The Bible’s witness is clear: When the people of God gather for corporate worship, their children are to be with them in the service. That’s the unmistakable record found throughout Scripture. Yet in the 20th century, many congregations abandoned this established biblical norm, starting Children’s Churches and other youth-centered ministries that separated families during weekly worship. 

 

In this podcast, Scott Brown and Jason Dohm, joined by special guest Sam Waldron, discuss the resurgence of family-integrated worship that has come as Christians have set aside pragmatic and worldly practices for the simple truths of Scripture. This move to follow God’s prescriptions for worship and church life, rather than man’s inventions, has transformed churches and families for the better. While there’s still room for growth, those committed to the Word will find blessing as they obey God from the heart. 

 

Additional Resources 

 

A Weed in the Church: How a Culture of Age Segregation is Harming the Next Generation, Fragmenting the Family, and Dividing the Church 

 

A Declaration of the Complementary Roles of Church and Family 

 

The Family at Church: How Parents Are Tour Guides of Joy 

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. Today we have Sam Waldron with us to talk about family integrated churches. Sam is the president of Covenant Baptist Theological Seminary in Owensboro, Kentucky, and we're going to talk about family integrated churches. We've got three resources on our website to help you understand that. First, A Weed in the Church, a book that I wrote and then the Family at Church and then finally the Declaration for the Complementary Roles of Church and Family Life all contain really the biblical underpinnings of this whole idea of why it's important to have a family-integrated church.

And I hope you enjoyed the discussion with Sam Waldron. Well Jason, you know, our proposition is that Scripture is sufficient for church life and family life. That does have to do with the way that the church gets together to worship God. And it extends to the things that the Church of Jesus Christ does. But one of the problems with that is, you know, our understanding of Scripture is that the church is a generational community.

It's not a culturally or age-graded, divided kind of community. We've been saying that for a long time. So we just want to talk about that. Yeah, and I think one of the words that is important to us is the word systematic. The thing that we've actually been pushing against is a systematic dividing up by age groups that you actually don't see anywhere in Scripture.

So it's not an argument that there could never conceivably be an opportunity where that would be appropriate, but that the church shouldn't organize that one. And Sam, we've been talking about this, you know, for many years, you know, back and forth. We say, we deny that there's any clear positive 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. Bounce off of that, Sam, how do you process that? Well, the way I process it is that the clearest and central thing that I think we need to talk about here is the character of the church.

As you've mentioned already, we share a confessional belief in the regulator principle of the church, which means that the church should only do in its worship, its formal worship, what God prescribes, and should not add to or subtract from the elements that God prescribes for worship. But there are some things that are connected with that that lead directly to a really important point, And that is the issue of not taking young people out of the worship of the Church of God. And the reason is this, the reason that there is a regulative principle is that there's something very special, put it on another biblical term, something very holy about the formal assemblies of the church. And to remove the young people from that assembly is to remove them from the special presence of God in the church. I mean, this is clear in Matthew 18-20, where two or three are gathered together in my name, there I am in the midst.

That's not talking about informal prayer meetings. The context there is church discipline, and Paul cites it in that light in 1 Corinthians 5, 4, and in 1 Timothy 3, you have the great language of the church being the house of God, the church of the living God, and the pillar in support of the truth. There is something very special about the church and its formal gatherings. That is not true of any other thing in the world. The church is holy in a way that other things are not holy and therefore it is a tragedy to see young people taken systematically out of the worship of the church and segregated People talk about junior church and my problem with junior church is that it's not a church The church is the formal assembly of God's people and junior church is simply not church Yes, he you know, we've created Various inventions, you know in the in I'll call it the worship of God, but they actually deprive people from the worship of God.

So we have a sensitivity of who's not there in the worship of God. And so we don't want Sunday school teachers out there somewhere else doing something else when when the people of God are gathered. Sam, what's your view of the impact of this kind of segregated, you know, kind of culture that's grown up in the church? Well, I think in the name of trying to minister to young people, we've done exactly the opposite. In taking them out of the special presence of God in the gathering of the church, we've actually deprived them from one of the major means of grace.

