In this interview, we discuss the impact of the local church on family life. Drawing from decades of watching families, Scott, Jason, and Kevin have specific advice for families regarding their local church involvement.

Hey, welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Let me tell you a couple of things real quick before we get going. Hope you can come to our Theology of the Family Conference at Richcrest, North Carolina, May 20 through 23. Just Before that, a singles conference called Holiness to the Lord, May 19 and 20. Also go to our website.

We have lots of resources, over 5,000. Churchandfamilylife.com. Also, I just published a book called The Family at Church, How Parents Are Tour Guides for Joy. I think this book could really help sweeten your local church experience. Okay, let's get on now with the podcast.

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. I'm Scott Brown and Jason Dome. Here we go again. Here we go again. Okay.

Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture for Church and Family Life for the spread of the gospel across the generations. And this week we are here to discuss local Church life with Kevin Swanson. Hey Kevin! Hi guys, It's good to be with you brothers today. So Kevin Swanson is the pastor at Reformation Church in Elizabeth, Colorado.

He's on the radio every day at Generations. I heard it today. I try to listen to it a lot. Really, really good stuff, Kevin. Man, I appreciate you doing that.

And he is cranking out homeschool curriculum like gangbusters need to go buy all of his books. So Kevin, it's so good to have you with us. It's great to be with you, Scott. I think we've had a partnership for what, 13, 14 years as you have worked on the National Center for Family Integrated Churches, and we brought you on the broadcast, I don't know what, 30 times over the years. I know we've preached all over the world.

We've really had a great time. It's been a joy. It really has. Done a lot of conferences together. I think you've preached at almost every one of my national conferences, and I've just always been so thankful for you.

Okay, so we're here to discuss the impact of the local church on a family drawing really from decades of watching families and having our own families making observations. So this is a really important subject. Hey, you know, I just wrote a book called The Family at Church, where I am really encouraging families to totally dial in to local church life. You know, I'm saying that parents are tour guides for joy in the local church. And, you know, I really do so desire parents to be helping their children understand the beauty of local church life and how much of the gospel they can inject by that involvement.

So Kevin, what are you seeing regarding families and their relationships to local churches? Well Scott, I think I can say I've been you know plugged in with the local churches for my whole life, but more so plugged in with the home education movement, the pro-family movement since the 1970s. I was homeschooled in the 60s and 70s. My folks were tied into some of those early movements as well. And over 50 years of watching families, I think I've seen that one of the big problems among homeschoolers is the separation from the local churches or church hopping or no church is good enough for me.

Some of those mentalities have been extremely damaging through the generations. And as you know, one of my huge passions is that I see my children walking in the truth, my grandchildren walking in the truth. I know that's your passion, and that's the passion of those that are watching this. And what happens is when people separate themselves from the local church, really bad things happen through the generations. They lose their children, they lose their grandchildren, and it's a very damaging thing.

Hebrews 10 really emphasizes the importance of forsake not the assembly of yourselves together, some manner some is. And so much the more as you see the day approaching, we are certainly in the day of tremendous apostasy. And here's one more data point that I think is significant. Over the last 12 to 15 years, if you do the stats on this, you find the evening service has dropped off significantly. There was some 80, 90 percent of churches had evening services in the 70s and 80s on into the 90s, but since then that's dropped off to 20-30%.

I think that's a good indication that people don't care. So they're not assembling themselves together as the manner of some is. And I think this is the most critical time, probably in the history of the nation, that our families connect themselves to the local church, not just in an evening service, but just a commitment to the prayer service of the church, a commitment to the preaching of the church. There's much less of that in this age of apostasy than there was even in the 70s and 80s. And so I've got a huge concern that we're gonna be walking through massive apostasy for the millennial generation and the Gen Zers, largely because parents have not really committed themselves to the local church.

So it's absolutely essential that families commit to the local church. The local church is the body of Christ. Jesus gave his life for the church and he expects us to love the brethren, to forsake not the assembling ourselves together with the brethren. And when people begin to look down their nose at the church, they're looking down their nose at Christ, and he does not receive that well. So I guess my encouragement is that we bring about a real reformation of the family and the church.

