In a recent MacArthur Center for Expository Preaching podcast titled “John MacArthur Is My Youth Pastor,” Austin Duncan raised objections to the family-integrated church movement. Duncan, who serves as College Pastor for Grace Community Church as well as Director of the MacArthur Center, cited a “friendly argument” with Voddie Baucham on the matter while lodging numerous criticisms of the family-integrated model.  

But is Duncan’s critique correct? In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm address his objections, point by point. They express high regard for the teaching ministry of John MacArthur and agree with some of Duncan’s concerns while also refuting numerous mischaracterizations. Resting their case on the sufficiency of Scripture, they maintain that the structure of the church and family should reflect the structure revealed in the Bible alone. 

 

Podcast Related Links:

Is The Church A Family of Families? By Scott Brown

Some Answers For Critics by Scott Brown

The Forgotten Mission Field Of The Family by Voddie Baucham

Other Resources by Voddie Baucham

We're going to have to talk about something that's been called a weed in the church. That's what critics are calling youth pastors, youth groups, me. Do the critics have a point? Will we save the next generation of Christians if we fire all the youth pastors? Keep all the kids in big church with their parents?

Shut down Sunday school classes? It's a contentious and spicy question that we'll address near the end of this episode as we offer a friendly critique of the family integrated model for church ministry and a defense of what MacArthur's been about his whole life which is ministering to every generation. Well, Jason, there you go. That was Austin Duncan, and he is an elder at Grace Community church where John MacArthur is the pastor and he is also the college pastor there at that church. And of course, he's registering a number of objections to the family integrated church movement.

So we want to respond to those. We're going to try to respond line by line to his objections. Yeah, I think, you know, both of us want to start by expressing our appreciation for John MacArthur and Grace Community Church. It's been particularly valuable during the COVID season. Some of the stances that they took are stances that we had a great appreciation for.

But way back for me, you know, back in the 1970s, when I was at Talbot Seminary and John MacArthur would come and speak there, I've been just profoundly impacted there. Have loved to go to the Shepherds Conference for many years. And boy, I just, we don't, we're not here to throw shade on Grace Community Church or John MacArthur or really anything that they're doing. In fact, when I go to the Shepherds Conference, I'm always amazed at how many pastors who are, who call themselves family integrated church pastors that are there at the Shepherds Conference. So they have a lot of people that don't like them because they've upheld biblical Christianity for 50 years plus.

We're not part of the people who don't like them. We like them a lot. In fact, a lot of the people who don't like them also don't like us for the same or similar reasons. And it's because we have so many shared commitments. Absolutely.

You know, I got a text this morning from one of the pastors in our network who told me, hey, we give money to Grace Community Church because we love it so much. So these are friends. We're so thankful for them. But we think that their critique was a misrepresentation Almost point by point now. So we want to try to address what we thought was misrepresentation But who are we?

Maybe there are people who are watching that don't know who we are. We are Church and Family Life. Our focus is to proclaim the sufficiency of Scripture for Church and Family Life. The sufficiency of Scripture is the heart of everything we try to say. We were formerly known as the National Center for Family Integrated Churches.

And we operated under that name for many, many years, built a church network, provided conferences on all kinds of things. Our conferences really never focused on family integrated churches. They focused on things like love the church, the worship of God, repentance. Dissufficiency of scripture. Dissufficiency of scripture primarily.

Everything we say we hope is a faithful representation of the sufficiency of scripture. If anybody wants to go to our website, we've got thousands of resources at churchandfamilylife.com. Jason and I, we do a podcast once a week on some issue that impinges on church life and family life. So anyway, that's, that's who we are. Why do we change our name?

We changed our name because the name National Center for Family Integrated Churches didn't really focus on what we were primarily focused on. We have always been primarily focused on the sufficiency of scripture. Yeah, and how that relates to church life and to family life and to the interrelationship between church and family. So really the things that we'll be talking about today are right, are central to that. And by the way, we're having a national conference in April, April 25th, and we want to invite anybody to come.

Some of our favorite preachers are going to be there, Steve Lawson, Joel Beeke, Tom Askell, and a whole bunch of other guys are going to come together and play out the doctrine of making disciples. We also have a pre-conference. It's a singles conference and a pastors conference that features particularly an entire day on preaching with Steve Lawson. And then the next day on shepherding the church with Alexander Strouk and Kevin Swanson. So anyway, we hope you can come to our national conference at the end of April, go check it out on our website.

So Jason, let's just work our way through the clips and just try to offer some explanation. That sounds good. Let's do it. In recent years though, some very vocal Christians in an attempt to reject the juvenileization of American Christianity, have fixed their sights on what they believe to be a different problem. But the primary problem in the American church is that there's any ministry to young people at all.

A small but vocal minority have started movements of churches and infiltrated many Bible churches equipped with an agenda. That the problem with the American Church is the youth pastor, the Sunday school teacher, or kids church. They even have weaponized vocabulary they employ. They call it age segregated ministry. That's right, segregated.

You got a class for fifth graders at your church where a patient saint teaches the Bible to 10 year olds? Age segregated ministry. And they don't just argue that it's a bad idea. They say it's unbiblical, satanic, and Darwinian. They think the church should have no ministry to college students or children.

