The people of God must trust His word to define every area of their lives—to affirm the sufficiency of Scripture for all of faith and practice. It was in pursuit of this aim that a Declaration of the Complementary Roles of Church and Family was first published—to correct errors of families who have dismissed the local church and to correct the errors of local churches that have ignored the biblical model for discipling families. In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm take a fresh look at the declaration, affirming the vital need for building up both institutions, affirming their complementary roles.

 

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Church and Family Life exists to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture. Before we get into it, I want to invite you to our national conference, May 4-6 at Ridgecrest. Also, we have a singles conference, a pre-conference, May 3-4, where you can hear Paul Washer and Jeffrey Johnson and myself. And really looking forward to the time.

Really hope you can meet with us, be with us there in Ridgecrest. And now let's get into our subject. And today we're going to discuss a declaration that we wrote many years ago, a declaration of the complimentary roles of church and family. And so we have 20 articles in this declaration. 20, count them, Jason, 20.

They're short. Well, they're kind of short. So why are you writing a declaration? So it's good. I think it's good that Church and Family Life or NCFIC beforehand has had and has a declaration.

It allows you to be understood and to not be misunderstood. And I think both of those things are really important. In kind of putting 20 categories forward, there are 20 of them, and to affirm certain things concisely, explicitly, and then to deny certain things concisely and explicitly helps people to understand what you actually mean from the arguments that you've tried to make. A lot of the arguments that have been made by Church of Fame and Life have been made orally in sermons and messages. And a lot of, sometimes that doesn't afford you the precision that you need to be completely understood and not to be misunderstood.

There have been things in our past that people thought about us and it wasn't really true of what we actually affirmed and denied at all. Right, yeah, So we wrote this declaration. We wanted to say the church and the family are complementary institutions. They're such important institutions. We wanted to correct some errors of families who dismiss the local church.

We wanted to correct, or at least in our declaring, a kind of a correction of the errors in churches, which really ignored the discipleship of families. And we wanted to also, in the midst of these 20, to cast our understanding of what a generationally integrated church, people call it a family integrated church, looks like. Why do we do that? That's only a small part of the Declaration. Let me just read something, this is in the preface.

We pray the Lord will use this declaration to help his churches remember and recover the biblically defined, complementary roles of church and family and to reform them accordingly. So that's what we did. Yeah, There's this introductory material that prefaces the 20 articles. One of those subsections is called the importance of the statement. I just wanted to read the first sentence or two.

While this statement addresses important matters of church and family life with significant consequences for good and for evil, we do not believe that the way the church and family intersect is the most pressing issue before the modern church. So there's this acknowledgement, even before you get to the articles, that there are bigger fish to fry. And it really goes on to say that what drives the need for a church and family declaration is the sufficiency of scripture. The biggest fish to be fried is that the people of God would trust the word of God to order every area of life, and this is just one piece of the every area of life pie. So Church of Family Life is about, is after a lot more than just reforming Church of Family Life, because that's only one sliver of the pie.

But really, it's a, in a certain, in a sense, it's a Trojan horse for what's more important, which is that the people of God would just embrace the word of God as being sufficient to tell us what to do in every category. That's the heart of the matter. That's actually always been the heart of a matter, at least in our hearts. It's in Article One, Scripture is sufficient. And that's really the keystone to all.

We affirm that our all-wise God has revealed himself and his will in a completed revelation, the 66 books of the Old and New Testaments, which is fully adequate in both content and clarity for everything pertaining to life, salvation, and godliness, sanctification, including the ordering of the church and the family. And then we say the church, it's not appropriate for the church to adopt secular psychologies, pragmatism, entertainment, corporate business models, and modern marketing techniques. The church belongs to Jesus Christ. He is the head of the church. Actually, that's Article Two.

He's the head of the church. Yeah, so I think it's worth just noticing that Article Four is the first article of the 20 where church and family appear. Meaning, I think this sort of tells the story that you are actually after something that is more substantial, even then church and family as important as they are. Articles 1, 2, and 3 are about things that are really more foundational even than the things that we try to advance. Yes, article four, God created the church and the family.

And our view is that pastors particularly should have their eye on both, not just one. Because you have these families that are part of churches. You have this big family, and then you have families scattered. Now you have single people and things like that. But it's substantial to recognize the families and what they're going through and what they need.

And because the church and the family actually function on some really similar lines. The church is given to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. The family is to equip children for the work of the ministry, if you wanna say it that way, but it's the family that brings up the next generation, and then the church is infused with those families. I know Church and Family Life has republished an old work of Matthew Henry. I think it was originally titled something like A Church in the home or something like that.

The church in the house. A church in the house, yeah. A church in the house. So it's a really helpful work, and you can find it online at Church and Family Life. But the reason you retitled it, I think, was that actually church and family are distinct, but they're meant to work together and you didn't want to introduce any confusion by calling a family a church.