See, one of the tensions that's existed between different aspects of church life over the last 30 to 40 years is whether we're passionate for the reformation of the family or whether we're passionate for the reformation of the church. And the answer to that question is yes, we must be passionate about the reformation of both at the same time. If there is not a reformation of church and family both at the same time, there is no reformation. So we need to see a passion for reforming both family and church. And the idea that you can reform just your family, we don't have to worry about where the church goes, that is a recipe for apostasy for your children and for your grandchildren.

That's the lesson I think I've learned over 50 years. So Kevin, Dad obviously starts by teaching his children the maxims from Scripture about how precious the church is to God, for instance, Acts 20, 28, which says that He purchased the church with His own blood. But you obviously don't want to stop with just your children having a head knowledge of it. You really want it coming out of their pores over time, where they're utterly unable to live in any other way except for just a life of devotion to their brethren in a local church. How can a father engage in a way in local church or with certain things in a local church that over time has it coming out of their pores?

That's a great question, Jason. And I want to pattern that love for the church for my children. And I know this is kind of a minor thing, but I sit on the front row of our church. And now that's a really minor thing, but when I go to church, I wanna be all in. I don't wanna be half asleep.

I don't want to be disengaged. I don't want to be critiquing the pastors and the prophesying. We're not to despise the sharing of the word of God. I take the word prophesying in First Thessalonians as just simply the sharing of God's word in any form, teaching, preaching, whatever it happens to be. But when my brothers, and we typically have multiple brothers share on a Sunday morning, typically three, four, five of the brothers will share.

I wanna be all in. I wanna be saying amen. I wanna be applying that to myself. And I wanna show love for my brothers and sisters, especially when we go through conflicts and difficulties. I want my children to see that I'm not growing bitter towards my brothers and sisters.

I'm forgiving them as we walk through this conflict. And ultimately, the church is the body of Christ. And I like to say, well, how do you know how much you love Jesus? Or how do you know how well you're caring for Jesus and washing his feet, or pouring perfume on his feet? How do you do that?

Seeing as he's not here materially or physically, the answer is very obvious. Love me, love my brothers. That's the way Jesus puts it. So if you really are loving Jesus and you really want to pour perfume over His feet, you crack that $15,000 bottle of perfume and you pour that over the feet of your brothers and sisters in Christ in the assembly of the saints and you've done it to Jesus. If you do it to the least of these my brothers, you've done it unto me." So there is an opportunity to love Jesus right here on earth, in church, on Sunday morning, and that's when you love your brothers and sisters, even those who have offended you.

You can forgive them 490 times on any given day, but that's difficult to do. And I think we just, you know, it's a learning curve. We have to grow in our love for our brothers and sisters in Christ. And actually conflicts provide one of the best opportunities to get to that point where we're forgiving, we're having mercy on our brothers and sisters, even as Jesus had mercy upon us. So those are some of the things that I have learned.

I think my children certainly see how I react to some of the difficult situations that have occurred in our church over now 20 years. And they begin to see how much I'm loving the brothers and sisters in Christ. You know on occasion I actually break down in tears as I talk of my brothers and sisters and what God is doing in their lives And I think my children catch that, you know, that I've got a lot bound up in my love for the flock. And I just want to share that with my children. You know, you're talking about, you know, surviving church conflicts.

How important is that? There are so many commands in the Bible to help us to understand how to act, how to think, how to talk in the midst of times like that, but I think you have lots of people who have, well they say they've gotten burned by a local church. And of course the stories are often very complex, but you have so many commands to love and forgive and have mercy and think the best and things like that. I often find it hard to hear people say, well, I got burned, because there's so many commands of Scripture to work your way through that. And I know that does happen.

I know that people in church, pastors, misbehave, and Bad things happen. So I do have compassion But we do have many many commands for how to get through those conflicts that you were talking about Yeah, and there's nothing that we don't go through that we don't read about in the scriptures You know also as good as forsaken me having loved this present world We have you know so many people that just they they turn away from the church They you know they gossip they slander the pastors and the church people and then they run into the world Just like Demas did so you've got that but you also got within the church, you know, people don't treat each other very well, but the disciples didn't treat Jesus very well either as they, you know, denied him, as Peter denied him on the worst day of his life. And so one thing I just keep reminding myself of is a servant is not above his master, so if my master has gone through some difficult times, I'm gonna go through some tough times too in the context of the local church, and that's okay. So I want to go back to something that you had said earlier.