That families should come to church together in the same car and never separate. Sit together in the same pew, never let your kids out of your sight, load back into the van, go home, stay there all week, seal the bunker against the culture. Their churches have no college ministry, no youth group, no children's ministry, no VBS, no nursery. All the saints and their kids gather together. This is called the family integrated movement.

Okay, so he talks right off the bat about this weed, the weed in the church. I'm assuming he's talking about my book, a weed in the church, how a culture of age segregation is harming the younger generation, fragmenting the family and dividing the church. And yes, we are absolutely concerned about the juvenileization of the church. But it's even broader than that. The church has become so pragmatic and has accepted all kinds of pragmatic means to reach people.

What we think the heart of the problem is not that there's a youth pastor out there. We think the heart of the problem is that the church has really rejected the sufficiency of Scripture for church and family life. Yeah, the weed in the church, according to your book, isn't youth pastors, although that might be part of the manifestation of that. Really the core of the weed in the church is how the people of God over time have adopted more and more practices that can't be found in scripture and that look a lot more like what has come out of worldviews that are not distinctively Christian worldviews, and in some cases are un-Christian worldviews. But we've sort of adopted and Christianized these things, even though you can't find a corresponding practice in the Bible.

So it's not a fear of a youth pastor per se, but it's actually something that's more fundamental than that. It's the people of God adopting practices that come from places other than Scripture. Right. In that clip, he puts a lot of words in our mouth that we've never said that I don't really... I don't know of any leader who is a proponent of what we would call an age-integrated church or a family-integrated church, whatever kind of terminology you want to use.

He says that, that these people are opposed of any ministry to young people at all. Now we, I, I'm just not aware of anybody saying that he, he mentions Vodi Bakum, later on in, in this discourse, but Vodi Bakum has never said that, that I'm aware of her. I just don't know anybody who said that. So, Scott, what we deny is that, it's a requirement to separate out by age for ministry to any person. That's very different than being against any ministry to young people at all.

We believe in age integrated churches that you have, you're having lots of ministry to young people, but that to accomplish that you don't have to separate them out by fifth grade, sixth grade, seventh grade. The question we're asking is, does the Bible command or even picture age segregated kind of ministry where the generations are separated? You can use the word segregated or separate, whatever you want to use. He says that this is a weaponized term, but we're just trying to describe a reality where the generations are separated and you have 13 year olds with 13 year olds and the senior citizens with the senior citizens. And, you know, the eight year olds with eight year olds is, Does the Bible describe that kind of church life anywhere?

I can see actually where you might consider the term segregated of a charged term because United States has a period of segregation. We're really not trying to link it to that. We would be just as happy to call it age separated. Really what we're talking about is separating by age group very finely, meaning every age gets its own group. That's really the objection, not to try to tie it to things in our history that everyone knows we're about.

You know, He talks about a vocal minority have started movements of churches and infiltrated many Bible churches. This is actually an accurate statement. There has been an upsurge of churches where their worship services include all the generations together, even from the babies. In the churches that we're connected with, we have a network of several hundred churches which subscribe to some basic principles about church structure and church life. But these churches are generationally united in terms of the worship.

The entire church comes together to worship God. Yeah. So he calls, he says that we're saying that separated, I'll just use that term so that it's not weaponized, that we say age-separated ministry is unbiblical, satanic, and Darwinian. Let's just take those one by one. We say it's unbiblical because you actually can't find a command or a pattern of it in the New Testament.

Let's just stop there. It's not that you can't find it, is that you actually find the opposite. What you see explicitly in Scripture is a pattern of the generations gathering together. And we've written extensively about it. You can read about it in this book, A Weed in the Church.

We put together a declaration for the complementary roles of church and family life, which is really written kind of in a confessional pattern. There are several articles, you know, they really try to describe what we believe about the church, what we believe about the family. We're really actually comprehensively specific about the things that we affirm, the propositions that we are advancing. And we deny things that actually we want to be clear, no, we're not saying this. So when I look, when I listen to this first clip, I would say I agree that the thing that he's describing is a scary thing and I don't recognize it.

Because he says, weed in the church, and you've written a book called, The Weed in the Church, I assume he's talking about us, but those are not the propositions advanced in the book or that we're actually advancing. Like you said this earlier, these are propositions that we've been advancing for the last 20 years and actually getting more and more specific and precise in how we articulate the things. And the thing in the clip doesn't match the things that we've been articulating at all. I'll read you Article 13 in the Declaration of the Complementary Roles in Church and family life. The biblical pattern is age integration.

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 there are a couple of dozen passages of scripture that demonstrate that. We're going to put that up on the screen just so that you can snapshot it. And then the denial. We deny 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.

So it's really simple what we mean by unbiblical. You cannot find it in the Bible. And you find the opposite in the Bible. But we are talking about what is systematic and comprehensive age-segregated discipleship. And I think that's why Austin misses what we've actually written when he says that there is any ministry to young people at all.

