Scripture models a family-integrated church. Not youth church, old church, or middle-aged church—but one family growing together. That’s the pattern throughout God’s Word (Deut. 31:11-13; Eph. 6:1–4). Hosts Scott Brown and Jason Dohm discuss this biblical picture with Pastor Ben Seewald. Ben has not only led a long-established Southern Baptist church to drop age-segregated worship for this approach, but has worked with his wife Jessa to train their six children to participate in weekly corporate worship. Yes, there have been awkward moments—for his family and others—but seeing every generation stretched and growing together has brought him great joy. 

Welcome to the Church and Family Life podcast. You've got a lot of young pastors out there planting and reforming churches to an age-integrated model, family-integrated churches. We've got Ben Seewald on today, the pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Springdale, Arkansas, And he's going to tell you his story about why he's got a family integrated church. Hope you enjoy the discussion. So Jason, we've got one of those guys.

We got one of those young family integrated church pastors. And it's amazing to see it. There's a tremendous rise in the younger generation planting family integrated churches or transitioning to a more age integrated model. And Ben Seawald is one of those guys. Hey, Ben.

Hey Scott, Jason. Good to be with you guys. Good to be with you. And he's a pastor at a Emmanuel Baptist Church in Springdale, Arkansas. And we're here to talk about some of the practical, both practical and theological reflections on this whole proposition of family integrated churches.

So now let's see, how long have you been pastoring there at Emmanuel Baptist? I've been pastoring here for about five years now, started in COVID, so 2020. What an intro. Yeah. What an intro.

So when you're pastoring a church that had a lot of inertia, here's what I mean by that. I took it off your website. Founded in 1952. So you're not starting from ground zero. You started pastoring a church where you inherited what you inherited going way back when.

Let me say it this way, in the 50s and the 60s, that was really the beginning of this massive age segregation movement in the church. And it just kept escalating all throughout the 20th century. It's kind of in a state of collapse right now, but your church was in the heyday. Yeah. Yeah.

And I think that's kind of been, I don't, I'm not aware of all of the aspects of, of the, how the church has done children's ministry in the past. But I know that that was kind of more of the mindset is, you know, what you'd find at most Southern Baptist churches. Was it like that when you got there? You know, that was kind of the, just the assumption is, you know, when we get to a certain point, see, when I first got here, we didn't really have any kids in the church. All of them were just toddlers and really young.

We had senior citizens and we had young families with very young kids. But the assumption was kind of, are we going to start, What kinds of programs are we going to start for the kids? You know, whenever we get to that point, we need to be thinking ahead. And so it was, it was a little different for folks at the church to hear that, well, really, we want to encourage families to be together. And I think for some that they kind of had to see it and see how it's going to work.

How's this going to work? Because it's just different. It's not so much that they were against it, but they just hadn't really seen how can this work. How did you explain that to them theologically? Well, I just kept going back to, we want to encourage fathers and mothers to be the main disciplers of their children.

We want to equip them. We see that in Scripture where it says in Ephesians 6, 4, fathers do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. And so just reinforcing that, that when we look to God's word, it seems as though fathers are the primary ones responsible for discipling their children. And so how can we encourage them? How can we come alongside of them and not supplant them and not just be kind of an easy out where they can easily abdicate that responsibility?

And recognizing maybe a lot of fathers don't know where to begin, but how can we teach them? How can we bring them along and help them to understand that responsibility? Ben, I was noticing on your website you have one of the tightest, most concise articulations of this on the What to Expect tab. Under intergenerational fellowship, you have this just short sentence, from oldest to youngest, the whole family learns and grows together as one. So I really like the articulation of that, learning together, growing together as one, staying together to learn and grow.

I love it. Right. Yeah, The church is the household of God. And so I think that whenever we divide, when we overly segregate, you're not getting that family experience, even that intergenerational experience within the church, where it's good for young people to sit at the feet of the they're aged and those that have gone before them and not only to always be surrounded by those their own age it's good to for the the older to spend time with the younger, we see in Titus too. Older women are to teach the younger women.