Or, yeah, well, it's a collection of the means of grace that take place in the formal assembly of God's people. And has it worked? Well, the whole Christian community in our day knows that it hasn't worked, and the constant decrying of losing a generation of young people shows that it hasn't worked. Of course, our argument is not pragmatic, but the fact of the matter is, doing what God requires, doing things in God's way in the world works. And what we're doing, what the church has been doing, and taking young people out of the church and putting them other places while the people of God are worshiping, hasn't worked and hasn't worked because it's not biblical.

Sam, you said something that I think really hits the nail on the head, which is that in the name of discipling young people, we've actually had the exact opposite effect. And I don't think that's appreciated enough. Scripture gives to parents the primary role in discipleship. It's not an exclusive role, the church certainly has a role to play in that, but I think unwittingly and unintentionally in taking up a role, a primary spot that Scripture gives to the parents in an attempt to create a safety net. In other words, we know not all parents will do it, and so we'll do it for the parents as a safety net.

So many parents have taken that as an escape hatch, and it has harmed because parents feel like the religious instruction, the discipleship for my children is being handled by the church. So they put a check on the list and say, well, that's taken care of in Sunday school programs, in children's church, and in the thing that we have in youth group. And so, I really have nothing to do here. And you've written a book about the priesthood of fathers, which really argues that the father needs to take up this mantle and embrace that he has a primary role here. Yeah, there's absolutely no substitute for the father's role in the lives of his children.

Yes, the church should try to reach out and minister to those young people that don't have that in some way, in a biblical way, but there's just no substitute for what the Father is supposed to do in the home. And you know, here's the thing that strikes me. What is the goal of evangelism? What is the goal of what we call missions? It's church planning and yes, making disciples and baptizing them into the church.

So the whole point of evangelism and missions and church planning is to bring people into the church. Why are we keeping young people out of the formal assemblies of the church if the whole goal of evangelism is to bring them in? It doesn't make any sense to me. And it's very interesting. We're running on probably five generations of parents, maybe less than that, who thought the godliest thing they could do was find the best youth group for their kids, to find the best children's church.

And that was sort of like the pinnacle of a godly parent. It was so off course in terms of Scripture. And, you know, we talked about fathers, how pivotal fathers and mothers are, But you think about the rich compliment that a local church gathered together with the generations together offers. First of all, you have preaching from qualified elders. You get the word of God.

You don't get a bunch of kiddie sermons. You get actual preaching, you know, theological, practical, experiential preaching. You get the body, the body building itself up in love, you have the mutual love between the brethren, you know, you have these matters of the ordinary means of grace, the singing, the unifying of the people of God together through the singing, all of us with one voice from the littlest child, you know, to the oldest adult in the church, you know. We've got a 97 year old in our church and we've got babies in our church and they're all, they're all, you know, operating according to that unified voice. So that's missed if you think the godliest thing you can do is get your kid in a good children's church.

What a tragedy it is when people make that the priority as opposed to faithful doctrine and all sorts of other things that really ought to trump whatever you think about a youth group. I don't think it's controversial to say that narrow age range groups are often echo chambers. In other words, if you really narrow down the age range, what you get is sort of a very, very narrow range of ideas and experiences. And what jolts us out of that, and man, do I need to be jolted out of it, and we all do, What jolts us out of that is mixing with people of younger age range and older age range and even older age range. It's really good and healthy for us.

Yeah, and you know, when I look around at our church, you know, particularly during the fellowship times, I really want to see the generations mixing together. I want to see that younger girl over there with older women and that throughout the whole Church. And that really reflects the generational function of the Church, that you might fear the Lord your God and that you might teach them to your son, your grandson, all the days of your life. You have this multi-generational picture. Well, that's best accomplished when the generation is together.

It's not best accomplished when 13-year-olds are being catechized by other 13-year-olds. There's wisdom in God's ways. One of the things we used to talk about a lot, and I want to bring back, is the desert Island challenge, which is just if you're on a desert island and all you had was a Bible, how would you build this, that, or the other? If you were on a desert island and all you had the Bible, how would you build your local church life? You didn't have access to any other methods, any other sources of truth.

