Family-integration is a biblical principle. But it is not the only biblical principle guiding God's church. While it is good and necessary to bring the family together in public worship, we cannot allow ourselves to become blinded to other dangers which may creep into the church. There are some common infections that tend to distort and damage family-integrated churches and we must be on guard against them so that something good (family-integration) doesn't become a gateway for something harmful.

I want to establish the importance of the subject. God shows His wrath against those who would harm His church. And Paul said to the Corinthians, in 1 Corinthians 3.17, If anyone defiles the church of God, God will destroy him. That's a stern enough warning. So men should be careful how they lead the church of the Lord Jesus Christ.

Thankfully, Christ is the great physician who heals the diseases of the churches. And He was dealing with various diseases in the Jewish church in His ministry. It's right for us to deal with infections in our own churches because we are His disciples. So here are some of the infections that I've encountered. First of all, neglecting the Gospel.

There's nothing more destructive to a church than to neglect the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. And there are several things that can cause the neglect of the Gospel. First of all, neglecting the Gospel can happen when emphasizing various legitimate lifestyle changes, obedient, you know, callings, areas of obedience, but they become replacements to the message of the cross. Also you might find a misunderstanding in churches of equipping and evangelism. When people say that the meeting of the church is for equipping only, they only speak a half truth.

I've heard this said many times in family integrated churches, that the purpose of the meetings of the church is exclusively for equipping and never for evangelism. And saying that really misrepresents the nature of biblically ordered church meetings. Because the meetings of the church really by their very nature require both. For example, biblical churches always have unbelievers in them. There never was a biblical church, I don't believe, that was absent of unbelievers.

Hey, whenever a child is born into your church, you have a new unbeliever in your church. Often you have people in churches who are legitimately deceived about their salvation. They often come to the realization after being deacons and officers in churches that though they were baptized in their childhood, though they prayed a prayer in their childhood, they are not genuinely converted. I don't know how many times that's happened to you in your church life, but I've seen it many, many times. There are always unbelievers in your church.

Some of them are deceived about their salvation. And they may sit there for years until God reaches in with a white hot heat in their heart and He convicts them of their sin and they're converted. I was preaching in a church in Seattle, Washington last year. I was preaching and there was a woman who'd been in that church for many years and she was converted that morning because the Spirit of God just decided to pierce her heart and it was the cause of rejoicing in that church. But she'd been there forever, but he thought she was saved.

But she wasn't at all. We need to assume that there are unconverted people who might be deceived about their salvation. Let's acknowledge that the Apostle Paul assumed that unbelievers would be present in the church at Corinth. He told them that if they unlawfully exercised the gift of languages in that church, then what would the unbelievers think? He assumed there were unbelievers in that church.

Hopefully, church members are proclaiming the Gospel to their unsaved friends and bringing them to have relationships with people in the church so that they can also be evangelistically related to them and giving them a sense of what church life looks like so that they know what the people of God do. You also may have Judas in your church, and you may have a wolf or wolves in your church. The Apostle Paul, in Acts 20, said that their wolves will arise up from among you, meaning that you have unconverted elders in your church. So you might even have elders, founding elders, whatever, that might not even be converted. Neglecting the gospel often happens when we misunderstand what biblically ordered churches are all about, and they include all kinds of people like that.

You know, the communion service assumes that there are some that might be tempted to take the Lord's Supper in an unworthy manner. And there are two categories of people who can take it in an unworthy manner. There are those unrepentant believers and there are the unsaved. Maybe you're aware of that great story in John Calvin's Geneva when the reprobates were standing at the back of the church with their swords, living a licentious lifestyle, and he put them on notice that they wouldn't be able to take communion. They drew their swords in the back of the church and started walking toward Calvin and the communion elements.

And Calvin threw his arms around the elements and he said, these hands you may crush, these arms you may lop off, but you will not defile the table of the Lord Jesus Christ. Well, there were some unbelievers in that church, and there are unbelievers in most churches, and there actually should be, so that they can hear the Gospel, and perhaps God would save them. You know, it often happens that there is no love for the lost in the church. And that's another reason the Gospel is neglected. Or it may be that a church is suffering from an inward focus that neglects ministry to the lost.

And it makes churches fat and happy and satisfied to be islands instead of outposts that transform the culture. The solution is this. Follow the Lord Jesus. Live like the Lord Jesus did. He was constantly with the sick and the sinful and the religious establishment and the fishermen and the tax collectors and even with the prostitutes, Jesus wasn't defiled by being with those people and neither will you.

And churches that neglect the Gospel are shameful examples of the body of Christ. The Apostle Paul spoke very uncompromising language to the Galatian church for misrepresenting the Gospel. He said, O foolish Galatians, who has bewitched you that you should not obey the truth. He said, I'm afraid for you because they had neglected the Gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ. Here's what Spurgeon said, make a beeline to the Gospel.

And I don't know how you can preach expositionally and not preach the Gospel every Sunday. I don't know how. Every word is tied to the goodness of salvation. And so we need to be doing that as Spurgeon exhorted. Spurgeon said this, there are many ministries in the world And you can evaluate them all to the degree that they exalt Jesus Christ.

And I think he's right about that. And so, family integrated churches that do not regularly preach the gospel are sinning. And neglecting the gospel, also it's practiced in mainstream evangelicalism as well as other places. But let's be very clear, neglecting the gospel is an infection in a church. Here's another.

