On this podcast, Jason Dohm, Carlton McLeod, and Kirk Smith will discuss the changing of the name of the NCFIC to Church and Family Life - Proclaiming the Sufficiency of Scripture.

Hey, thanks for joining us for the Church and Family Life podcast. But before we get going with the podcast, I want to tell you about a few things. First, we have a remarkable conference coming up called Jurisdictions Under Fire, church and family in the balance. That is going to happen October 28th through 30th in the evenings. It'll be live streamed.

Hope you can join us with that. We have some really remarkable communicators that will help us deal with that issue. Also, I just wrote a book called The Family at Church, How Parents Are Tour Guides for Joy. This is a book that is designed to help families fully engage in local church life and make it the sweetest thing ever. Also, our national conference has been scheduled for May 20th next year at Ridgecrest, Theology of the Family.

But just before that conference, we're going to have a singles conference on May 19th. And I hope you all can come and join us with that as well. And with that, go to our website. We have thousands of resources to equip churches and families to be ordered by the word of God and the word of God alone. And you can get there by going to ChurchandFamilyLife.com Well, welcome to the Church and Family Life broadcast.

I'm here with Jason Doan, pastor at Sovereign Redeemer Community Church and a regional facilitator for Church and Family Life. Church and Family life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture for the spread of the gospel across the generations in the context of biblically ordered churches and families. And this week we're going to discuss the changing of the name of the NCFIC to Church and Family Life. Wow, how about that? And I have Carlton MacLeod with us today as well as Kirk Smith, Carlton MacLeod, pastor of Calvary Reformation Church in Chesapeake, Virginia.

So glad to have you close by Carlton. Please come down and see us. I need to come up and see you. Kirk Smith, he's from the Midwest. He's in Illinois.

He's actually a board member of what is now Church and Family Life and he is also the head of the Illinois Christian Home Educators Wow, what a wild time for you on Kirk man. These are interesting times. Yeah for homeschooling So, okay. So we're announcing right now that we're changing the name of the National Center for Family Integrated Churches to Church and Family Life, proclaiming the sufficiency of scripture. So, y'all, what's all that about?

Well, I think it's fantastic. I'll jump in. I think it's just fantastic. The NCFIC has meant so much to me and my family in my church over the last several years and it's honored to serve on to be apart but I honestly believe this name change opens a whole nother door for our ministry to be able to reach out to so many other churches and so many other believers and so many people who were longing for what the Bible describes for family and for church and I am just over the moon about it. I am extremely excited about it.

So thank you Scott and thank you Bort. This is going to be great. Good deal. I've also been very excited about it. Scott shared it probably back in March or so, about the possibility.

And the more that I thought about the name, the more I got excited, simply because I think it more accurately describes who we are, church and family life. And the Institute of I.C. Has been a great name that has served us well, but I like the relational name of church and family life. I think it more aptly describes our dynamics, so more relational than institutional. And I guess I've resisted a name change for the better part of a decade.

Oh, don't we know that? We know that, Jason. Everyone knows that. It's sort of the inside joke, but I really resisted it for two reasons. One is we've been known by that name for so long, we've sort of carved out a position in people's minds.

And it was just difficult for me to think about starting over again and carving out a position in people's minds under a different name. But the second thing was, I've so appreciated the work of the National Center for Family Integrated Churches that I didn't want any sense in which we were backing away from the legacy of the work that's been done over the past decade, but I really do love the new name. It is more fitting. It's like our brothers have said, it's broader, it's probably a better fit. I wrote down some names of the national conferences over the last years.

This isn't all of them, but here's just a list. Gospel-centered marriages, sufficiency of Scripture, highway of holiness, repentance, white under harvest. And so family integration has really been the exception and not the rule in terms of national conferences, which is really sort of the theme for any given year of what we're working on. And so we've really been working much more broadly than this narrow title that has been on us. Right, yeah, we have focused really since the beginning as an overwhelming focus the establishment of biblically ordered churches and families and by the principle of the sufficiency of scripture and that's been the focus of our ministry.

The family integrated church piece we think is an important piece not to be abandoned at all but it's not the central piece for sure. It's really an application among many many applications that we think describe churches that are, you know, appealing to the sufficiency of Scripture. And I've wanted to change the name of this ministry for about 10 years. Many people know that. I've asked many people.