And so there's that expectation that these relationships, we need these relationships. We can't just say like, well, I cannot say to the hand, I have no need of you. The Lord has composed the body, not just of one age. There's not the church of the young and the church of the old and the church of the middle-aged. It's designed to be where the older can help the younger along.

You know, when we have a fellowship meal in our church every Sunday after the worship service, and one of the things I want to see, I want to see a general mixing of the generations. I don't want to just see clumps of old people over here and clumps of 13-year-olds over here. I mean, we don't legislate that, but we want to have a culture where the older are with the younger and they're not just always segregating. You know, sometimes, you know, there'll be a group of kids, I'll just go up to them and just start asking them questions. And I don't think it's wrong that they do that, you know, that they're together, but I don't want them together all the time and just, you know, like glue.

That's the only thing they do in the church. I want to see a little bit more of a mix. Yeah. Well, I, I can say that just, just honestly speaking, we, we need to work on that a little bit more. I probably need to take a cue from you there and go talk to the younger ones.

It's easy to do, you know, it's easy to just even when you do have church-wide functions to just go to those that are your same age. It's kind of the way our culture often operates. So maybe that might be a good sermon application. FYI, Ben, just let me tell you this, you will always have to work on it because the generations always want to divide. You know, the adults want to have their little fellowship clutch, you know.

You've got this peer-to-peer desire in the older generation. That's actually one of the big problems because, you know, the older men and women want to talk to each other. Well that's a good thing, right? But you want to really encourage them to embrace their children and bring the younger generation along in the conversations. All of your conversations don't have to be private.

Yeah. Mm-hmm. Hey, the beauty is an individual can have a big impact because when the youth are all together, you can just...one person can go join in with them and sort of redirect the conversation or ask a good question, and you're off to the races. I think one of the biggest errors of my ministry is not repeating things enough. Because in order to really create the culture that you want, you've got to talk about it all the time.

And you slip into, or I slip into think, well, I said that five years ago. I'm sure everybody knows that, you know, that is, that is a very, very bad assumption. Right. Meanwhile, nobody remembers what they had for breakfast. That's right.

And Scott, how many years, just out of curiosity, how many years have you been in ministry? Well, I was a pastor when I was 26 in California. And I've always been involved in planting churches or an elder in churches. I had several years where I was in business. I started an electronics company and then I sold it in the late 90s.

But I never really quit being a pastor in a church. I just didn't get paid for it for a little while. What about you, Jason? Twenty years as an elder, 14 of those have now been as full-time. Before that, it was bivocational with all my income coming from secular employment.

Yep. Wow. Well, here I am at just five years in. What was your first encounter with Family Integrated, a church functioning that way? That would be whenever I was in my kind of young teen years, my parents were coming to those convictions of wanting to have us in the worship gathering.

And so, yeah, they really began to look for churches that would at least be accommodating of that and accepting of that, of them having us all together in the worship service. And I remember us in my teen years going to a church where It actually created a bit of a divide within the church because our pastor was leading the church in that direction, but not everyone was on board with it. And so We were certainly behind our pastor in wanting to just encourage families and the unity of the family and not be pulling people apart in all these different directions. So I remember that as a teenager. You know, it is a little bit more difficult to have your children with you in church and in the modern culture, you know, parents don't really want their kids bugging them in church.

But we think that's just not biblical. The Bible makes it really clear that the church for the worship of God was generational. So I think that's very easy to prove from scripture and you don't find any other pattern. But people have questions about how are your children going to really learn and how's it going to be beneficial? What have you thought about that?

How do you help parents help their children really squeeze the greatest amount of good out of their church life? Well, I'll share what we are currently learning. I'll put it that way because we're, like I said, I'm just five years in and we could probably do some things differently as we learn and as we grow. But I'll share what we do currently and maybe it'll be helpful and I hope it will be, but maybe it'll be something that I need some help on. So one of the things that we do for the younger ones just during the service is they do get fidgety and we've will allow our kids for example to the younger ones to have some paper and markers And I've encouraged them at times to, hey, draw something that you're hearing in the sermon or something from the reading of the Bible.