That's actually not what we're saying. What we're saying is what we've declared in our declaration, Article 14, the importance of age-integrated discipleship. We affirm that returning to a biblically ordered age-integrated methodology for the worship of God and discipleship in a local church is consistent with Holy Scripture and critical for the restoration of the kind of worship and discipleship culture we see demonstrated in the Old and New Testaments. And then there are several passages of Scripture that explicitly affirm that. We deny or reject that an age-integrated ministry methodology should be the only or even the primary consideration for selecting or establishing a local church, because priority of consideration should be given to the preaching of the gospel and the teaching of sound doctrine, while recognizing that the purest churches under heaven are subject to mixture of error.

We're not even saying that a family integrated church is the essential nature of the church. We've never said that and we don't say that and we don't think that that's what absolutely defines a church. We're talking about methodology. Scott, I think, you know, one of the things that makes us say this isn't an accurate representation of us is that you and I are both the farthest away from anti-institutional, anti-local church people. We're actually advocating that people build their lives around the local church.

And so the propositions that we're advancing are not a diminishment of local church at all. In many ways, it's an exaltation of God's church. I want to loop back to the satanic quote here. They say it's unbiblical, satanic, and Darwinian, and they think the church should have no ministry to college students or children. I just want to clarify what we've actually said.

What we have said is that there was a radical change, particularly in the 20th century, but it was really fomented earlier through the rise of public education. And the reason the church is so highly segmented into all life stages goes back to Horace Mann, who was the father of public education, and also to John Dewey, who really created the age-segregated classroom. These were Darwinists, these were Haters of God, you know, Horace Mann was a Unitarian, but they could, they created an, a novel educational system. Before, before they began their work, you know, schools were in one room. That changed.

And, and they began to, they call it the egg crate system of public education, where you had a room for every segment, an age group. And the church adopted that. And that's why you have churches that are built today with lots and lots of classrooms. That, that was an outgrowth of the public education movement and and the public education movement was actually founded by unbelievers. And I think that's all that we're saying.

And it was founded really out of a pragmatic methodology. And what you mean by pragmatic is that it didn't arise out of exposition of scripture, studying the patterns of the New Testament church. It actually arose out of what was happening in the larger culture around us, things that really had no correspondence to what was in the Bible. Right. And I think by the time Austin Duncan became a youth pastor, this thing had been well underway.

It was just the standard, it was what we all did. It's what I did. Sure. Back in the 70s and 80s, I started a Youth for Christ, or a campus life ministry in the town that I was in. I was very, you know, very well aware of the modern youth ministry nonprofits, gleaned from them, used their materials, had youth camps, all kinds, you know, I was sort of born into that.

And that was the standard methodology for ministering to youth. So Scott, I think I should say this, people who are familiar with my personal testimony know that I benefited from and was shaped by, in some very good ways, by youth ministry. And what we would say to that is actually that's not the question we're addressing here. The question isn't can anything good come out of youth ministry? The question is what are the practices that God has given to his people and we should give ourselves to those things?

Yeah, being satisfied with the biblical patterns, to bring biblical order to church life and to be satisfied with the things that the Bible both describes and the things that the Bible doesn't promote at all. I think that's really what we... That's the doctrine of the sufficiency of scripture for church and family life. And neither one of us want to live in a world where God only works when we're thinking clearly about things, when what we're doing matches up exactly with the Bible. Knowing all the things that we've shifted on, I think, in a good direction over time, we would say, no, God never waited.

God is merciful. God works through all sorts of things that we look back later and say, what were we thinking in every category of life? Certainly not in just this one, but that is not the question we're trying to answer. Hey, so let's move, move to the next clip. We he's talked about a weed in the church.

Now, he's going to cite Vodi Bakum. Let's play that clip. The centrality of the home in the evangelism and discipleship of the next generation. God has a plan for multigenerational faithfulness. That plan is the family.

That's the booming and melodious voice of my friend, Dr. Vodi Balkam. He's the Dean of the School of Divinity at African Christian University in Lusaka, Zambia. He used to be the pastor of a family integrated church in Houston, Texas. He is, without a doubt, the most prominent advocate of the family integrated approach to church.

And he's quite the critic of modern youth ministry, something I've been involved in my entire life. In addition to my responsibilities here hosting this fine podcast and my work as a professor at the Master Seminary, I serve at my church Grace Community as a youth pastor right now to college students. And I've done youth ministry for 25 years and counting. Our current approach to youth ministry, number one, is unbiblical. Number two, is antithetical to what the biblical model is for the evangelization and discipleship of young people.

And number three, it doesn't work. Let me give you what we say is the goal of many of our youth ministries. What we say is this, the youth ministry at so-and-so Baptist Church exists to evangelize teenagers, to disciple them, and to equip them to go and evangelize other teenagers. Two problems for that. Number one, nine times out of ten we never mentioned parents.

And number two, not your job. Whose job is it to evangelize my children? The church? No, it's mine. Look, I can think of a lot of people I'd rather pick a fight with than Vody Baucom.

He is a faithful brother in Christ and I consider him a friend. But there was once a slight disagreement between us, a friendly argument among teammates. The conversation went down at the 2011 Shepherds Conference when Vodi made a surprise appearance at my breakout session titled, Family Matters, does the Bible demand family integrated ministry? The room was primed for some fireworks. I did everything I could to defuse the situation by immediately clarifying that though I, as a youth pastor, disagree with family integrated ministry, I don't think it's the biggest problem that faced the church in 2011 or today.