I have probably every other year engaged branding experts to help me try to figure it out. I've talked about it with Christian leaders who know us well, who've preached at our conferences, who've been with us through the years. We started this in 2001, and one of the things that happened at that time when we first started, I recognized that the definition of the church was unclear in many people's minds. And so that really became a very, you know, very central focus. It was the Church of Jesus Christ that was the focus, and we've maintained that.

But We've always wanted to speak to churches and families. So in some ways there's really no change in the thrust or the focus, but the name actually communicates better what our focus is. Yeah, I like that Scott, because when the name Family Integrated is in the title, it sounds like it's a central piece of what we do. And it's ironic. I was actually there at the first United Church of Home back in 2001 in St.

Louis, and I'm sure I've missed a couple of conferences along the way, but I have never heard the word family integrated at a conference. Never. And yet I think that's who people perceive that we are because that is in the name, so we kind of pigeon-holed ourselves with that. You know, church and family life, we can speak to both, church and family. We are unique in that.

There's a lot of ministries that minister to the church. There are many ministries that minister to the family, but to my knowledge we are the only organization, the only ministry that minister to both the church and the family. You know it's a very unique position that we have. We understand they're complementary, yet they're also separate, And I think that we need to really bring that point to bear on people. As you said, it's not the central point.

It's just one of—family integration is just one of many expressions of the sufficiency of Scripture. And that is our heartbeat. That is our DNA, that line right there, with the other things being an expression of that. Amen. And hey, we believe that biblically ordered families can be a massive blessing and a strength to a local church, and that a local church really must be the central, you know, agenda in a family and that church must minister to those families to help them be everything they were designed to be to preach the gospel to the next generation.

It's interesting these two institutions, the church and the family, I'm just going to call them the greatest institutions in the world. They're the ones that God established and he established them to preach the gospel to the generations and to raise up a holy generation of people who follow Jesus Christ. Both the church and the family are both evangelistic and they're equipping institutions. And so they're pivotal. And when you have weakness in these institutions, you have weakness in the culture.

You know, we look around and we're astounded at the strange things that are happening in our culture. Well, guess what? You can usually trace those back to a father and a pastor. And so church and family life is massively important. We want to speak to those issues as the decades roll out ahead of us.

Amen, Scott. And I think the need is just tremendous. Again, you mentioned it, but we're all right now inundated with kind of the dearth of work in this area. We're inundated with, as you said, the lack of fathers, strong men in homes, and the results thereof, and the lack of churches. You know, just preaching the gospel and preaching truths concerning scripture as it relates to the current issues of the day when this is being recorded.

People look at you like you have two heads. And so the need for an organization that will equip and encourage pastors to stand their ground and stand on the word of God and the need to raise up men and fathers in every generation and across all ethnicities and culture is just tremendous. And so I'm excited, you know, Brother Kirk mentioned it about how maybe we were pigeonholed to touch. Well, when I came in, I didn't feel that way. It was all very new to me.

But as I began to try to share with people what we were doing, I began to see that a little bit. And so for me and in my sphere of influence, this is tremendous because all of a sudden I don't have to fight my way through, well, we have a youth ministry, so you guys won't accept this. Well, that has never been true, but yet it was a barrier. So now all of this information, all of this great preaching and teaching, these wonderful conferences, I think we're set up now to be the Lord's will to see the ministry broaden as well, to see people who may not have heard of us because they weren't on a homeschooling blog or something. Nothing wrong with homeschooling blogs, but people who've never heard of us now all of a sudden might give us more than a second look and really kind of peel back the layers and see that our primary message is, in fact, whatever the Lord says is what we're trying to do.

Amen. Kirk said something which I sort of want to double down on, that family and church are complementary and separate. And I'm so excited that we're continuing to work on these two institutions, but not just the two institutions, but their interrelationships between the two. So I think there's a multiplying effect to be had for the church and the family. In other words, the church is never going to be what we're supposed to be as Christ Church without godly biblical families.

