For many years, folks have accused the Family Integrated Church movement, saying that we teach that families should never be separated for worship or discipleship. But is that really true? In fact, we have never said such a thing. 

In this podcast, hosts Scott Brown and Jason Dohm clarify a common misunderstanding by explaining the difference between occasional age-specific ministry and the comprehensive, systematic age segregation that has become common in many churches. The truth is, the generations need each other. That’s what the Scriptures teach. From Genesis to Revelation, we’re given a beautiful picture of “men and women and little ones” (Deut. 31:12), side by side, worshiping God together. Their charge: to be strong, the church must recover this biblical pattern. 

Ready to put these principles into practice? Download our free We Worship Together Starter Kit and discover simple, biblical tools to help your family prepare for, participate in, and grow from the gathered worship of the church.   

Thanks for checking out the podcast. Just a quick reminder, not to use this as a replacement for the good pastoral leadership and teaching in your local church, but really just an encouragement for quiet faithfulness through the sufficiency of Scripture. Of Scripture. So Jason, when people critique the family integrated church movement, they will invariably say these people are against ever separating families from any worship or discipleship. Now, we've actually never said such a thing.

Here's what we've said and we've said it over and over again for years, but apparently people don't understand what it means. Here's what we're against. We are against systematic and comprehensive age segregation And we're also against creating particular generational cultures. Like we're against creating youth culture in a church. We think youth culture is dumb culture.

We're actually not in favor of creating old folks' culture. Senior citizens' culture might have its toxic elements as well. Because the generations need each other. And that's the wisdom that we see in God's design, which is generations worshiping together and the discipleship of every generation, including the other generations. Yeah, here's what 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. You can read that in Article 13 in our declaration for the complementary roles of church and family life. So why would people say that we believe that you can never separate families for any sort of function? To me, I think it's a lazy argument to prop up exactly what we have said and what we actually are against, which is systematic comprehensive age segregation. It's to prop that up is to say, you believe we can never do that, which is something we've never said.

It really is a lazy argument. Yeah. And in our practice, I mean, in our churches, I mean, we will separate the family and have a father-son retreat, a father-daughter retreat. We have men's Bible studies that actually separate the family. So we never have said, never would say that you can never separate family members.

Matthew 14 Well, what we have said and continue to say, and is our real position, is that the family together is the normal pattern for the worship of God and is the normal pattern for the discipleship. Discipleship should happen normally, overwhelmingly with families encountering these things together and the same with the worship of God. And that's a very different thing from saying, you can never do it. We're talking about what is the rule and what's the exception. Yeah.

Yeah. The creation of youth cultures is problematic. And of course, this is something that we saw arise, and particularly in the 1950s, the exaltation of youth and youth culture. Scott, when you make age segregation, meaning fourth graders with fourth graders, seventh graders with seventh graders, eleventh graders with eleventh graders, when you make that standard fare, when you make that normal, you are creating a fourth grade culture, a seventh grade culture, an eleventh grade culture. At its best, that culture will be immature.

Let me unpack that. People who are maturing aren't yet mature. They're immature. So if you just put them all together, the best thing that you can get is immaturity. And often it's that and a lot worse than just immaturity.

You end up getting a lot of things that are worse than just immature when you create that kind of culture. Right. In our church, we have a monthly meeting with my wife, the older women teaching the younger women. We call it women's mentoring. And for years, we had had a babysitter come to take care of the children of those mothers that wanted to come.

Gasp. Gasp. And so one day, Deborah lost her babysitter at the last second, and I was still at home. And she said, Scott, would you do this for me? And I was very reluctant but I was an obedient husband and I said yes.

And what I did is that I pulled out my guitar and we sang for about 40 minutes. And we, and I taught them what I was gonna preach on Sunday. And I read them a couple of stories and we took a walk. It was a two hour timeframe. And I thought, you know, this is neat, and I've kept doing it.

But you cannot make a case that I'm creating a youth culture with this monthly meeting. Their eyes are all on me and they're with me the entire time and then they go back to their mothers. But we're not creating a youth culture and the age range is very, very broad, you know, from, you know, one, two years old into teens. So it's a very broad mix. But I don't believe that violates what we've said about comprehensive, systematic age segregation.

We don't have a comprehensively, systematically age segregated church. When you make it comprehensive and systematic, you've institutionalized it so that your church is pointing a tremendous amount of the best of your time and resources at that. Right. And the argument that we've always made is simply this, because you don't find anything like that in scripture, churches have no warrant to point the best of their time and resources at something that you just cannot find in scripture. Right.

Now, this language, you know, comprehensive, systematic, appeared in Voddy Bakram's book 2007, Family-Driven Faith, And he was contrasting what was being purported as family-friendly ministries. Southern Seminary was creating kind of a family-based youth, family-based ministries. And there were others that were doing Mark de Vries and others. And what Vody was observing is that this supposed family-friendly ministry didn't require that you changed anything structurally in the church. That was the beauty of the family base, the family-friendly ministries that were rising up during that time.

It didn't require that you change anything. And so he was saying, but in fact, these are comprehensive and systematic age segregated. So Scott, There was an interesting article making a lot of these points written by Scott Anial in the Christian Post. He did an op-ed. Scott Anial, who's the head of G3 now.

