Paul Thompson was pastoring a traditional Southern Baptist Church in Idaho when he realized that his church was in the grip of pragmatism. He read “A Weed in the Church” and started blogging about it. Paul concluded that he needed to repent of comprehensive age segregation. So he led his whole church to repent for their innovations and then to turn to the principle of the sufficiency of scripture. They became a family-integrated church.

Well, welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture, and we're here to talk about one element of the sufficiency of Scripture and that is how the church gathers together to worship God particularly as an age-integrated gathering, as a community of the generations gathering together. It's, it's called as a family integrated churches, churches where, families and all the generations gather. And So we have a veteran with us here, Jason. Yeah, Paul Thompson.

Paul, thanks for coming. Hey, it's always great to see you guys and great to talk to you. Thanks for letting me do this. So Paul is a pastor at Eastside Baptist Church in Twin Falls, Idaho. And I'll never forget seeing the announcement that you were going to change the way that your people gathered together to worship in.

You had written this very clear statement expressing actually repentance from the way you were doing things. What was that all about? Yeah, so this was really the result of several years of crying out to God and kind of reading the Psalms where you say, how long, oh God, will you limit this or hinder that? And so, some praying and asking God to help me as a pastor I I've been pastoring my church for about ten years at this at that time and Trying to process through I was in a lot of the pragmatic trappings That that a lot of the modern church is in, is always looking for a new, innovative, creative program or methodology to accomplish an end, which at the end was always more people, not the glorifying of God, but how do we gather more people for our sake. And so it was just some frustration out of desire to really be a faithful pastor, to be a faithful church, to lead a faithful church.

And so as a result of several things coming together in the process of thinking, one of first acknowledging that I was in the trappings of pragmatism and basically waiting almost with bated breath for the next idea to come in the mailbox from some publishing house support. Right. I can relate. And so that reality, you know, those publishing house flyers are here, here's how to double your attendance in less than a year. Here's how to increase your budget within a certain matter of time.

And you know what, I gotta say, you could try those things and because they're built in a marketing model, now there is some level of success that's there. And so if that's what you're aiming for, if that's what you're wanting, then you can accomplish that through a worldly means. But it's not what the Lord wants from His church. It's not what I wanted to do as a pastor. I just knew.

Because I've been expositionally preaching really from the first day of arriving at this church, and I just think that methodical plowing through the Scripture, my heart was certainly drawn more and more into the holiness of God, the glory of God, and faithfulness of the servant and obedience. And so I just really began asking God to help me shake off this, I didn't even know to call it pragmatism because I just, I didn't know anything else. It's just I thought I was being faithful. But I got a the kindness of God, Scott, that brought me across your book, A Weed in the Church. So I started reading that And before I even got through the first chapter, I decided, you know, what I want to do is I want to do an actual chapter-by-chapter review of a book.

And I wanted to share it with my church, And, you know, so I have a blog page and I knew my mom read it, and I didn't know who else read it. So I just began writing out my ideas and reflections and responses to what I was coming across in this book, A Weed in the Church, and it really, all of a sudden, I'm sitting there going, this is exactly what I'm thinking. I just didn't know what to call it, and I didn't know how to articulate it. And so as a result of that, at the end of reading that book, it was clear for me that I needed to repent of leaning on the publishing house to grow the Lord's church rather than the sufficiency of Scripture to do what God wants to do with this church. So me and my fellow elder, at that time there were just two of us at the time, there's three now, but at that time we drafted up a statement for our church, presented it to the church, and asked the church if they would agree with us to repent to God for how we've been really relying upon man's innovativeness rather than the sufficiency of Scripture.

And I just got to say, this is the kindness of God, that my church was ready for that. And I think it was really just a result of systematic expositional preaching that had even prepared not only my heart to say, I really want to honor God and everything, But I think the end result was I have a church body that that's exactly what they wanted to do as well So we did we did lose a couple of families but they To this day, I can't really fault them because we attracted them with an idea of something different and we now were we're not going to give them what we attracted them with and so you know I take the responsibility of that but I could not really fault them for wanting what we attracted them with. You know, I remember distinctly, you brought this to a vote. You brought an initiative of repentance to a vote, right? In your church, your church polity was consistent with that?