And the reverse is true as well. Families will never be what God designed them to be without godly biblical churches and so we have a multiplying effect. Godly families have a multiplying effect on the church enabling the church to do her work and and vice versa. Yes, amen. And you know the isolation of our name to family integrated churches was actually deceiving to people.

It didn't tell people what we were really doing and what we were really saying. It took a small piece and seemed to make it the center. And we, over the years, have felt like our name should actually reflect what is the center of what we're doing. And so even though, you know, our, we, our name has been with us since 2001, it's very difficult to, you know, it's dangerous to change the name of a ministry or change the name of anything. Rebranding can mean disaster.

So we've been very, very well aware of that. But I think that we just ended up continuing to be convicted that our name needed to reflect really exactly what we do. And we couldn't figure out a name, you know, like Google or something like that. We, we, of the, of the hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of names, literally, that I've considered over the years, we just weren't able to land on anything that really seemed to ring. And so we feel like we've finally done that.

Well, I was pretty disappointed because I had suggested the Institute of Sufficiency of Scripture and calling it ISIS for short, but that got shot down for some reason. What is wrong with you? That's nothing, Kirk. I don't feel bad for you at all because I have suggested probably two dozen names to my friends and my board, and they've been shot down. So no one knows the pain that I've seen.

Well, I like the fact, you know, in the title, if you go to different NCFIC now, Church and Family Life functions, there are times that we speak exclusively to the church life. We have regional leadership meetings around the nation. We do it now on Zoom with all the COVID situations going on. So we have that aspect. We speak exclusively to churches.

And then I know we've had Scott and Deborah at our house. They do the Get In The Picture Right, which speaks exclusively to marriages. And then we have the National Conference that might speak 60% one year to the church and 40% to the family. Then the next year it might be vice versa, 60% to the family and 40% to the church. So as Carlton said, it just gives us a broader and more diverse opportunities in expressing who we really are.

Amen. Now I had a question for Scott, if that's okay, or actually any of you brothers, because all of you have been working in these areas longer than me. But now as our name is changing, and we've become a broader, or will become by God's grace, broader in our reach, as people get exposed to church and family life and as they begin to learn and grow and explore and read books and Get around us and so forth. What do you think's going to happen? You know, just take an average, You know a pastor somewhere who he says, okay Church and family life.

Wow, that sounds neat. Let's let's go out there How can you how can he expect his ministry to change or a father who takes his family to a church and family life conference? What can he expect as he goes forward with some of the principles and patterns that we lay out? You know, Richard Baxter said that if pastors neglect the families in their church, They will undo all. That's what he said.

So I think, I mean, I hope to see pastors, you know, having a vision for, you know, for taking good care of their families to do everything they can to preach the Word of God to help those families to be ordered by the Word of God alone to construct their whole family life and schedule around the things that God has commanded. And the other thing is that I think it's well known that the American Church got bitten by the bug of pragmatism a long time ago and we're still recovering from it. And that churches will become less pragmatic and more faithful to the biblical order. There's a pattern. You know, Paul said, we have no other pattern.

And the pattern is the pattern of Jesus Christ communicated through the apostles. And returning to the pattern is really critical. So I pray that's the effect. And you know, in some ways it's just very simple Christianity. It's just doing the things that God has commanded the church to do and the family to do, being satisfied, being content, not to create some new cool world, but to just do the things that God has commanded.

You know the church has been afflicted by coolness technicians, you know, for a long time. And the church doesn't need coolness technicians. The church needs the Word of God. So I pray that that's really the effect of all of what we do as we go forward. Yeah, I think the centerpiece of everything that we've been working on for the whole time has really been the sufficiency of Scripture.

And so there's been a focus of the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture that the Bible is all you need to order yourselves in the different categories of life. So there's been a specific focus on family and church and the interrelationship between the two, but really at the heart of it has been the sufficiency of Scripture for all things. I would hope a pastor like the one that Carlton described would come away knowing that our heart is a sufficiency of Scripture across all categories, not just these two and the interrelationship between these two, but for every category of life. And we'll have that just an increase of trust in the scripture to order every area of his life. Amen.