You talked about homeschooling families who have ended up not being connected to local churches. And we had this massive homeschool movement, what a blessing it was that that happened and it's still rolling. And you had vestiges of a family reformation. You had James Dobson and all kinds of people contributing to that. But so you had reform happening in families, you had a shift in education, these were all really helpful things.

Kevin, do you have a theory about where, what caused the disconnect? Because some of these, a lot of these families didn't seem to end up as devoted local church members. Well, I think on the one hand, there's a lot of individuation in America as it is America has the highest divorce rate in the world. By the way, the western states have the highest divorce rate in America. And Colorado Springs has the highest divorce rate in the west, and that is the home of focus on the family.

So There's a lot of ironies there. But I think what happens in American churches, what happens in the whole school movement is we're very individuated. We have a rugged individualism that we think is really cool. But the problem is the Bible doesn't recommend an individuation of human society. The Bible really expresses the importance of covenant and marriage, covenant and family, and covenant and church.

The church itself is a covenant. We come together as a covenant and family of God. And people forget about that in an age of rugged individualism. I like to tell our fellow pastors out here on the Western slopes of Colorado that we're trying to replace rugged individualism with rugged covenantalism. We like rugged, that's good, We'll keep that.

But we need a rugged covenantalism that'll make it through, you know, all the rapids and through all the conflicts. And we're just going to covenant together and love each other and love the Lord through all these conflicts. We'll forgive each other 490 times, and we'll come out of these rapids tighter as a covenant community than we've ever been. So that's one thing. The second thing is I think we have to be cautious with heavy duty patriarchalism where there isn't a desire on the part of fathers to submit themselves to, sometimes they don't even want to submit themselves to the state, you know they're just rebels and anarchists in terms of their politics.

But oftentimes these patriarchal dads don't really want to submit themselves to elders either. We're to submit ourselves one to another in the fear of God. And there should be a measure of submission to the local church and to the pastors in the local church. But we see that that's sometimes almost impossible for some families. Also, I think one other thing that needs to be said is that there is a measure of family idolatry.

And I'm glad that some of the homeschool speakers, I think there's been a number of, Norm Wakefield would be one that wrote a book on it. I think there is a tendency sometimes to to idolize your family or idolize your children. So Kevin, I'm going to do a plug. We have to be cautious with that. You preached at my first 2009 conference on the Suficiency of Scripture.

I had Jeff Pollard give a message called Family Idolatry. It's on our website. It's a great message, but I think anyway, keep going, keep going. Yeah. And, and, you know, I'm really convicted by the words of our Lord Jesus, where he tells us that, you know, we have to hate our own brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers and children, in comparison with our love for him and our willingness to give everything up for Christ as we serve him.

Now I think at the end of the day if we're loving God with our heart, soul, mind, and strength, we're loving Jesus more than everything and everybody else. In the end, we will wind up loving our families even more. So the family idolatry isn't really buying us very much and certainly is an increasing love for one another within the body of the church or within the body of the family. So I think the idolatry issue is a big one and at the point at which we are willing to deny ourselves, love the Lord our God with our heart, soul, mind and strength and give up our lives for the Lord Jesus and for his kingdom, we will find ourselves holding everything else in balance. So that would be the other thing I would say.

It is easy for I think all of us to get fixated on our children or fixated on our families and leave the Lord out of it. And I don't want that. I want to you know worship God with all my heart, soul, mind and strength. I want to put God first and that includes attending the church and putting a value upon worship. This thing that where I'm sorry if I offend too many people, but people who are saying, hey, the family picnic or the family reunion on a Sunday morning is more important than worship or I have my kids in 4-H or we have these ball games or putting family, putting the children ahead of worship is, I think, a good instance, a good example of how people are not loving God first, and this problem of family idolatry is creeping in.

Right. So Kevin and Scott, you're both pastors. If I ask you to just identify the most indispensable family in your church, probably if you're like me, two or three or four families would come to mind, you'd have a hard time distinguishing among them. But they've bought that spot in your mind through engaging the churches that you're serving in a particular way. So, tease that out.

What about them makes them indispensable to you? Well, three things. One is they hang in there, come thick or thin, for 26 years. OK, I've had families that have been with us for 26 years. Now, I'm not saying that's the only thing, but that is huge.