Exactly. So we're a, you know, that classical, well, one of those many church polity models, our church is a, as a elder led congregational ruled church. And so anything of this kind of magnitude, the church would look to the elders, but ultimately all those final decisions were on the church body. And so, we wanted to follow the Lord through the honor of him, through the polity of our church. And so, yes, we brought the idea to the church and we asked the church to repent with us on the matter.

And as I think through that, there was something that had struck out, that stuck out to me in this process where I had either read this and perhaps it was in the Weed and the Church or the preaching of a sermon I had listened to in a recent time around that same time where they'll look at what's going on in the book of Revelation and there's, you know, the seven churches in those early chapters and five of those churches were called to repentance and two were not called to repentance. And so the vast majority of those churches, a lot of times we just preach about individuals repenting, or in some cases, a family to repent. But rarely, and I gotta say for me, I had never been under the idea of a church repenting outside of reading about that in the book of Revelation. So if five of those seven churches were called the repentance, who am I to so arrogantly assume that my church didn't need to repent under my leadership. I wondered, are there going to be people who are going to say, I'm not repenting for that?

Did you have any of that? Yeah, certainly. Because, you know, we're, we're dealing with a, a, a, multiple generations of people. So we're a Southern Baptist Church. And so we have people who've raised in our church, who've been raised in Southern Baptist churches, and they begin asking, Are you meaning that what my pastor did or what my Sunday school teacher did was a sin?

Is that what you're telling me? And so, we really didn't want to make a statement about the past. We wanted to just address what we were currently doing, and that was that we were leaning upon the methodology of man rather than the sufficiency of Scripture. So we did have some of that, and I wanted to assure people, listen, by the common grace of God, that your salvation came under the teaching of a faithful Sunday school teacher who obeyed her pastor or his pastor and filled an empty spot that needed that. The pastor said, we got to fill this.

If we don't, this class isn't going to have a teacher next week. And so, you know, the heart of a faithful follower of God in that church says, well, I can't let that happen. And so, we weren't trying to say or suggest that that was on the fault of the teacher. We were really saying, this is the fault of the pastor. And we were pointing at us, not at other pastors.

And this is the difficulty, isn't it? We all, all of us are subject to the sins of our times. And we grow up in a certain environment and it's not all right, but God uses it all, which is just the kindness of God. Paul, what year did this hit your radar just in terms of you started thinking this way and then how long from then until that Sunday when you voted and approved that and made the shift? Yeah, I got to say that the total picture time is probably about a year and a half.

From the time that I first began asking myself more probing questions, not really realizing that I'm still acting out of my pragmatic mindset, not really looking on the early side of, hey, what do we got to repent of? That kind of came as a result of the study, the prayer, the examination. You know, from start to finish, probably about a year and a half of a lot of examination on my own part, conversations with my fellow elder at that time, who's still with us, by the way, in our church as an elder. And then to finally bring it to the point where I think probably eight or nine months after I first began not really even know what I was asking or knowing what the end result would be was when I came across a weed in the church and still had never met Scott or knew anything about the National Center of Family Integrated Churches. So that kind of sped up the process of, okay, So here's where I was and here's what I really think we need to be doing.

I began examining the men in my church, had never sat down with their families. So this again would be a reflection on the pastor, not necessarily the families of my church, but I had never done one thing to prepare them to prepare their own families their own households and so kind of behaving like many many of my peers Hey, you bring your children to us trust us with your children. We'll take care of this and The The end result of that is a lot of laziness on behalf of heads of households. So really kind of wanting them to stir the heads of households is really what began to really move it forward that we want houses, we want fathers, we want husbands shepherding their families, and we want them to bring their families together to be shepherded together under the word of God. So, it's probably about a year and a half through that whole process.