And we've even set just paper and markers out that as families come in, they can get these kind of doodling supplies for their younger kids. I think, you know, like my oldest is 10, and he's to the point now where I've, he just will sit there and listen. He's developed that discipline. We've worked with him. But, you know, for the, you know, four, five and six, especially like four and five there.

That's one way that we try to encourage them is you can color, but, you know, maybe at least draw something from the message, you know, so I remember one Sunday, my son was, he drew this whole altar and the priest going to the altar and the sacrifices, and I was like, wow, okay. So he was listening. He's getting more out of it than you'd think. So one of the most difficult things is when you have a baby, you know, up to three years old, typically I found, you know, most parents, you know, can get equilibrium, you know, somewhere around age three, you know, if they're doing a good job. How have you worked with parents with really little kids?

You've got them yourself. I think, yeah, and again, I'm not saying that we have arrived and we do everything right. What we've done in our church is initially we just have all the kids with you there. There was one instance where I was preaching and my young son grabbed the car keys and it just happened to be a moment when my wife was out of the room and there was still another adult, one of our friends was sitting with my kids in the pew, but all of a sudden the panic button and I hear this, the car alarm going off. And there's some things that as a pastor in a church that has lots of kids, you just got to learn to just focus and preach through it.

And just keep going. But this was an instance where everyone was going to be distracted. So I had to kind of pause and say, tell my son, sit down and give the keys to Laura. Everyone laughed and we went on with it. So I think that, thankfully, in our church, I'm so thankful that the older folks that were here whenever we first arrived, They were just so thankful to see little kids running through their building again.

And so, they will often tell us, we do not mind the noise. It's a beautiful thing just to see like the future of this church. So that's a huge encouragement. And that's encouraged so many of our young families. And so just for the older folks in the church, you don't know how much that means to a young family.

Whenever you just remind them that, hey, your children are a blessing. You know, yes, they can get a little noisy, but we love that they're here. And so I think that's really important. Now We, as time has gone on, we have opened up a nursery for like young, young children, like zero to two. We've kind of come to that where we're okay with that.

And Maybe I'm wrong, but that's kind of where we're at right now is we're providing that. But we're also trying to create other kind of rooms within our church where if parents want to still watch their kids themselves, like their toddlers, you know, the one that just will is getting a little to the point where it's distracting from the service. Thankfully, we have a room in the back that we're remodeling into a cry room. That could be a place where you could go and still be a part of the... You can still look through the glass and you're still there, but also there's a little bit of noise barrier if the baby's just being exceedingly loud.

We have churches on our network that have nurseries. That's not a problem. What we've always said is what we're against is comprehensive or systematic age segregation. And a lot of these churches use those nurseries as almost a training place or something like that. But I mean, for the record, we don't really have a problem with that.

Yeah, well, I mean, it was, even in our church, there were some questions, you know, it was a little controversial. And so I had to kind of wrestle through with my co-elder. We were on the same page, but just talking to church members and, you know, is this okay? And I value that, you know, our church is trying to be as biblical as we can. So we had some really good conversations and we did end up starting the nursery.

But that was something we had to think through. But yeah, we kind of have it on the wall. This is for like zero to three, and if you need it. But even when I'll announce that we have that available for visitors, I try to also let people know like, hey, if you want to keep your kids with you, we want to encourage you in that. And that's a wonderful thing.

So that's kind of where we've landed as a church. You know, especially with young moms who are having children in quick succession, so they have a lot of young ones at the same time. We've seen it be such a blessing for either other women in the church who are out of that stage, or especially teenage young ladies to just help the burden. When we had, when the domes had a number of young children, Deborah Brown held Laura Dome, because my wife was playing keyboard most of the time. I was up front some.

And hey, that was a blessing to have another woman in the church who was able to take one and it just changes the equation for young families. So there's a number of ways to tackle that, but it's not helpful to just keep the lines so rigid that you can't get any form of help. That's not what we're after. Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah. And I think just being sensitive to if you always have the same people that are having to leave with the toddler that's crying a lot in the service. But it's always the same, either teen or the same mom. And she's missing so much. Is there any way that we can serve these ones where, you know, every so often they're able to kind of come back in and just sit and listen.