That is core. That is the very substance of the fellowship of the saints, especially in a massively transient age, where There were years in which I felt I was sort of the pastor of the Romani community church where I, you know, you're the Romani or the gypsies where you back your wagon up and you're preaching to a different crowd every week. So there were points in which I kind of felt, you know, is this the Romani community church that we're operating in? But to have people hang in there through thick and thin, through all those conflicts over the long haul, very, very, very encouraging. Secondly, families that show hospitality, that open their homes on a regular basis to visitors as well as members of the church.

That's huge. And then the third thing is those families that lean into the prayer meetings of the church. Not necessarily just the Wednesday night prayer meeting, but we probably have six or seven or eight opportunities for small groups to come together to pray in any given week, including our elder meetings or what have you, but to just have those families or representatives from those families attend the prayer meetings, to me that's the backbone of the church. If you need a backbone of the church, that's the prayer life of the church. So people that are leaning in and realizing that spiritual enemies that are surrounding the church, there's a huge spiritual burden that we need to take before the Lord, and they're willing to lift the hands of the prophet and really engage that work in prayer, that, my friends, is gold for the church.

Absolutely. Hey, I just say big amen on all of those, Jason. I think that's the list. Kevin, I want to go back to something you said. I want to go back to rugged covenantalism here for a minute.

So I want you to unpack that a little bit. You know, some people might call that church membership and things like that, but I have you talk to us about rugged covenantalism. Well, rugged covenantalism first and foremost is the commitment to forgive one another and to prefer one another and to humble ourselves before each other to make it through those conflicts. We like to call them the number five rapids along the rivers of relationship. We'd really want to be able to make it through that.

And it does take a tremendous amount of rugged covenant. In fact, if you've ever ridden the rapids, one thing you know is you can't stand up in the middle of the boat and beat your chest as you're flying through a number five waterfall rapid. Don't ever do that. The guide will always tell you, what you need to do is you need to kneel down in the boat and everybody lean into the center of the boat. That's what the guide will tell you when you run through rapids.

And whatever you do, don't jump out of the boat. You will kill yourself. You see how that might apply to church membership? You know, whatever you do, don't get out of the boat now. But the sad thing is that, you know, people in the midst of conflict, when there's that, you know, crazy spiritual attack on the church, people just like to fly, fly out and try to avoid it.

But that's not the moment to get out of the boat. That's the moment to humble yourself, that is, kneel down and then lean in together and I would say pray through the conflict as the body of Christ. And you'll come out stronger than ever on the other side. So I think that's the best picture I can give you, Scott, for rugged covenantalism is. It's hanging in there through thick and thin and loving the brothers and sisters in Christ.

Love that bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, and endures all things. That's what you're looking for. And God willing to give you that opportunity. I did a wedding last week, and one of the things I said was, it's not your emotions that'll keep you together, it's your covenant. And That's why in our church and in your church we have a church covenant.

We enter into covenant with one another so that we're not tossed about by every wind of emotion or change. There are particular things that we're committing ourselves to when we enter into church membership. And of course, people don't like church membership today. They think, many think it's unbiblical, and of course we do think it's biblical because God has made a covenant with us and we make a covenant with Him, and we make a covenant with one another to behave in a particular way in his church. So it's critical that people are held into a church by more than their pastor's performance, than their own emotions, by how somebody treated them, how somebody ignored them, or they didn't feel connected or whatever it is.

There has to be something greater than your own personal experience to hold you in. And I think you need to be able to shepherd a rugged covenantalism through as well, which means that the pastors need to be willing to be direct and willing to wade into people's lives this idea of just barely knowing anybody and people floating in and floating out of the church is is not what we're speaking of here. We need to know each other. In fact, I had a pastor one time tell me that if you don't know where every member of your church is in any given week, you're not a good shepherd. And that stuck with me.

I think we're at the point at which we, we are in people's lives enough to know where they're at generally. And, we need to be able to pray with them. We need to be able to counsel them. They need to be willing to receive the counsel. That's what we're talking about here.

And not, you know, at the first drop of a hat, someone to get offended and walk away because they've been rebuked or exhorted in one way or another. So if you had somebody who had a church, local church profile of one to two years, then leave, one to two years, then leave, one to two years, then leave, you've been through the wars and scenes so that you know to predict. So you're meeting with that man, that father, that household, to predict his future. Right. Well, let me give you an example.