This is not heresy. Not heresy. This is not false teaching. These are shepherds and sheep. These are not wolves and goats.

So put away your fundamentalist weapons and let's relax here. This is not an attack. It's not like Vodi Bakum is actually here or something. I had the privilege of meeting Vody 20 minutes ago. We have mutual friends and acquaintances and Vody is not my opposition.

I thought that was incredibly unfair to isolate one, one quote, to try to represent what Vodi has been living and teaching, you know, his whole life. It's hard to find an evangelical with a higher view of the local church than Vodi Bakum. That's true. So, another thing I think it's helpful to understand about Vodi Bakum is his entire theological orientation. He, embraces the 1689 London Baptist Confession, which speaks to the doctrine of the church.

He's been an ardent expositor of the Word of God. He designs to hold tightly to the text of Scripture. If you've ever heard him preach, you know that's exactly what he's doing. And he doesn't want to go off the playbook of the Bible. And a clip like that kind of slots Vody in an unfavorable light that I felt was very inappropriate.

Scott, one of the things he says here is that he disagrees with family integrated ministry, but he doesn't think it's the biggest problem being faced in the church in 2011 or today. So I think we would say the flip side of that too, like while we don't agree with the church's almost universal adoption, at least for a long period of time of separating out by age groups, we don't think it's the biggest problem. But we do think it's symptomatic of a really big problem. Exactly. We think it's symptomatic of the big problem, and that is pragmatism, and a diminishing of the doctrine of the sufficiency of scripture, and particularly the regulated principle of worship.

So we think that there are lots of symptoms that have arisen out of this. I mean, I think, you know, some of the most egregious symptoms, and we would certainly not lump Grace Community church in this at all, but the whole seeker sensitive movement was just a massive pragmatic move advancing even further than the youth ministry movement. And then you had the emergent church movement and now you have this woke movement. These are pragmatic movements in the church. And the greatest problem that we think is the greatest problem is pragmatism as a result of the rejection of the sufficiency of scripture.

So the bedrock text on the sufficiency of Scripture is 2 Timothy 3, 16 and 17. No one knows that better than the pastors and the people at Grace Community Church. We know that they embrace this concept, but it's that all scripture is breathed out by God and that it's able to make you thoroughly equipped for every good work. And what we want to say is that the discipleship of children and youth is a good work and that the scriptures actually don't have a big hole in thoroughly equipping us to do that good work, but the scriptures have the commands and patterns that we need for that. The truth is that the best way, the most effective way, the way we should structure around and give the best of our resources to is to separate out the people in church by age to disciple them.

Your Bible doesn't know that. Your Bible has never heard that. Your Bible is estranged from that proposition. So Jason, in the next clip, Austin continues to itemize some of his concerns. Let's listen.

After that attempt of establishing a foundation of pleasantries, I went on to explain my concerns with the family integrated movement. It can, at times, place too high an emphasis on methodology. How they structure their churches becomes the most important thing about them. The family integrated movement can also, again at times, confuse the roles of the family and the church, giving to the father roles that God intends for the pastor and elders. After all, the local church, not solely the family, is God's discipleship program.

Christ's church is a reminder that families are not an end in themselves. Families need other families. They also need pastors and leaders. And ultimately and eternally, your family will not consist of those who are biologically related to you. In the New Covenant, the Church isn't a family of families, but the family of God.

Yes, there's a responsibility of parents to faithfully teach their children the truth, but the Holy Spirit is the one who ultimately will save them. After addressing those concerns, I tried to take a more positive approach, make a biblical case for age-appropriate ministry, and point out how youth groups and college ministries can have a valuable and biblical role in the life of the church. Here's a young ATD. I believe that a biblical student ministry understands that it is the call of both the church and the family to disciple students and thus present all people complete in Christ. I believe families are to integrate into the church and not the church into the family.

Sorry to interrupt myself here, but I need to add a couple biblical references, both from Jesus, both quite shocking. The first is Matthew 10 37. It's there that Jesus says, the one who loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me. The one who loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me. A few chapters later, we read, well, he's still speaking to the crowds.

Behold, his mother and brothers were standing outside seeking to speak to him. And someone said to him, Look, your mother and your brothers are standing outside seeking to speak to you. But Jesus replied to the one who was telling him and said, Who is my mother? Who are my brothers? And extending his hand toward his disciples, he said, Behold, my mother and my brothers.

For whoever does the will of my father who is in heaven he is my brother and sister and mother now obviously Jesus isn't anti-family but he's anti turning the family into an idol saying it's more important than knowing the Savior. And to help us all know Christ better, God gives us the Church with its diversity of spiritual gifts. Ephesians 4, 11 through 13, and he gave some as apostles, some as prophets, some as evangelists, some as pastors and teachers, for the equipping of the saints, for the work of ministry, for the building up of the body of Christ, until we all attain to the unity of the faith and of the knowledge of the Son of God, to a mature man, to the measure of stature which belongs to the fullness of Christ." So Jason, one of the things that he mentions is that we place too high an emphasis on methodology, quote, how they structure their churches becomes the most important thing about them, unquote. Well, I would say we do think that's a very, very important issue. We think that the structure of the church should come out of the structure that's revealed in the Bible alone.