All you have was your Bible. I think it's easy to argue that a quote-unquote normal church structure is not what you would find on the desert island with just a Bible. If you were building it with just the Bible, you would actually have the ages together, because what you find in the Bible from a positive side is when the people of God meet, the generations meet together, and what you specifically don't find is a thin gradation of ages separated out and divided that way. So then you have to ask the question, where do we get this from? If you can't find it in the Bible, and this isn't what we would develop if we were on a desert island with just our Bibles, then where did it come from?

And the truth of the matter is it came when secular sources began to do this in all sorts of venues outside the church, but particularly with education and the church adopted it. Yeah. Sam, what's your view on how this youth ministry subculture, age-segregated subculture, what's your sort of historical view of how all that transpired, because 200 years ago, it wasn't like that. Yeah, boy. And where did it come from then?

Because it's true. I mean, a lot of it, I suppose, arose from the Sunday School movement that originated as an attempt to evangelize unchurched young people, right? And then that got introduced into the church. You know, but again, I need to say that to me the center of this is the church meeting together as a church. I think as, I think you've implied this, outside of the actual gathering of the church, there may be some liberty for how we minister to different groups and what kind of things we do.

But the church is not the Sunday school. The church is the church. And we need to, and I think it's a product of the introduction of an attempt to evangelize unchurched children, and then somehow that getting translated into the church in ways that weren't healthy. Right, and at the same time you had the rise of the public school movement with Horace Mann, and they created very highly granular age-graded educational institutions, and the Church adopted that. I wrote a book about it called A Weed in the Church, where I talk about the history of it.

I think you're right. Some of it came from the Sunday School movement, but what happened during the Sunday School movement is really a far cry from what I'm just going to call the youth ministry industrial complex that grew up as a result of that. That was very, very different. The churches were still very generally age-integrated, even during the Sunday School movement, but I think what the church did is they adopted this well-meaning ministry to the poor to teach reading and things like that. And on the Lord's Day, they had teachers teaching that kind of...

And it was such a massive movement in England. And actually, God used it in some profoundly helpful ways. But the problem was, it did actually deprive children from the worship of God. Eventually, it just grew into this modern manifestation. Now I can't say I spent a lot of time in England, but I can say that the place I've seen most often, children dismissed to go to Sunday school during the worship of the church.

It has been in Great Britain. It has been in England. And churches I've been in there, I'm not saying it hasn't happened here in the States, but it's my, My anecdotal testimony is that I see that happen much more frequently in England, even in reformed churches, or churches that would have sympathy to reform doctrine. I think a central question, and maybe the central question, is do we just take the ends from the Bible, or do we take the means to the ends from the Bible? In other words, do we just take our marching orders?

Well, the ends are evangelism, telling people about God and His holiness and what Jesus has done for sinners, and that then when there are converts, they are to be discipled so that they make progress in the face, and those are the ends, and really any pathway that you think gets you there is fine. Or is what Scripture is sufficient for is actually the pathways that get you to the ends that Scripture gives to us. And I want to argue, and I think we all hold this perspective, is actually the means are the only thing that we have. God controls the ends. None of us can save anyone, and none of us can actually make anyone make progress in the faith, all we have is these pathways that God has given us towards these ends, and we have to just be faithful to implement the pathways as God would give us grace, and he takes care of where people end up in that?

Hasn't it been something like with Sunday's goals and the things that have been related to that? Really, It's become the tail wagging the dog. The church is the thing, and not other stuff that happens around it. The church and the gathering of God's people is the central thing. And What we do in that worship is the central thing dictated by the scripture and not the secondary things that happen outside of that.

Yeah, you know, and I think what we've been trying to say over the last 20 years is the church picked up a wayward practice in the 20th century, and it ossified, and it grew to industrial proportions. And I think one of the things that we've been saying is, isn't it time to put that practice aside in the 21st century? And thankfully, there are thousands of churches that have put that practice aside. And the youth ministry industrial complex is nothing like what it used to be 20 years ago. It's really shrunk.