How do you, in your preaching and counseling with people, how did you walk people up to this point in terms of what scripture, Just how did you do it in congregational life? You know, it's surprisingly, at least surprising to me, that there's this missing component of the modern Southern Baptist Church where we forgot that we actually have catechisms. And so, I immediately went and found Charles Spurgeon's Puritan Catechism, I think is what he calls it. And so, we began actually letting that be a part of our model or our corporate gatherings where we ask this question and give the answer and give the proof of it from Scripture. That really kind of began to build the appetite inside the church body, especially of men, to say, you know, because then I would say, turn around to the men, and now you need to go home and teach the next question to your children, because next week when they get to church I'm gonna ask them these questions and I'll know if you've been teaching them or not.

And so it really kind of one of those things that really stirred them in. They wanted this but no one had ever expected of them and by no one I'm meaning me. And so they began to get really hungry to want to actually lead their families and to lead them well. That's interesting. You know, over the years I've had lots of, you know, People ask me, you know, how do I go about doing this?

And I pretty much say the same thing Your church needs to first you need to get your church to where they really embrace the idea that scripture is sufficient And you do that through expositional preaching and through illustrating that. That's the most important thing. And then, and then have your, have your families, you know, begin to worship God in their families and see how that extends to the church and things like that. And that's kind of what happened with you with the catechism. You had families beginning to do spiritual life in their homes.

Right. Right. And it wasn't long then that we began to introduce singing songs in their homes. And that was a beautiful thing to start hearing dads saying that they were going to be singing for the first time in their households. Yeah, that's neat.

So if you could get a do-over on one thing, is there anything that sticks out in your mind as a mistake? You'd like to have a time capsule and go back and do it differently. That's a really great question, Jason. I think If I were to look at the scope of my adult life as a minister, I would say I wish I had come here sooner. As far as through the process, what would I have done different here?

I think we walked carefully on the front end and that way, so that whenever we came to the time when we felt like, you know what, I've gotta ask the church to follow me in repenting to God for this, I don't think we went too fast, but I do think there were some moments whenever I'm ready to do this where I want to ask the church before I think the church would have been ready. But I really wish, and so here I am just saying in a big picture, I'd have loved to have come across this decades before I did. But I'm so grateful I did when I did. What kind of objections were you encountering or do you encounter even today? Yeah, some of these things are, what about, you know, I grew up in a church, we would hear these things, I grew up in a church that had a youth ministry and I turned out pretty good, or I had these great experiences here, and I want my children to experience those same things.

So already we were kind of wrestling through encouraging families to leave public school. And so, they began wrestling through the Christian school experience. And so, we were even noticing there that there's a lot of that desire to have for your children the similar kind of experience that you had without realizing it. Some of those experiences were not very healthy and not very good where the majority of their influence are their own peers rather than the majority of their influence being older people or their parents for that matter. Yeah, I think that's a really big issue.

Now one of the things that most people who turn their churches into age integrated churches is how do you deal with broken families? How do you deal with single people and things like that? How do you answer that question now? Yeah, I answer that with, with, we, we answer that question with a lot of grace and with a lot of, of, of hope and with assistance. You know, I think about some, we have, We actually have some single dads and single moms, and sometimes the children are split between other homes.

When we have a single dad who has four children who's with him every other weekend, and they invite their friends with them, and this dad is still learning himself how to lead his family in the broken condition that it's in. So I call upon the men of the congregation to help the brother out. I can even think of here about a couple of months ago where we had some children in our church that invited one of their friends to come with them, and I mean, they came all the way up and sat on the front row, and it was clear within about five minutes that this friend had never been to church ever. And it was going to be an interesting day. By the grace of God, a man who's raised his children already, sitting about three rows away from him, he just picked his chair up, brought it over and sat it right next to this young guy, and he sat there the entire rest of the time, and he helped him.

