Carlton McLeod engaged in a careful process to transform a mainstream pragmatic church into a family-integrated church. He became frustrated with the loss of the younger generation. He did the most dangerous thing you can do – he went to the Bible. Here is the process his church engaged in.

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture, and we're here today to talk to a brother who made the move to Age Integrated Church and he did it many years ago but Carlton McLeod is here. Carlton, hey good to have you. Hey Scott, hey Jason, good to see you and good to be here. Yeah, so nice to talk to you again.

Carlton is a pastor at Calvary Reformation Church in Chesapeake, Virginia. And okay, So who's that woman in the picture behind you? Oh, that is my dear mother who went home to be with the Lord last year. And she served the Lord's church playing the piano almost her entire life. And so this picture of her sits over our piano as my children practice their lessons.

So they always remember their grandma. So sweet. Love it. Love it. Now, you talk about your grandma, or I mean your mother, and when you gave your testimony, it's on our website.

I think, I can't remember what we titled it, but y'all y'all ought to look for Carlton's testimony that he gave. It's so compelling and so beautiful. The grace of God is everywhere in it. And he had a praying mom who took him to church. I did praise God and a singing mother too.

How about that? That's right. That's right. That's right. Love it.

Love it. Okay. So, several years ago I heard somebody told me, hey, there's this guy in Chesapeake who has a family integrated church. I said, no kidding. And so he started telling me about you.

And that, and I went to your website and I thought, wow, this is amazing. And so tell us the story, what happened? Yeah, so thanks for the question. We started our church here in Virginia in 1997, and we started like many churches do, very practical, very pragmatic, filled with the latest growth models and so forth. And we saw some growth, but somewhere around year eight or nine, somewhere in that range, having been in ministry for a while, you know, we started to assess just how are we doing with families?

How are we doing with children? And much to our chagrin, we saw a lot of damage in households, particularly as it relates to, you know, retaining our children in the meeting of the church, but also seeing them come to the Lord. And it was very frustrating because our ministry back in the day, as we say, was very youth-oriented. Very much so. I was pretty young.

I was 27 when I started. I like to say I had a lot more zeal than knowledge back in those days. But it was a shock to the system. And so I started looking around as to, you know, what is this and reading and so forth. And I ran across some of the statistics about youth falling away from the church.

I ran across Bodhi Bakum's book, Mass Factor, it was given to me by a friend, Family, Jiv, and Faith. And then a mutual friend, Scott, told me about you and eventually, and it was at the time, NCFIC, but before I ran into you, we had already started this process of trying to figure out why we were losing children. And one of the things that I always tell people when they ask me about this, I got so frustrated. I did the unthinkable as pastor. I went to the Bible.

I mean, you know, there's nothing else. What a frustration to go to the scriptures. And When I personally went to the scripture just to try to find how to disciple children, how to teach children, how to train children, all I saw was parents and then brought into the corporate meeting. I didn't see any of the things that I was doing. And so it was, you know, all the cool and hip and modern things we were doing, I didn't see any of it.

And that started us down the pathway of changing our church and by God's providence meeting you and the team there, and then away we go. Amen. I think one of the things people don't realize about us is that we came to family integration having led everything else that's out there, having led Sunday schools, having led youth groups, and on and on and on, having hosted Super Bowl parties. We've done it all. That's right.

Clowns for Jesus. Yeah, exactly. So, Carl, what year did you start the shift and how long did it take? Yeah, it was somewhere in the 2008-2009 range where I was studying myself personally and becoming convinced personally. And by 2010, we were full on.

We had already met with the elders. Elders and I had met and we had started teaching the church and took a year to do that and we were already starting to get our eyes towards closing down some of the segregated ministries and bringing the children into the church. So it's been 12 years-ish now. How did you bring your fellow elders and your church along with you? Because this is one of the amazing things.

You shepherded these people in this direction, and many, many of them, they listened to you and they followed you. Yeah, well I think for me first, I had to personally study it. Like it was a shock to me that that I had been in ministry 10 years plus and and still hadn't you know, scenes, you know, made the connection between some of the passages of scripture that deal with this issue and what I was actually doing. And so it took a minute for me to see my own need for correction. So I had to do my own study after I did my own study, then meeting with the team and sharing with them what I had learned and wrestling with whether or not that had direct implication on what we were going to do in ministry.