And here are a couple of the salient points. We just wanna, I think, say a rowdy amen to these. The article's name is Why Kids Belong in Worship Service, Not Children's Ministry. And one of the points he made was just confidence in the transforming power of preaching. Can you talk about our view of that?

Absolutely. God gave preaching to the church to proclaim the gospel, to equip the saints. It's a central matter in the worship of God. And why would you shuttle your children out from under that? Spurgeon commented on the occasional critique that he got that he spoke to plainly.

And he said, I have doctors in my church who say, why don't you speak to the educated? You preach like you're preaching to eight-year-olds. And Spurgeon really wore that as a badge of honor that his preaching was designed to be plain speaking. And it was designed for eight-year-olds because eight-year-olds were there and eight-year-olds can benefit from preaching. The notion that preaching is for the adults is such a fallacy and it's a harmful fallacy.

And our children are getting the word of God and it actually doesn't need to be significantly dumbed down for them. I do think preachers should be careful to be plain spoken, But our children are getting a steady drip. The children who are in worship services, hearing live preaching, are getting a steady drip of truth. And it's like building a building. It's one brick on top of another and something significant is being built a little bit at a time.

Hey, some of our great heroes were very explicit in declaring that they were preaching to children. John Bunyan, John Newton, Jonathan Edwards, Richard Baxter. I could go on. They have explicit statements that they delighted in preaching to the children and they urged parents to bring their children to the preaching. Of course, there wasn't anything such as Kitty Church at that time, as far as I know, but he was urging parents to bring even their littlest kids into the worship of God.

So don't comprehensively, systematically segregate children from these things. They can gain so much, and it's a blessing. It's actually not just a blessing to the children. It's a blessing to parents to have that be part of the discipleship of their children, which they actually are the primary instrument of in the lives of their children. Right.

But should you meet with young people ever in a church? I think it's possible to argue that there are times that you should. Jonathan Edwards did. There was a suicide that took place in his church and he gathered the youth together to shepherd them. He would gather youth together every once in a while.

It wasn't an ongoing kind of youth group situation. I think those kinds of things can be very, very helpful in the life of a church. I mean, even just recently, my fellow elder and I, we were convicted that we wanted to gather with a fairly broad range of the young people in our church. We wanted to go through the book of James for five weeks. It's not the creation of a youth group, but we wanted to get eyeball to eyeball and speak the life that's in the book of James to them.

And when it's over, it's over. We don't plan to have an ongoing pattern like that. It's not comprehensive. It's not systematic. It's age segregation.

Scott, let me return to the Scott Anial article for one minute. Another point that he makes is about the myth of learning styles and stages. This is really what all this comprehensive, institutionalized age segregation is built upon. It's a foundation of thinking that there are learning styles and learning stages that we should build around. Meanwhile, we find none of this in the Bible.

And it's actually, in practice, you can find that these aren't really valid reasons to build entire structures around. We've written about this. Did God intend for us to do such a thing? It's a child of the public school system. Yeah, we wanna continue to say these things are new.

You know, most of us, and I'm no different, I'm sure you're not different either. Most of us tend to have this framework that human history began on the day of my birth, April 7th, 1970. That was the day of my birth. Nothing actually happened before then. Actually, millennia happened before then.

This comprehensive systematic age integration is a very new thing in the history of the church and we don't think it's an improvement and we know you can't find it in Scripture. Yeah, yeah. It really did. It was launched in the 1950s and in the beginning of the youth ministry movement. You know, from time to time, you know, church leaders would gather children together for catechisms, John Calvin did.

He taught a catechism to a pretty wide range of children on Sunday afternoons. Was that sinful? I don't think we're here to say that, but he wasn't creating the kind of youth ministry, the kind of age-segregated culture that we see today. What those guys did is nothing like what has happened in the modern church. So I think a key question for us is, what is the exception and what is the rule?

We want the rule to be for the worship of God and for the discipleship of every generation to be that we're together because that's what you find in the Bible. Yeah, so why are we against the creation of separate cultures in the church? Why are we against separating the generations comprehensively and systematically? Because it fragments the church and it actually dumbs down the younger generation and the older generation and everybody in between. But the heart of the matter, and it's undeniable in Scripture, it's the only pattern that you see in the Bible.

And that's significant. Yeah, that really is. When you strip away every other argument, if you're just left with, we don't see this anywhere in the Bible, and the generations worshiping together and being discipled together is what we see in the Bible, that is enough of an argument. I've heard people say, well, no, it's just an inference. It's not a command.

Well, of course, it's not a command. Well, there's no command that only men can be elders. It's just an inference from the text that men are appointed as elders. But when you see something that is so clear and unbroken in the Bible, it's more than just an inference. It's a biblical pattern.

It's a fixed pattern that God established. And just to write it off as an inference and say, it's legalism if you press it. I just don't think that fits the whole contour of scripture. Don't forget that the patterns of scripture are the beautiful things. They're the nourishing things.

They're the things that make people strong. So let's return to age-integrated worship and discipleship in the Church of Jesus Christ as the Word of God has clearly pictured. Church and Family Life is proclaiming the sufficiency of Scripture by helping build strong families and strong churches. If you found this resource helpful, we encourage you to check out ChurchandFamilyLife.com.