Matthew Henry actually doesn't do that in the substance of the book, but the title can be misleading. And you can find that phrase, the family is a little church. Whitfield, Baxter, lots of the Puritans use that exact same terminology. But It was controversial because we were being accused of conflating the church and the family, confusing them and giving the same context to both of them. And we wanted to say, no, they're separate jurisdictions.

The church isn't the family. The family isn't the church, but they are complementary. I really appreciate, though, Matthew Henry and Whitfield saying, you know, every family is a little church, because a family should be like that. There are so many principles that are parallel between church and family that they function in similar ways even though they're distinct institutions created by God. Yeah, and frankly, when you think about the health of a church and the problems that happen in a church, sometimes the problems that take place in a church are because parents didn't raise their families right and they have dishonorable rebellious children that come and bring dishonor to the church.

So the church is benefited by healthy families and families are benefited by healthy churches. You need both, not just one, you need both. Right, God meant the best friend of a family to be the local church, and God meant the best friend of the local church to be a healthy family. Yeah. You know, Article 7, we say it like this, the church and the family are complementary in role and function.

We affirm that the church and the family were designed to be complimentary, compatible and harmonious because the family is commanded to raise godly seed for the next generation and is the proving ground for church leaders while the church is responsible to give the family her instruction, discipline, and protection. Yeah. You know, the last thing we wanna do is to be pitting these two God-ordained institutions. Right. If you're in a scenario where the family is pitted against the church and the church against the family, something is radically off base from what God had in mind when he created these institutions and their interrelationships.

Yeah, you know, one of the problems in the 20th century, and it continues, is that the doctrine of the family, the biblical doctrine of manhood and womanhood and the training and the admonition of children in the Lord was pretty much lost. And it was a tragic loss. And we think it's something that needs to be recovered. Yeah. So I wanna hit article 12, but you might have one or two that you wanna hit before there.

No, go for it. Okay. Article 12 is titled, The Biblical Revelation is Sufficient for Worship and Discipleship. And really, in one way, this is the core of the proposition. Scripture is enough to tell us how we ought to worship in the way that pleases God and to engage in discipleship in the way that pleases God.

And really, it's an outflow of the Reformation doctrine of the Regulative Principle of Worship, which just said that the people of God really only are at liberty to do the things in corporate worship that are firmly established in Scripture either by command or by precept or by a good pattern in Scripture. That's really what we're saying about worship. We ought to go to the Bible to tell us how to worship and about discipleship, we ought to go to the Bible to tell us how to make disciples. So that's the affirmation. The denial goes like this.

We reject that the church should invent and institute her own principles and methods for corporate worship and discipleship that disregard or replace the explicit teaching of scripture. So we think that the church should be limited to the things that God has commanded the church to do. The church can't do whatever it wants to do. That's what we believe. We're not here to be creative.

We're here actually to take what God has already designed. We naturally chafe at the term limited because it feels very constraining. But the other side of that coin is focused. When you limit yourself, you actually are focusing yourself. And that's really the core of the argument is, let's focus on the things that God has given us and not try to invent things that he hasn't given us that we somehow think might be better.

Yeah, so my guess is, Jason, most people are shaking their heads, yes. This is good, you know, it's scripture sufficient and everything like that. But the next article is where we get in so much trouble. Article 13, the biblical pattern is age integration. And that really has caused us a lot of problems because the modern church is largely age segregated.

And So we affirm that there is a clear and consistent biblical pattern of worship and discipleship for the people of God that is age integrated, and we believe that this pattern should be embraced and practiced. And then there are like 19 texts that are listed after that that give those pictures. So Scott, if you went back 200 years and asked an average, and told an average Christian that you wanted to do discipleship with just the third graders together, what would they say? They would say, what's a third grader? Why is that?

It's because they went 200 years ago, they wouldn't know anything about third graders. This was a time of home education and one room school houses where you had all the ages together. And so our argument is that we're not saying anything new. We're actually recovering what has been normal and what never would have been controversial for thousands of years of church history, but is only controversial now where we tend to have the viewpoint that world history started on the day of my birth, April 7th, 1970, world history started. Actually, that's not true.

That was the beginning of the collapse, Jason. That's possible. So We also, it gets worse because we deny, we reject that there is any clear, positive, and scriptural pattern or positive institution for creating distinct age-segregated cultures in the church through age-segregated worship and systematic and comprehensive age-segregated discipleship. You and I were talking about this a little bit earlier. That is controversial, but has become less controversial over the last decade, in other words.

I think once some of the heat subsided, with people feeling like their baby was being called ugly, you know, the purveyors of youth ministry having their baby called ugly, Once the heat died down, kind of the observations about that kind of discipleship and some of the risks have been acknowledged in the intervening years where people thought, well, maybe there's a better version of this or something like that, but an acknowledgement that these things haven't borne the fruit we wanted them to bear. You know, back in the days when we were writing this and we created a movie called Divided, and I wrote a book called A Weed in the Church, How a Culture of Age Segregation is Harming the Church and the Family, I was on dozens and dozens of radio interviews. And my big question always sort of defaulted to, can you give me one explicit example or command or principle from the Bible, only from the Bible, that advocates an age-segregated worship or discipleship experience? And the problem is, there isn't one. They're just, you used to say this, you can read your Bible till your eyes bleed.