And of course it did, but I wanted to vet that through our elders, our leaders. And so doing that study with them and also maybe reading together, I think we all got a copy of Bodhi's book. We were all looking at the NCFIC website and reading articles and doing different things as we went through that study together. Only after we were convinced as a leadership team, That's when we began the reasonably, I think, long process. It took a year or so of walking the church through these principles on Sunday morning and letting them, giving them the time to kind of wrestle with it and look at it and pray it through and talking to them and so forth.

So we tried to pace it out so that we wouldn't turn the ship as lightly as possible so we wouldn't spill that many over the side. In terms of that, who and what survived the transition? So, it sounds like you had sort of a multi-year transition. Yeah, it was about a good, you know, from, yeah, if you include my personal time, it was multi-year. It was about a year with the church.

And initially, I have to say, I thought everybody would survive the transition because there was so much enthusiasm. There's a lot of Amen and going on on Sunday is about reading about Ezra or reading about Joshua or Moses or, or even, you know, looking at Paul's letters to corn or to Colossae or to Ephesus and, and a lot of enthusiasm. We're ever gonna take back our children and so forth. But when, as I like to say, when the rubber finally introduced itself to the road, the real world application of wrestling with young children and all the spillover of solar scripture, all the spillover of, wow, you know, are we really going to bring the children to church, but still give them to pagans to educate? I mean, all the other things, your manhood, womanhood, all the things that are, they kind of, you know, move with it in the orbit of this process.

I think we probably contributed just to family integration. Maybe we lost 5% of the church, but some of the other spillover, probably more as we were walking line by line through lots of passages. And that was a tough year or so, but then it was a little bit of a rebound after that. You know, that happened to us when we planted the first family-oriented church here in Wake Forest. We had a bunch of people that came with us.

And then after a few months, we had some families coming to us and saying, you mean we really have to sit with our children in church, really? I mean, are we really gonna keep doing this? And we said, yeah, yeah. And then, so they went back, you know, that happens. Yeah, it does.

I had a mother tell me that, you know, because she was having such a time with her young children in service, they hadn't been trained yet. I mean, the process was new for all of us. And she felt like such a failure as a mom, she felt like her parenting skills were on, you know, being judged every Sunday, and she left. No matter how much we tried to dissuade her and encourage her and hey, we're all learning, we're all growing. And that was after taking quite a bit of time of shutting down ministries, not all at once, but just slowly and steadily.

I learned something from that too, though, just about the kind of patience that it needs to make a transition and what people could be feeling despite your best efforts. You know, we spent, I think, if I remember right, we took about three months on Sunday nights and kind of trained people about how to think about having your children with you in church and how to manage the things that happen and how to approach it and how to prepare your children. Yeah, I think it was three months and even after that we had people after a while saying, yeah, this is too much. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, when you're used to kind of the performance, and maybe that's not the best choice of words, but when you're used to just a very sanitized, easy environment where your children are somewhere else, it is an adjustment.

And as I said, looking back at errors and mistakes that I made, I didn't realize just how much of life would change from the mindset of seeing scripture as sufficient in this area. And it's home life and the training that has to happen and family worship and preparing for worship and all the way through education. And if the marriage isn't solid, then that's going to be impacted because all of a sudden there's more responsibility and so on. So, you know, things I wish I knew, but God was kind. We didn't lose nearly as many as we could have.

And we actually, like I said, rebounded, and there were folks who found us because of that very reason. I remember when my family participated in the first family integrated church that we were a part of. I could tell that Janet had some reservations, but she wasn't articulating them. And then finally, I was able to draw it out of her, and she said this, I'm afraid that we're leaving a church with some good things, and we're going to a church that's going to depend on you doing other things, and if you don't do anything, we will have left somewhere for nowhere. And I mean, that was a sobering moment for me to hear those things.

She was justified in the question for sure. But hey, this family integrated churches rise and fall on whether a father is willing to do discipleship during the middle of the week. If he's not, then these other churches offer the solution for that. I mean, Dad shouldn't need a solution for that, but that's really what the programs are designed to do, is to backfill fathers who were unwilling to teach the scriptures of their children, lead their families, and worship daily in their homes. That's right.

I figured that out pretty fast that we needed to institute. We strongly encouraged the brothers to institute family worship. And then for me, not coming out of a background that used catechism, a whole lot opened up to me as it relates to using good materials, to using historic materials to help fathers. And in our case, even some mothers who when dad wasn't around, but to help families teach and train their children at home. Carl, can you think of one mistake that you made that you really wish you could have a do-over on?