Scott, do you have any sentimentality about leaving the old name at all? What will we lose or what do we need to be sensitive to in making the transition to what we all feel is a much better name? Well, I, you know, our hearts haven't changed at all in terms of the thrust and the focus. So in many ways, we're not really leaving, we're not really leaving anything behind that hasn't been in our hearts for a long time so this this name change doesn't really represent a change of direction rather it just represents a clear description of our direction which we've always had so I don't I don't really I don't know what to say about what we will leave behind. You know, as Jason pointed out earlier, If you look at our conferences, our message has been very clear.

You know, family integration has not been the center of it at all. In fact, it's funny. Last week, I was on a podcast and the host started asking me questions about family integrated churches. And I was just I just wasn't prepared to I just hadn't thought about it really in a long time It's just something that you do. You know, there's no big are you well, we've made we've made arguments I wrote a book about it, but You know, it just hasn't been a central matter, but we're not leaving behind family-integrated churches I think we want to say age integrated churches, generational contour churches are the pattern of the Bible.

Now how that look, They might look differently in different contexts within different churches, but I think we still want to say how important it is that the church is a generational community. And you know, the church should not be systematically divided up by age. We've always said it that way. We've never said that, you know, you can never divide the church by age at any time we've never said that we've said we've been always against systematic age segregation And we've said that you know for you know a decade and a half So I don't know if we're really leaving anything behind. I think we're just trying to assert a Name that's clearer for us so Scott Most people wouldn't know the the history that my family has with your family, but it starts before I had a family at all.

I wanted to very badly to marry a woman who was spending a lot of time in your household, so it gave me access to your household. And hey, this is what I've known about you the whole time. I mean, the sufficiency of Scripture comes out of your pores, and particularly bringing the Bible to bear on what family life should look like and what church life should look like has been an integral part of what you think about, what you talk about, what you spend your hours developing for the 30, It's now over 30 years that we've known each other. Back to my single days trying to marry a woman who was spending time in your house. But anyway, I've just been getting ready for this and thinking through the things that I would say.

One of the things I would say is just this is the fruition of a lot of years of heading down the same track. Yeah, I think that's right. Was the process harder than you thought, Scott? We went through all the different name thoughts. What was part of that process to you?

And you've invested more time and energy than any of us have all probably put together. What's been the most difficult part of the process? Trying to capture, trying to capture in a short phrase, we just suggested so many names. I would have an affection for a particular name for about six months and it just didn't seem to ring after about six months. And then I would get locked on another one and I would propose it to everybody around me and one third of the people would like it.

And so then I ended up not liking it. So it, it was really a process of trial and error. It took for, it really took forever to try to come up with him. I, I love the new name now. And I actually have for quite a long time.

I think someone told me that I started talking about this name three or four years ago, but so I'm just, I'm delighted with it now. I'm ready. I'm ready to go. Well, there's one word that we don't talk much about in the new name, church and family life. That's the last word life.

I personally really like that. I get passionate about that. I see it kind of as an equation. Church plus family equals life. I mean, if we get church and family life correct, we'll have life and life more abundant.

Oh, you took the words right out of my mouth, Kirk. I was just about to ask Scott and Jason, you know, you have a dad right now who's looking at his wife or he's looking at his children and He is trying to raise them up in the fear and admonition of the Lord in some of the craziest times that we've experienced in our lifetimes. What would you gentlemen say, what would you rather say to that man or that wife who is looking at her children, looking at her family, what would you say that man, that church and family life can provide for him or help him with? Oh my, well, you know, you can't fix what's going on in Washington. You can't fix what's going on in the United Nations, but you have an enormous amount of influence and authority and flexibility with your family.

That's where you change the world. God has given those two institutions to focus us, actually to narrow the focus of our lives, so that what we do is foundational for all of society. So these two institutions are the most important institutions that exist in the world today. Investing your life in those two institutions is not a fool's errand. Every minute invested in a church and a family is not wasted.

I think I would say that. So there you have it. We have a new name, Church and Family Life, proclaiming this efficiency of scripture. So let's go do it. Thank you, brothers, so much for collaborating and working through these things, really, for all these years.

I'm just very, very thankful for that. And I'm thankful for what's ahead. Amen. Exciting times to be sure. Amen.

So, okay. Thank you for joining us. Check back with us next week, next Monday, and we'll be discussing more of these things with Joel Beeke. So until next time, 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.