Remember I used to say that? I probably quoted you many times. I stole that from Alexander Stroup. Oh, you did? Absolutely.

Okay. Proper attribution. Proper attribution, that's a great statement. But yeah, so this is where all the problem is, right, for the declaration where people get riled up and stuff. And well, we got riled up about it too.

We really thought that should change in local church life. I think the thing people need to understand about us is that We've engaged really wholeheartedly in everything that we now have a conviction, oh, I don't think we should do this going forward. So it's not that we haven't participated this in our own personal histories. I mean, youth ministry and all these things that we have articulated concerns about, we've been all in the thick of it. That's part of why we are where we are, is we've seen, hey, these have objectives, and often the objectives aren't met, and we've actually come to the conclusion that there's a fatal flaw in the methodology that will never yield what you hope it will yield.

Yeah. However, I was at the Shepherds Conference in California, John MacArthur's pastors conference last week, and in the food line, just over from me, was a kid who was in my youth group in California. Yeah, he's 61 years old now. How about that? We had such a great time.

He's a pastor. Now, so I'm just saying, we've done all this. We pushed it up until about 25 years ago and thought maybe this was, we were maybe doing something that wasn't very biblical. Yeah. It's a back to the Bible movement.

Yeah, yeah, it's a sufficiency of scripture movement. And there've been various strands of that over the last 30 or 40 years. The return to Creationism has been one of those movements over the last 40 years. The biblical counseling movement. They're really, about 40 years ago, there was somehow God started shaking people up and saying, wait, scripture really is sufficient.

I don't know how many years it was, maybe it was a dozen years ago where you updated the declaration. And hey, I think the work done at that time on the declaration has been very helpful in tamping down the controversy, because it just made very explicit the things we do affirm, we actually do affirm and actually do deny. And some of the fears about us and the things that we were saying have dissipated because we've been really clear to say, that thing that you're afraid that we're advocating, we're not actually advocating for that. We're against it like you're against it. We're for many of the things that you're for.

You know, we had seminary presidents, lots of pastors vet the new version of the Declaration. That was a good process. It helped us to really clarify. And you were saying one of some friends that before were very standoffish and not sure that they should have anything to do with this, but once they had clear affirmations and denials, they knew it was safe to be our friend. Yeah, yeah, that was a really neat process.

So we, Article 14, we talk about the importance of age-integrated discipleship. Of course, Its greatest importance is that it's what you see in the Bible. We're just saying here that it's consistent with Holy Scripture, it's critical for the restoration of the kind of worship and discipleship culture that we see demonstrated in the New and the Old Testaments. But we also say, we also deny that an age-integrated ministry methodology should be the only or even the primary consideration for selecting or establishing a local church because the priority should be in the preaching of the gospel, the exposition of the Word of God, and the Regulative Principle of Worship. So Scott, I think I know, I know for a fact that there are age-segregated churches that we could go to and our families could be a part of because of other strengths and good things.

And there are family integrated churches that we could never take our families to because they're bad in a bunch of categories that we really value. Hey, if you went to small town America and you had a bad family integrated church where the word of God wasn't carefully handled and you didn't feel like they were sound doctrinally, but there was a good, even, we're Baptists, even if there was a good, sound Presbyterian church, you would find our families in that Presbyterian church in a New York second. Yeah, you know, it could have been like 15 years ago. I preached a sermon called Common Infections in Family Integrated Churches. It's on Sermon Audio, you can find it.

So yeah, we're not saying that a family-aggregated church makes it the best church in the world. It might not be, frankly. And we have a network of churches. We have a list of about 600 churches. We don't endorse all those churches, but what we ask them to do is to embrace at least fundamentally the propositions that are in here.

They don't have to agree with every single detail, but they at least have a sense of agreement with it. Yeah, we ask them to be in substantial agreement with the Declaration. Yeah. And some of the churches on our network, you know, they might have nurseries or they might have some version of gathering their youth together. What we say in here is what we're against is the creation of youth culture in a church and systematic age segregation.

Like, we don't want a church on our network that kicks the kids out of their worship service. You can't be on our network if you do that. But God gives elders to figure out how to minister to their people in different seasons of their church life. So that's not a problem with us. Okay, anything else?

Is that it? I think that's it for me. Okay, the Declaration for the Complementary roles of Church and Family Life, 20 articles. Check it out, let us know what you think. And thanks for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast, and we really hope to see you next time, and we really hope to see you at our national conference May 4th through 6th, or at our singles conference May 3rd and 4th, which is a pre-conference in Ridgecrest, North Carolina.

God bless. Have a great day. 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.