One mistake? Wow, There's several. I think I kind of already mentioned it. It was just not understanding how much this mindset, because this whole idea of bringing our children in comes from thinking of scripture, believing that scripture is sufficient. And while we were thinking about our children and the discipleship of our children, this mindset was taking hold across the board.

And the love of God, the love of His Word, to see his word is absolutely sufficient for, for our ministry and our life practices at this just kind of overwhelming effect on everything else. And I wasn't fully prepared for that. I think, you know, as I was teaching line by line through the scriptures going, hey, this is so cool. I had families going, I can't believe you're even talking about this because it had never been talked about before. And so I lost some friends and I lost some families for not understanding just how far reaching this mindset, this heart would be.

Probably a close second mistake is just helping families with young children and reassuring them that it's okay and give and offering them some practical tools and tips as to how to keep the two-year-old you know somewhat with us and reassure them that this too shall pass. Yeah. Amen. Now, what kind of objections did you encounter? Almost immediately.

There's one from outside the church and one from inside the church. One from outside the church is I was told that other pastors, a couple of the churches in our area were saying that we no longer cared about children, which is nonsensical, ridiculous. A church that reorients its entire ministry around blessing children to get accused of not caring for children. But that was an objection that because you shut down youth ministries and brought children into the sanctuary during the worship of God that you don't care about children. So that was one.

The other was, you don't care about single people. This church, all of a sudden now, is about families and nuclear families. And so I'm single, and I feel different and ostracized. And what's in this church for me? And I don't have children.

And so just kind of walking through that with our precious singles who are extraordinarily needful in the body of Christ according to, you know, Paul in first Corinthians seven and to help them see what a privilege it is to serve the kingdom and walk with them. I think that one though, that objection that, there's nothing in the church for a single person was one that sticks out. Isn't that interesting? Because I think that's pretty common. But the reality is, you're not building your ministry around singles or married people or children.

You're building it around everybody. You're right. We're bringing everybody together. And, you know, the families aren't any more special than the single person. They're just part of the body.

They're right. They're part of this intergenerational. Family. That's right. And it's actually one of the most beautiful pictures of the gospel, the kingdom that one can see when you have people of different, you know, they're in different places in life.

This young lady is single. She hasn't married yet. He has a family with, you know, six children. They're all laughing together. They all are, you know, fellowshiping and eating together, singing together and, you know, receiving strength one to another, older, younger.

I mean, the model, if you want to call it that, but what we see in scripture as it relates to the worship of God is just this wonderful picture of the love of God for his children. And I've come to see this, I didn't see the beauty at first, but I see it now, 10 years later, 12 years later, to see that someone holding someone's baby, and helping that mom of whose husband's in the military or children singing with the adults or serving in some way one with another. And I wouldn't trade this journey for anything at this point. I think one thing that happens when singles come into churches like ours, if they came out of mainstream church situations, they haven't been sitting in the worship with families. So they come into our churches and they look around and they say, look at all these families, look at all these kids.

This church is all about the family. But it's just that they haven't seen it before. They just haven't seen families worshiping together before because the kids are off in children's church and they're separate classrooms. I don't think it's that the church is built around families. I just think it looks weird to people who've lived in an age-segregated family, segregated kind of environment.

Yes. I think we've conditioned ourselves to think that if it's not institutionalized, it doesn't count. Meaning, if it's not in a program, being managed in a spreadsheet, then it's non-existent. But the truth is that a single person in a church who's essentially adopted by four or five different families and spending time in those homes around the dinner table is really more powerful than any singles program ever conceived in the mind of man, but it's not in a spreadsheet somewhere, so we think it doesn't count. The other thing to be said there is that it is true that there's nothing automatic about families being hospitable and inviting singles into their world and including, and you could be a very lonely single in a family-integrated church if you don't have families that are sensitive to that.

Amen, well said. And so we try to encourage just that, you know, and the normal means of grace that we experience on a Sunday help with that if we do it well. And then also just cultivating the hospitality mindset throughout the church has helped us tremendously in this area. Yeah, and pastors just have to look around the congregation and say, how are all the sheep doing? Yeah, how's everybody?

How's everybody? Now, Carlton, you've transitioned this church that you've been pastoring. Now we used to say 20 years ago, don't try to change your church because you'll blow it up. And we saw that happen, where people just couldn't make the transition. And so at the very beginning, you know, 20 or so years ago, when men would come to us, we would say, you know, do you want to really try to transform this church that's been doing this for 30 years?