So I think he identifies something that is true about us. So what are the ends that are a shared commitment between us and men. People of all ages and especially, or at least including young people, should be evangelized. They should be told that Jesus saves sinners, and they should be discipled. So the ends, evangelism, discipleship is a shared commitment.

The methods are actually what we control. So he's already said, we can't save our children. Parents can't save their children, family structures don't save their children. To that we say, amen. Preaching at church doesn't save your children.

The Holy Spirit saves your children. But what we control are the methods, not the ends. So the ends actually don't justify the means. The means are actually the only place where we can be faithful because that's where we have our instructions and that's what we can control. And so we want the methods actually to conform to scripture because that's what God has put in our hands, not actually the end point, His Spirit determines that.

Yeah. And, you know, on the other hand, you know, He accuses us of blending the church and the family, blending the roles of the church and the family, giving to the father the role that God intends for the pastor and the elders. And that's just so far from the truth. We've never communicated that in any way over the years. In fact, our declaration of the complementary roles of church and family life.

We have always made it very clear that the church is an institution, it's an independent institution, and the family is an independent institution. They are complementary, They do have overlapping functions, but the church is not the family and the family is not the church. And pastors and elders are a very, very important reality in the lives of everybody in the family. That we've, We've always said that the church needs the family and the family needs the church. We've always said that children need to hear preaching from qualified elders.

They need to hear voices beyond their fathers and mothers. They actually need something more than father and mother. We've always articulated that. And I think that if Austin had read or heard the things that we've actually said, he couldn't have said what he said here. One of the things he introduced in that clip was a phrase, age-appropriate ministry.

And one of the things sort of bound up in the term is that there's a lot in quote unquote big church that isn't appropriate for younger children. And that's just not a proposition that we embrace. There may be certain vocabulary that's friendlier to people who are older, have a higher level of education. But we think actually that you really don't have to make your instruction overly basic. That actually, in every time a child sits through big church, for lack of a better term, they're getting something and the somethings compound over time.

We've learned that, hey, children get a lot more than you think. It's astounding to me what children retain, what they understand, and they get a little bit here and a little bit there, and they keep getting a little bit more. But nobody gets everything out of what they hear. But what they, what they do learn is they learn to see people worshiping God, praying to God, hearing, preaching, one of the most important things that happens on the planet. And they actually end up loving it.

That's what we found for many, many years. The children in these churches, they love the church. So another thing bound up in the term age-appropriate ministry is that if you do it that way, they'll get further faster. And we've been part of age-appropriate ministry, age-specific ministry. I've sat through it as a child pretty much all the way through.

I've presided over it. I've been a part of that system and I just deny that as a reality that this age-appropriate ministry is getting them farther faster. That's simply not true. Well, and I'll take it to another level and that is, does the Bible lead us to believe that we should be providing age-appropriate teaching to people? Does the Bible lead us that way?

Do the, the, the patterns and the principles in the Bible lead us to say, we have to provide age appropriate teaching to children. And I think the answer is, Yes, because the preaching of the word of God is inherently age appropriate. For Vody and me and everybody else in this space, you know, experienced a significant controversy over the use of that term family of families. We'll put a link to Vody's article that he wrote in response to that controversy. I wrote an article as well about it, but we have said, you know, the church is the family of families And lots and lots of people have used that terminology, you know, over the years.

But, you know, we were accused of, of, of changing the nature of the church, that it's always families. And what we were actually just trying to say is, look, when the church gathers, families show up and you should, and you should minister to families, not just families, you single people and divorced people and all kinds of people. But The church should not ignore that there are actual families out there. You should be ministering to families during the preaching and all of what you're doing. So Scott, I thought the use of these two texts was absolutely fascinating.

So there's Matthew 1037 and following, where Jesus makes the point that the spiritual nature of his relationship with his disciples is actually more fundamental than the biological bloodlines that you have with your natural family. We would say, amen. We would say, what does that have to do with it? That actually, to say that your spiritual connection is more fundamental than your bloodline connection is not the same thing as saying what we ought to do is to split up by ages for discipleship. So that passage doesn't teach that, say that, a proper application of that is not that.

And then the other one is Ephesians 411, which says that pastors ought to equip the saints for the work of the ministry. Again, we'd say a hearty amen to both of these. We love both those texts, but we deny that what they teach is that we should be splitting out by age for discipleship and evangelism. And honestly, if that's the case, if that's the biblical case for this practice, There might be people who are satisfied that Grace Community takes this position and on that basis alone, they would say, well, we've been put in our place. The good Bereans though are going to need a lot more and a lot better than that.

You know, in this this citation, Jason, in Matthew 10, he's really attacking a family idolatry where the family becomes more important than the gospel and the Lord Jesus Christ himself. And there are family idolaters out there. There are people who exalt the family over everything. And so I think he's right to cite that, but he's talking about a different category than what it means to have a family becoming part of a church. He says this, the local church, not solely the family is God's discipleship program.

To which we both say amen and have always said this is not a shift in our view. This has always been the articulated view. I don't know who he's arguing against. Yeah. You know, it's interesting.