We had a young woman come into our church. She'd just been divorced and she was escaping a Reformed Baptist Church in Colorado Springs. And she attempted to come to our church for I think it was maybe a month or two. We sat down and talked to her a few times. We called her elders from the other church, had multiple conversations with them.

Finally we came to her and said, you can't come to our church. You cannot come here. Well, she couldn't believe it. The next Sunday she showed up and we said, we told you, you can't come here. If you would like us to go with you to your other church, we'd be willing to do that.

You know, we're not just saying, hey, we're not gonna help you at all, but we don't want you to come to our church when you haven't submitted to the council, you haven't walked with the brothers and sisters in your previous church. So that's the kind of rugged covenantalism I'm talking about is is we absolutely will call previous churches. We absolutely must do our work. And by the way, that's maybe 1% of churches that actually will follow up on these members. But I think we should have something like ChurchFacts.com.

You know how there's a CarFacts.com where you can do a search on the VIN number and kind of figure out how many accidents they've been through and all that? Well, I think we need a ChurchFacts.com and some of these families so we can just know how many churches they split, how many blogs they've done against pastors in previous churches, etc. Etc. Just to see, you know, because we live in a period of time in which the sanctity, the covenantal nature of our churches need to be preserved. And we have found over 20 years of experience in shepherding that there are some people that have a background, and we need to know about that background.

We need to know what kind of church discipline has happened in previous years. Also we're connecting with almost all the local evangelical churches. We meet weekly with the pastors for the last six months. We've established very close relationships And so when the sheep try to crawl over the walls and wander into other pastors, we're right on it now. And so at least in this county, you just don't have that opportunity like they have for decades past.

But now the pastors have a close enough relationship in this valley that that kind of thing can't happen without a long and drawn-out discussion between pastors. Good deal. Well, Kevin, This has been great. Thank you so much. Hey, could you give us one parting shot?

Look eyeball to eyeball with parents and give them a sense of how important it is that they are intimately involved in their local church. Right. Do not separate yourself from the body of Christ, and that is the visible body of Christ. This is the body that gathers together. Do not forsake the assembling of yourselves together.

If you do, you could very well be sending your children to hell. You could very well be sending your grandchildren to hell, the way you treat the local church will have a tremendous impact on the continuity of faith from generation to generation. This is probably the most critical aspect in the raising of children and to assure something of a faithful generational continuity. I just really plead with parents to just pick your church, pick your bunch of sinners and hang with them. You're going to find that there are centers in every church.

But as you hop churches, you're going to find that's going to be counterproductive to your Christian life as well as the continuity of faith for your children and grandchildren. So this is a serious issue. It's a massively serious issue. The church you attend, the church you're faithful to, is a very important thing. Amen.

Kevin, thank you so much. What a great time. Really appreciate your counsel and that God would raise up a generation of people who love the church the way that Jesus Christ. Amen. Thank you, brothers.

Thank you. Scott, could I ask for an opportunity for a parting shot? Sure. Yeah, just a quick one. So, there are privileges that you get through longevity in a church that there's no other way to get.

And one of the key ones is the ability to see God's faithfulness in the lives of your brethren over a long period of time that are not obvious day to day, week to week, month to month, but are obvious year to year, and decade to decade. You just get to see God move people forward, change their lives, transform them in beautiful ways that you'd never get to see if you were two years and done over and over again. Amen. Okay. 100 amens to that.

We've seen it. So can I have a parting shot as well? Years ago, this is really toward husbands and how important it is that you have your wife in a local church. A few years ago there was a family that came to our church and the husband was a nomad, a homeschool nomad, and He had never really connected with local church life and he died and His wife was hanging out there with no spiritual care No community No financial resources to help her and I was I was upset with that man for what he did to his wife. He exposed her in a very inappropriate way, on the breaking of the command to love the Church of Jesus Christ and to enter into a rugged covenantalism which would have really saved his family a lot of trouble.

So husbands, fathers, make sure your family's in a local church where there's help and authority and care and a community. So, well thank you for joining us. Check with us next week for the podcast and remember that scripture is sufficient for Church and Family Life. God bless you. Thanks for listening to the Church and Family Life podcast.

We have thousands of resources on our website, announcements of conferences coming up. Hope you can join us. Go to churchandfamilylife.com. See you next Monday for our next broadcast of the Church and Family Life podcast.