Yeah, consider leaving peaceably and starting a new work. Yeah, I think we used to encourage people to do that. And then, bam, Carlton McLeod, what is going on? McLeod. What is going on?

Hard head, I guess. I don't know. I don't know. I think it was nothing special about our church or me or anything like that. I just was crazy enough to believe it, that it could happen.

We did work hard. I spent a lot of time talking to families, a lot of time asking questions after sermons. Hey, did that make sense? Then you go home and study that and tell me if you have any feedback? I mean, I really wanted the saints to know that this wasn't some heavy-handed thing that we were trying to do.

We really did just want to please God. And as a result of pleasing him, We were begging him to bless our families and save our children, and that's it. And the commitment to expository preaching, to just taking the scriptures as they are, helped us immensely in that, and then just pastorally, just loving the saints, loving the sheep. You also had two things. I mean, the church had a shepherd, a man with a shepherd's heart.

And the church also had a unified eldership, at least unified enough. And those things are really critical. If you're going to transition your church, those two things are really important. And a flock will follow, everybody won't follow, but that was your experience. Only 5%.

That's really remarkable. Yeah. Again, that's attributed to just the family integration piece. I mean, some of the spillover got a little once we got into manhood and womanhood, that was That's another podcast for another day. But yeah, it really helped that all of our pastors saw it.

We worked through it together before starting to teach it through to the church. And so there wasn't any, someone looking at me and then looking at pastor so-and-so and see if they agreed. So yeah. Yeah, but you're right. The big problem is the proposition that scripture is sufficient.

Right. And that's because that changes everything. It messes with your whole life. Yeah, And it's nice to become a family-grade church, but how about everything else in your life? Exactly.

Exactly. Your first thoughts tend to be, oh, we're changing church models. We're going from a traditional model, and now we're becoming seeker sensitive and trying to draw in the community. No, no, no. This is flowing out of the sufficiency of Scripture, which really isn't going to leave any single thing untouched.

That's right. So it's a package deal. I don't think anyone would shift to family integration just to change their church model to try to attract more people. I don't think that's ever happened. No, if anything, you know, I was cautioned that I would attract less people when people brought their children into church and they went, okay, where do I put my kid?

And I'm going, well, they're with you. I mean, that doesn't exactly lend itself in the thinking at the time, that didn't exactly lend itself to growth, quote unquote. People used to say to me, Scott, if you would just say that this is another model, you know, y'all wouldn't be in so much trouble. And because what we were saying, no, it's because scripture is sufficient, that's why. And that's the real problem.

Okay, last thing. Yes, sir. Any advice for churches who are thinking about doing this? Yeah. I've heard, you know, people say, don't do it, but I'm, I'm on the other side, I'm saying, you know, seek the Lord, go to his word.

Do you see it in the scriptures? Do you love God? Do you love families? Do you love children? Then go for it.

And, and one, and so I would say is if you're a pastor, start with yourself, do the study, bring in your elders, work it through together, have a high, high, high degree of unity, and then pace yourself. Take time to, as we say, kind of feed and lead, teach first, you know, take them through the texts first, draw the implications out, look at application, talk to families, hey, what do you think about that? Assess, you know, whether you're, you know, where your church is and how long it's going to take. And but but definitely go for it because what we see in scripture and in our current models, the models, if you will, aren't working. Look at look at our families, look at our children, look at the calamity happening in households and and so many young people believing everything but the 66 books of God's Word.

So yeah, I'd say go for it, but do the personal study, have unity amongst leadership, and then take time to teach people before you shift. Amen. Hey, and we have some resources that give sort of the theological, practical, you know, and biblical underpinnings of all these things. I wrote a book called A Weed in the Church several years ago, and then more recently a book called The Family at Church, How Parents are Tour Guides for Joy, and I have a couple of chapters in there about the proposition, very short form of the biblical case and how parents really are tour guides for joy, bringing their children into the worship of God, and how to do it, how to navigate the waters. So we do have some resources.

Vodi Bakum's book, Family Driven Faith, has two really neat chapters about it, right in the middle of the book, if I remember correctly. And there's some helpful things. Things have been written. You know, since this happened at your church, really it's interesting, the landscape has changed. Thousands and thousands of churches have, or they're already moved or they're moving in this direction?

Why? Because the Bible tells them so. Amen. It's really simple. Amen.

Well, Carlton, we appreciate you. We love you and can't wait to Work together more as the years pass. Amen. Love you guys. Okay.

God bless. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast, and we hope you can join us next time. 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.