How can we share the burden a little bit? So I think that's something to be sensitive to. Who's having to leave the room at times? And is it the same people over and over and over, Sunday after Sunday? And honestly, especially for young fathers, hey, the fathers who have been through it and come through on the other side and have the pro tips, because there are pro tips, need to take those young fathers under their wing and they shouldn't be embarrassed to do it.

And the young fathers shouldn't be embarrassed to benefit from somebody who's already been through it and sort of learned by experience. Yeah. Yeah, that can be a great way to live out Ephesians 5 and serve your wife, lay down your life for her, take the baby out and let her sit there and listen to the sermon. Absolutely. Hold the baby.

I want to land the plane here with two different questions because we're getting close to running out of time. One question is, how do you disciple teens, young adults, with a family integrated model? And then the last question I want to ask you, I'm going to ask you right now, we'll wait till the end, can you share a story or an example of how this has impacted the families in your church? So first of all, ministering to young people. Yeah, so ministering to young people.

I think that we, I mean, We've tried to show parents and grandparents that you're the primary discipler. We have a beautiful story of a grandmother and grandfather that have really stepped in and started teaching their teenage grandchildren the catechism, using that as a teaching tool. Just giving them those resources, saying, hey, here's something that is simple that you can take them through there's The catechism is a wonderful tool for that. Just read this with your child, your grandchild. But then also, it's not that the elders have no place in discipling the kids and the teens.

And so I really appreciate Brother Joel Beeke's advice that he gave at your last conference, where he was just challenging pastors to try to find a certain point in each sermon where you're speaking directly to the young people and the children in the room. And so I've tried to take that and apply it to myself. And then even after the sermon, And as you get together with families, maybe you've got the fellowship gathering, I try to make a point to talk to some of the young people and ask them what they're learning. And pastoral visits, whenever I've gone and visited different families in the church. I want to talk to the mother and father, but I also want to talk to the children.

And do you have any questions about the Bible? How is your Bible reading going? Is there any way I can pray for you? And just show them that I'm there as somebody that they can talk to as well. So yeah, that's the first question and how I've tried to, how I'm trying to live that out.

The second one, how it has impacted families and children. I was thinking about my own son and having him in the service, and he just turned 10, and he's learned so much. And he hasn't always, you know, he's not been a part of, you know, children's church or youth church or anything like that. He's sitting in the church with all the adults, but he's learned to sit there and to listen. And I'm sure as a young boy, his mind gets distracted.

But also He's learned the discipline to sit and listen and he'll take things away. And as I'm talking with him during the week, he'll often bring things up of, well, it's like this from the sermon. And so That's just been encouraging just even in our own family is sometimes you wonder like, are the kids paying attention at all? Are they getting anything out of this? And you'd be surprised how much they are taking away from it, how much they are learning.

And so, yeah, I'd say that. Yeah, that's that that's what you learn by having a family integrated church. The kids here way more than you ever thought they were and it's going to come up. And it is a challenge too as a preacher. Am I talking in a way that the kids can understand?

Not that you just want to dumb down all your language, never use a big word, but I think it causes you to be a little more conscious of, if I'm using theological terms, am I explaining them? And I think it actually helps you preach more clearly, even to the adults in the room. Yeah. Yeah, that's really super important. Well, man, hey, thank you so much for sharing all these great things with us.

We're glad for what you're doing. Keep doing it, and we'll be excited to see the rising generations come out of a generational church. And that's what we're actually seeing all over the country. In these kind of churches, you're not losing 80% of the young people, it's the opposite. And I think it's just because God blesses his own ways.

Well, Scott, Jason, thank you so much for having me on and I'm thankful to God for the foundation that you guys and others like you have laid and for younger pastors like us to just be able to build on that is a tremendous blessing. Amen. Carry on, brother. Thank you for joining us on the Church and Family Life podcast. Hope to see you next year, May 7th through 9th, in Ridgecrest for manhood and womanhood, the glory of God and the creation order, and come here, Ben Seawald, preach it.

Hope to see you then. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com