Who is he arguing against? Who are the specific people that have written or preached this type of thing? You can find isolated individuals that act like this, But I don't believe any of the actual leaders who are promoting an age integrated discipleship proposition are doing that. In this next clip, Austin is telling us what we base our proposition on and this is at best a really big straw man. So let's play the clip.

The Bible doesn't say that the church should or shouldn't have age-specific ministry. Some of the proponents of the family-integrated church use Deuteronomy 6 to try to demonstrate that children should only and exclusively learn from their parents in the context of the family of God. Deuteronomy 6 says, these words which I am commanding you today shall be on your heart and you shall repeat them diligently to your sons and speak of them when you sit in your house, when you walk on the road, when you lie down, and when you get up. Now that's an important teaching. That's the the creed of Israel, the Shema, and it is showing us the centrality, significance, and importance of parents investing truth into their children and their children's children.

But in the context of the church, it's not an exclusive investment. To say an Old Testament passage like that is forbidding anyone except parents from teaching their children is to stretch that passage beyond its hermeneutical limits. As we've already pointed out, there are bad youth ministries with bad ecclesiology that do not honor the parents' role, And that doesn't necessarily mean that all youth ministries are a bad idea. That's like saying we should shut down all churches because some of them have bad doctrine. Austin makes a statement that I'm not aware of anybody ever saying or making a connection with Deuteronomy 6.

Deuteronomy 6 is clearly the way that families should function. And he is declaring that we use Deuteronomy 6 to demonstrate that children should only and exclusively learn from their parents in the context of the family of God. That's a ridiculous statement because we don't believe that. And we to say that children can only learn from their parents is so antithetical to the entire doctrine of the local church. In 20 years, I've never heard one person say that.

I'd like to know who said that. Yeah. This has never been the message of anybody I'm aware of, you know, that's promoting these kinds of things. So I think Deuteronomy 6 is certainly a foundational starting point for the discipleship of children. I don't think anyone at Grace Community would deny that that's so.

But our view of it has always been that it's maybe a starting point for a full-orbed view of how the Bible says disciples ought to be made and to help them make progress in the faith. So Scott, what do you think is that full-orbed view? We deny that Deuteronomy 6 is the sum total of it. What would you say is the full-orbed biblical view of discipleship? Yeah, what's the full or picture?

Well, God, God places his children in local churches, and there in those local churches, they have the worship of God, they have the preaching of the word, they have singing, they have prayer meetings, they have what we call the ordinary means of grace. They have various gifted people in the church that have different skills and gifts, a broad range of people. They have older women teaching the younger women, older men teaching the younger men. There's such a rich compliment in a local church for ministry to youth. And, you know, you think about the single mother, what does she get?

Well, she doesn't get everybody like her. She gets a broad spectrum of people in her life. And, and, you know, everybody in the local church gets a spiritual father, a spiritual mother. They get a spiritual grandfather, a spiritual grandmother. They get elders, they get deacons, they get gifted people.

The normal contours of a local church is that full or ministry. And of course, the center of it is the worship of God and then all the other things that the church does in fellowship and evangelism. So that's how that happens in the New Testament church. And there's a relationship in the Bible between the family who has given this role for diligently teaching their children to love God and what his ways are, Deuteronomy chapter 6, which is really, I think it's just summarized in Ephesians chapter 6, when you get to parents being commanded to bring up their children and the training and the admonition of the Lord. Those are commands to parents, but it doesn't mean that the church doesn't have a role.

The church has a role in the discipleship of all the Lord's people. It really is the place where we all go, we all sit under the preaching of God and receive these ordinary means of grace into our lives. So it's happening all week long in our homes as a father takes the commands to him seriously. And then we go to church, maybe midweek, definitely on Sundays and receive more. So it isn't the church without the family.

It isn't the family without the church. Actually, I think this would be a common ground with the people who are critiquing. But in some ways, both institutions have to be careful to uphold and promote the ground given to the other institution. Right, these institutions are jurisdictions. And so you have these complementary jurisdictions that are meant to function in a harmonious way.

I think it's worthwhile though, to walk through the Bible and just demonstrate that God has always, first of all, God has always gathered his people together. That's what God's people do. They gather. The very meaning of the term church ecclesia is to gather. So that's what the church has done from the very beginning.

But I'd like to walk us through how the people of God have always gathered and they've always gathered in generational contexts. I documented that in this book and also in the Weed in the Church and also in the Declaration, but I want to give you just some examples of when God's people gather together, What is it like? This is from the family at church. This is from the family at church, how parents are tour guides for joy, which is a book about how to go to church as a family. In Exodus chapter 12, verses one through 28, you have the Passover, where whole families celebrated deliverance from bondage in Egypt.

In Leviticus 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5, you have the ministry of the tabernacle, where the whole family is commanded to bring sacrifices to the tabernacle for atonement. You have the Sabbath feast. These were family-oriented kind of events that also include the priests and the Levites. In Deuteronomy 12, Moses is explaining how parents should bring their families to the place for the Lord your God chooses. And all of the tribes come.

The tribes are families. In Deuteronomy chapter 27, verses 11 through 26, you see the young and the old, all the families of Israel gathered, some on Mount Ebal and some on Mount Gerizim to recount the blessings and the curses. In the days of Moses, God commands families, including little ones, quote unquote, to come together every seven years to hear the reading of the law of God. That's Deuteronomy 31, 12 and 13. You find the same pattern in Joshua 8, 35, the same pattern in Nehemiah 8, 1 and 2.