And I think one of the reasons it's shrunk is people have just woken up to, is it really wise to create these subcultures in the church? And so I think we want to see these faithful churches set aside this 20th century problem and move into the 21st century. You know, isn't it, you can almost say about youth pastors what I said about junior church. You know, the problem is that I think you're saying many people began to recognize this. Junior churches and church and youth pastors aren't pastors.

I'm not, many of them, I'm not saying I'm not being, I'm not universalizing, of course, but many of them are simply not pastors by the biblical standards. And that's the source of a whole lot of problems too. Right, and does the Bible know anything about a youth pastor, or a senior adult pastor, or a sports pastor? You know, no, the Bible doesn't know of any of these things. And what I think one of the things that happened in the 20th century is the Evangelical Church became a lot like the Roman Catholic Church, who invented all kinds of offices and practices to try to thrill people.

And you can grow your church, you know, if you do a bunch of thrilling things for people and get people to look for those things and you supply them for them. And so, yeah, all this to say, hey, let's put that practice aside and let's recover actually the biblical patterns. And I think that's the message we want, you know, the modern church to understand. And I think what we're advocating is not that we start with the current baseline of church life and then try to argue for something different, but that we actually start with the Bible and argue based on what you find in the scriptures. I think that is at the core of what we're advocating.

Let's start with the Bible and how we structure our churches and how we determine where the resources ought to go. Yeah. Amen. Sam, any parting shots here? We've, we've, we're about the end of this thing.

What's, what's the wisdom from the mountain? I don't know where I'm, where the mountain is, but, well, I do know where the mountain is. I'm not sure I'm on it, but, I was entering into what Jason said, you know, the movement, back to Reformed and Baptist churches for some of us, you know, made us, you know, I remember you know, 45 years ago or something like that, when we're trying to figure out All of us who are elders of the church and the people are a little church in Grand Rapids a little at that time We were trying to figure out You know, we knew everything almost everything would be taught about the church was wrong we knew that almost everything would have been taught about Christian doctrine was skewed and And it it brought us back to the place where we felt we almost had the start over. Now, obviously we weren't perfect, and we made mistakes too, but I think there was a genuine desire and attempt to go back to the Bible. What does the Bible bring us in terms of church life?

What does the Bible teach us in terms of church life? And, and, and that experience for me was very vivid, being raised in a typical Baptist church and other of the men that I was raised in typical churches of other kinds. Amen. Sam, you know, we've had a front row seat of the growth of what people call the family integrated church movement. I really think it's the regulator principle movement, but what, what, what, what's your, what's your view of, of that?

Cause now you really do have thousands of churches that have had, have exchanged an age segregated pattern for an age integrated pattern. Well, you know, we get a chance to see a lot of this by the guys that come to us and the growth of the seminary and interacting with these guys about their churches. You know, and a lot of what we're saying or what we're on the edge of or the cutting edge of are churches that are in the process of reforming, or that are in the process of understanding and then implementing the regulative principle. That's why I wrote How Should We Worship a couple of years ago, because I think there needs to be biblical guidance in terms of what exactly is it of The God says about how the church should be regulated. What exactly are the principles and parts of worship that we should be?

Focused on and magnifying as opposed to all the stuff that really has very little to do with the church life according to Scripture. And so we see, I guess what I see there is that a lot of guys beginning to get a hold of the regulative principle, but still needing to take it in a lot of different directions, and churches that have traditions pre-existing that still need to be straightened out. Yeah, reform and doctrine usually comes a fair amount before our reform and practice. Yeah. Our practice catches up with our theological reform for sure.

Yeah, that's the reason, that's one of the things I was kind of saying, you know, having had the privilege of teaching a lot of reform doctrine and a modern exposition getting published back in 1989. We need to catch up with our doctrine in terms of our practice and our worship and our church life. Amen. Always reforming. Yeah, that's good enough.

I think that's where we should end this podcast. Great. Sam, thank you so much for joining us. We really, Really appreciate it. Oh, great.

Thank you, Scott. I appreciate it. And may God bless your labors. Looking forward to being with you next year. Can't wait.

And thank you for joining us on the church and family life podcast. And we hope you can Join us next time.