe like we do that it's perfectly fine and good and helpful to have a children's worship for younger kids. I don't think we need to be legalistic about this and saying, this is the right way and you're wrong and you're in sin. We agree. We shouldn't be legalistic where God has not spoken about what to do.
We're simply calling people to obey the pattern of scripture. That's not legalism, that's just Christian obedience. Our service normally is an hour and a half. It's a long service, but we occasionally have special services That are about 55 minutes to an hour where instead of preaching a sermon It's really a it's really a devotional if I mean honest, it's a 15 to 20 minute devotion and Maybe some people wish that that all my sermons would be that but but I don't think you can actually do Bible exposition like that I think Bible exposition I heard MacArthur say one time that to really do Bible exposition, it needs to be 40 minutes or longer. And I would agree with that, because by the time you explain the context and you're really going through a text, it takes time to unpack it and to pull it out.
But we do have shorter services, and those services normally we do not offer childcare. And those services are great opportunities to come with your whole family and to worship together. And the babies, many of them are crying, there's children everywhere, and I just preach shorter and louder. So I think that's helpful though, to have those types of services. We do a Thanksgiving service, we do Christmas Eve, Good Friday, family meetings, number of services that are shorter.
He makes a big deal about how long his services are at the King's Chapel with the implication that it's just not realistic to have the kids in a service that is that long. And this is honestly very frustrating to me as it indicates that he really hasn't put much effort into understanding the FIC model or how practical it really is in regular church life. For instance, our church, our services are, our short ones are an hour and a half. They can be almost two hours long. And the sermons are gonna be generally between 45 minutes to an hour or sometimes even longer, depending on who's preaching.
We're fans of expository preaching too. We don't have short little talks. We have long sermons. And I have been in this church for over 10 years. When we came to this church, we had one child, we have seven now from 12 years old to nine months old.
And in over 500 Sunday services, I have never seen anything blow up in the kind of free for all circus that you might expect from the way he describes what will happen if you have all the children in the service. It simply hasn't happened. And honestly, it's not really that hard. Yes, in the moment it can be difficult and it takes training and there is effort and there are seasons where it's harder. Obviously, I don't want to diminish that at all.
But kids can learn. They can learn to sit. They can learn to be still. They can learn to listen, even at a young age. We're not asking them to come out of the sermon and recite it word for word or be a theologian, but they can listen and glean something.
They can sit even for an hour, even for two. I've seen it and I see it every single Sunday, not just with my family, but with dozens of families in our church. And currently we're sitting at about 40 families with children. And typically these are larger families with lots of kids, often lots of little kids. And for 10 years, I can tell you from first-hand experience, it's not been a problem.
It doesn't become some catastrophe where no one hears anything. It can be done, it is done, and God gives the grace to do it. So in conclusion, the family integrated church model is simply the best understanding of how children and families are brought in to the worship of God. It reflects the consistent pattern of scripture. It reflects church history.
And if we're going to be faithful to what God has said, we are going to reject age segregation as a modern innovation that has completely failed. Bring your children to the church. Well that's all the time we have for today. If you'd like to connect with me personally, I'm on X at R Bosley 1689. If you'd like to learn more about church and family life, you can do so at churchandfamilylife.com.
And speaking of families worshiping together, right now Church and Family Life is running a campaign titled We Will Worship Together, where we're encouraging families to join the movement to worship together. And You can find out more in the description. And remember, let your reasonableness be known to all men. Thanks. See you next time.