He helped him sit still, he helped him find where we were at in the Bible. He helped him with the Scripture readings, with the singing. It was actually a beautiful picture to see a man who understood that this child was going to need some help through the experience. It was beautiful to watch, And nobody had to tell him to do it. He knew that's what he needed to do.

Oh, that's great. Now, how did you defend all this from the Bible? Well, there's a lot of unexpected need to defend for one. I didn't think I would need to defend it because I'm thinking this just makes sense. But you get a little bit of pushback from people that want to say, Jesus' disciples, they were just a bunch of teenagers.

And so I say, we got to open up the Bible and read this again. And, you know, Peter has a wife. Maybe some of them were a bit younger, but we also can't read this under our American Western context. We need to be reading this with the lens of Scripture. And so, the household, the family, it's always Old Testament and New Testament, it's always expected to be the primary place where children hear the teachings of God.

Moses tells the fathers, you teach these things to your children. You hear in the New Testament, the apostle Paul giving exhortations to fathers. So I actually think it's easier to defend from scripture than any other method that man is using because it's biblical. So what advice would you have for pastors who are thinking about doing what you did almost a decade ago? Yeah, you know, I have had several pastors that have come alongside of me throughout these last years, and they come and say, listen, I get what you're doing.

I know why you're doing it, and I want to do this at my church." And I've seen some of them move way too fast, and their church was nowhere ready for that to happen. And that's pretty devastating, both to the pastor and to the congregation. Those couple of experiences, it didn't take long for that church to be fed up with the new idea, because that's how they were hearing it as a pragmatic methodology, rather than a response to the holiness of God. So my suggestion is you weighed upon the Lord. You don't move here.

At one level when we look at it, it feels like it moved very fast for us. And it, with a couple of bumps, we really had a fellowship that wanted to go here because I think they understood we were going here because we weren't chasing down a new pragmatic idea, that we were going here to honor the Lord. So I said, wait, don't act too quick. And then of course, at some point along the way, and I don't have that magical understanding to know, after two years or three years, you do it anyway or you move along, but certainly wait upon the Lord and wait upon his people. That's great.

That's great advice. Shepherd the flock, take them with you if you can. Yeah. That's what happened with you guys. It was an astonishing story to follow for me.

I was looking at your blog posts and seeing your call for repentance. And it was just an amazing, amazing scene for me to look from the outside. But I'm just so thankful, God, I know God's been blessing your church and the families that are there. You know, what it kind of did for us as well, Scott, is it made us comfortable as a people to actually do what the Reformers were calling the Church to always be doing, to always be reforming. Right.

So good. I've got to say, we've seen a lot, not just this, but the way we gather for our weekly prayer meetings, radically different. That was not an end result that we thought that would come about. The pattern here is always letting Scripture direct why we do something and what we're going to do when we get together. It's influenced the songs we sing, and not because I wanted to change a particular style or kind of singing, the scripture just naturally moves that way and so here we are ready to be led by the Spirit and that by the inspiration of the word of God that everything we do is high glory unto God.

So it's really been beautiful to see the influence really of the sufficiency of Scripture on everything we do as a church. Well, that's the heart of the matter. And when a church really embraces the idea that scripture is sufficient, they'll keep seeing things that need to be adjusted according to the Word of God. And so it puts you on a journey to be lucky having your eyes fixed on the Lord Jesus through his word, which is the only really refreshing thing the church can do. It really is, it really is.

And I tell you, my church loves to sing now. And that was never an idea that I thought, I want a church that sings better. But I sit there and I join them on Sunday mornings and sing and I think, man, this church is belting it out. And it's gloriously good. That's great.

Yeah, The Apostle Paul taught at least two churches how to sing, so why not you, right? Okay, well, hey, Paul, thank you so much for sharing these things, and it's just a blessing to see how God's used all these things in your life. Amen. Thank you. I appreciate being a part of this.

Amen. And thank you, thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast, and we hope to see you 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.

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