In Nehemiah 12, 43, you have women and children all gathering to rejoice because of the revival that took place. In 2 Chronicles 20, verse 13, the children and the wives, they come together to pray under the threat of invasion. I mean, something really bad is happening and they're worshiping God and praying under the threat of attack. And all the children are there, They're experiencing this gathering. In the temple, in 2 Chronicles 31, 18, the families were before God in the temple to sanctify themselves.

In Joel 2, 15 and 16, this is a season of repentance, the scribes, whole families, even brides and bridegrooms on their wedding day are coming together. New Testament examples we see, you have Jesus Christ calling the children to come and be with him. The disciples resisted it in Matthew 18, 2, and 3. In the temple in Jerusalem, in Matthew 21, 15, and 16, we learn that children were in the temple and they were crying out. The Pharisees did not approve of what they were doing.

In Matthew 14, 21, Jesus is feeding 5,000 men besides the women and the children. This is the pattern of the gathering of the people of God. In Acts 21 verse 5, we find the children joining their parents to pray on the beach. In Ephesians 6, 1 through 4, you find the setting really is the gathered church and the apostle Paul is addressing the children directly. He uses the vocative of direct address.

Children obey your parents and the Lord. He, in this whole context, he's addressing wives, then husbands, and then he addresses children, and then he addresses slaves. There are just so many examples of this. You know, when Adam and Eve gathered their family to sacrifice, the brothers were there. When Abraham would gather and build an altar to the Lord.

This was a family affair. What I'm saying is that the only explicit pattern you see in the Bible is a generational pattern. You don't see age segmentation in the Bible, but you see the exact opposite. Yeah. How many guys have you met over the last decade or decade and a half whose story was, I was a youth pastor, I was really engaged in my work, felt like this is what God called me to, and then I listened to a Vodi Bakam sermon.

And it just sort of made me think, hey, I can't actually find it in scripture. Hey, we weren't born family integrated. Right. We didn't grow up that way. No, we didn't grow up that way.

And we both have long lives in quote unquote normal churches that have structured around separating out on age groups. And we came to this conviction over time, but we've experienced all of that. And honestly, to say again what I've already said, can you find people that have been saved through youth ministry? Of course, a multitude. Can you find the people who were helped by teaching that was done in youth ministry, of course, a multitude that doesn't compare with anything, and certainly not what would have happened had they been structured differently.

So they really have no way to make a comparison. And it's really not the question we think we should be answering. I've either done myself or promoted most of the really dumb things that have happened in youth groups, particularly in the 20th century. So, you know, I've seen it. And, you know, I'm here to testify that when you gather all the generations together, there's really a big difference.

The children mature faster. They become more biblically literate. They're more orderly. It's just very interesting that such a small thing of listening to preaching and singing with the saints and praying together, the effect it has is profound. And the children actually like it.

So in the next clip Austin brings in John MacArthur to explain why he's always had a nursery or a children's Sunday school. So let's listen. Well, first there's a pragmatic reality. I sat under my dad, he was my pastor, and I loved him probably more than anybody, obviously my own father and mother. And when I was a little kid, I'd sit when he preached and I would count the ease in the bulletin So look I'm like nine years old And literally I'm counting the ease in the bulletin because in the first place nothing in my life compels me to the solution that he's offering.

Do you know what I mean by that? I mean he's preaching to people, The Word of God is the answer to this and this and I don't even have those questions. I'm a nine-year-old kid, you know. So you have to recognize that there has to be a very well thought out approach to instructing children in the Word of God. Any parent with half a brain knows that.

So you would do that in your home. You would do that with your own children, age appropriate instruction, why wouldn't you do that in a church? The advantage of doing it in the church rather than isolating it in the home is that the church has multiple gifted people who can do so many things better than, I mean look we all have some gifts but we don't have all the gifts. That's the genius of the church. The church has all the gifts.

And so the richness of that biblical training is coming from all kinds of people investing into this life. Why would you say it's better for the Father to be the only teacher when that doesn't make any sense at all? Jason, he seems to be responding to the Father to be the only teacher, And that doesn't make any sense at all. To that we completely agree, the father is not the only teacher. He mentioned that there's a pragmatic reality involved when he was sitting under his father's preaching, he's nine years old and he would count the E's.

You know, that actually kind of cracked me up because I thought that's because he was going to focus on expository preaching. The E, the expository. But I wasn't sure exactly what he was responding to I think he's talking about The way that people learn a nine-year-old is gonna hear things differently, but he was in church when he was nine, so he wasn't in children's church, I guess. Right. He's listening to his father's preaching.

He says, in the first place, nothing in my life compels me to the solution that he's offering. And that is true. There are things that happen in the course of a normal sermon that a child doesn't yet have a frame of reference for. Right. But this actually stretches our children.

I think to step back and examine the argument or think it through, what we're saying is there's benefit to having both. He's saying, well, why would you do that? Why would you have teaching that's not age appropriate? Well, we would say, careful about the use of that term. They actually do get a lot.

And it actually stretches them that it's not absolutely tailored to their particular age means they're being stretched. And then he talks about what parents do in their own home. They are actually more, are more targeted to the age. And we're saying, yes, exactly. At home, they get something that might be a little more tailored to their individual age or state of life or achievements in learning or any of that.

But then when they go to church, they're actually expanded by an exposure to things that are outside of just things that are tailored to them. One of the wonderful things about preaching is you get advanced vocabulary, you continue to build vocabulary, you're building a theological vocabulary, you're walking through narratives and doctrinal situations that are mind expanding. The preaching of the Word of God is mind expanding. And, you know, our understanding is that's the way that children are always in that mind expanding experience. And that's actually the best thing for them to just continue to hear the language of the Bible and the stories that are connected to the Bible.

So Scott, here's MacArthur. The church has multiple gifted people who can do so many things better than, and he doesn't finish the sentence. We don't know why he didn't finish the sentence. It is true that the church has multiple gifted people, But if the implication is that these gifted people can do so many things better than what they could get from only a father, well true, but we're not calling for just what's only a father. We actually want them to have the best of both worlds.

And the best of both worlds to us is robust discipleship during the course of the week at home, plus the input of biblically qualified elders when they go to church in a way that really stretches and helps. And they're getting something out of every sermon. How many times have you ridden home afterwards? And our children were on the row next to us or listening to you as you were preaching, and you thought they're just doodling. But something that they said in the car on the way home tipped you off.

Oh, actually, there was a whole lot more than doodling happen there. That has happened to me time without count. I loved when John MacArthur said this, we all have some gifts, but we don't have all the gifts. That's the genius of the church. The church has all the gifts, and so the richness of that biblical training is coming from all kinds of people investing into this life.

Praise the Lord. That's exactly what we're advocating. Right. And we deny that the only way to get the richness of that, or even the best way to get the richness of that is to separate out into age groups. So in this last clip, Jason, you've got this wonderful story from John MacArthur about his grandson.

And we've seen this kind of thing play out so many times. It's so beautiful. I love the way he told this. Let's hear it. What my little two year old great grandson, Sunday came up to my office and he wanted M&Ms.

He's two. His name is Titus. And his mom said, You have to ask Papa for those after you said your Bible verse. So he mumbles John 3.15 and he rattles off something. And I'm thinking in my heart, this is two years old and he's learning John 3.16.

He's learning John 3.16. So, yeah, you know, if you want to really win parents, you have to have directed instruction in the Word of God in the lives of their children and young people and teenagers. So I think you break it down by multiplying many leaders who are gifted teachers and leaders who can break the Word of God down at every level. At the foundation of everything John has said about youth ministry is a simple biblical commitment, one that's at the heart of every enduring ministry. That commitment is laid out in 2 Timothy chapter two.

Paul is writing to Timothy, his beloved son in the faith, reminding him of his calling, his responsibility to pass truth along to the next generation. This is what he said, You therefore, my son, be strong in the grace that is in Christ Jesus. The things which you have heard from me in the presence of many witnesses, entrust these to faithful men who will be able to teach others also. That entrusting starts at a young age. For John, it starts with his great-grandson when he's two years old.

That entrusting happens in the home, and it happens in the church. We're all called to the work of teaching the next generation the truth, helping them see that their life is not their own. They are bought with a price, and they are called to glorify God. So we see another text of Scripture employed. It's a text that we've quoted many times and always appreciated.

And so we, we love the truth of it, but it's, it's not a foundation stone upon which to disciple people by segregating them out into different age groups. Our entire message is trust Scripture alone. It's sola Scriptura. It's the sufficiency of Scripture. It's to continue the work of sanctification and to seek what it means to be a biblically ordered church, to follow the biblical patterns, and what it means to be a biblically ordered family, and to operate these two jurisdictions, these two jurisdictions, the greatest jurisdictions, the greatest governments in the world that are designed specifically by God for the evangelization and the discipleship of the next generation.

These institutions are not our playground. These are God's holy institutions that need to be respected and preserved in the way that they were revealed in Scripture. The apostle Paul said, we have no other pattern and our pattern is Scripture alone. That's really our hope. Do we get it perfectly?

Absolutely not. Do we have, you know, miles and miles to go in our own sanctification? You know, our confession, the 1689, makes it clear that all churches are a mixture of error. But what we're convinced of is that the Church of Jesus Christ was designed to be a generational community where the word of God and the gospel of Jesus Christ was the center of everything. And that it's very important that you have biblically ordered families and biblically ordered churches, and you can't have a healthy church without healthy families, and you can't have healthy families without healthy churches.

And that's why our whole focus of our ministry is to bring biblical order to church and family life. So Jason, I'm really glad we had an opportunity to explain our position in the face of Austin Duncan's objections. It was a great discussion, thanks so much. And thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. And I hope you can join us at our national conference in April at Ridgecrest, North Carolina, where it's a preaching conference.

It's a conference where the whole families gather to hear the preaching of the Word of God. It's a wonderful time of fellowship, and you're going to hear Joe Beeke and Steve Lawson and Tom Aschall and Jeffrey Johnson and Brian Borgman and lots of really wonderful Bible expositors at that conference. Hope to see you there. Helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com