Misunderstanding family integration. There are churches who misunderstand the place that age-integrated discipleship should take in church life. And the reality is, age integration should take almost a transparent place in life, Because it doesn't have anything to do with the message of the church. It just has to do with a methodology that is almost message free. The only reason to be a family integrated church is because it's just the indisputable pattern.

And you can begin to follow that pattern in a second. It doesn't take administration, it doesn't take hardly anything. It doesn't take much conversation. It's transparent in that sense. But building a church around family integration, where this is the main topic of discussion, is like building a church around any other biblical practice.

Like for example, we know that singing together is a biblical practice, but you wouldn't have First Presbyterian Church of Singing and that's all they do. You wouldn't have, you know, First Baptist Church of Church Discipline and that was the overwhelming focus of the church. It makes no sense at all. And it's sinful and dangerous to build a church around one doctrine or one practice like family integration. And so when you find churches that focus their conversation and their meditation of the church around one single reform.

They've made a big mistake. The most important thing is to build a biblical church. Now, something I want to be very clear regarding the NCFIC, this is something that you can find on our website. We've had it on for many years. I'm just going to quote it for you.

We do not believe that family integration is the only or even the primary issue for selecting or establishing a church. But it is unquestionably a defining issue of our day in the modern church, which has lost the essential, familistic culture that we see modeled in the New Testament. You're making too much out of family in the church or a particular structure in the church, it just displaces the center of the church. The center of the church should be the glory of God. And there are many things that flow out of that.

But if you put something else in, if you try to put something else, it won't go in the center and it will wobble that church. But you know, for so long the church has ignored the family. And so if you make any changes in church life regarding the family, you've got a fight on your hands. It's unfortunate if it's that way. And people, if you just make a little change, people will say, it's an overemphasis.

When actually it's just probably a small step back to where we really ought to be. But we need to understand that misunderstanding family integration can be an infection in a family-integrated church. Another infection, lack of biblically qualified leadership. Now, if you ask church elders around the nation what their biggest problem is in their churches, almost always the first thing that comes out of their mouth is a lack of biblically qualified elders. And this is a sad, sad state that we exist in today.

How did it happen? I'm going to blame it on the immaturity and the worldliness of the American male. He was so entertainment driven, he was so sports saturated that he did not train up a new generation of young men who knew the Word of God. And so you do not have future elders being trained in their households. And the consequences of this lack of family discipleship are really terrifying.

Men have not dedicated themselves to the Lord. And the truth is, men care more about their ball fields and their games and their entertainments than they do about the Church of Jesus Christ. And they should be ashamed of themselves to spend their time doing things like that while the whole generation goes lacking and there are no elders to fill the churches. Men ought to be ashamed of themselves for living that way. It's sinful to treat the church of Jesus Christ like that and do everything else that has very little value and impact on the church.

When the church goes languishing, I want to make it my point, whenever I'm with men, to challenge them to not repeat that mistake again. We have just suffered an enormous amount of time from that mistake and we need to be very careful. Hey, you know broken families make for broken churches and men who do not bring their sons up in the training and the admonition of the Lord make for weak, wimpy, feministic churches that really have a hard time standing for righteousness in the world. And we ought not let that happen in the coming generation. But one infection in family-integrated churches is lack of biblically qualified leadership.

You know, you can't just wave a wand on this problem and make it go away. You can't have a few seminars on it and have it disappear. It's something that will only change one generation to the next as men train a new generation of elders and I so promote it. Here's another infection in family-integrated churches. I'm going to call this home-churching.

What I mean by home-churching is treating the church like a retreat from society, or it might include conducting church life that only includes meeting with your family or a collection of families where, you know, there's prayer and there's singing and there's teaching, but it's also characterized by, you know, participating in what I'm just going to call a leaderless house church with very few participants. Because of the collection of people, there's no way to fulfill the commands for fellowship and instruction and church discipline. You can't identify leaders. There's no real biblical accountability. There's no way to even exercise church discipline.

There's no way to fulfill Hebrews 1317, which says that church leaders must give account for the souls that are those there in that church. But leaderless house churches make that impossible. It may happen when families react to abuses in churches and they hide away and they exempt themselves. It's a wrong reaction but it often happens. It happens when people live as if there are only two spheres of sovereignty, the family and the state, and they neglect the church.

God has established three different governments to take care of His people, the family and the church and the state, and all of them we must participate in in a way that God has commanded us to. And often people do not participate in the government of the church, that sphere of sovereignty and jurisdiction for various personal reasons, but they act like there are only two spheres of sovereignty. Now, I'm not talking about a church that meets in a house. It is legitimate for churches to meet in homes if they are biblically ordered. In the New Testament, Many churches met in homes.

In fact, there were no church buildings until the third century. It's legitimate to meet in a home. So when I use the term home-churching, I'm not talking about having church in a house. I'm talking about having a church that isn't a true church because it doesn't have biblical practices in operation. There is no biblical preaching, there are no biblical leaders, there's no biblical discipline, there are no biblical practices and accountabilities that you see in scripture that are required for biblical church life.

So often this home-churching practice happens because it's a symptom of a deeper problem. And the Bible speaks very plainly about those who isolate themselves. Solomon actually reveals the true motives of those who would isolate themselves. He says this in Proverbs 18, 1, a man who isolates himself seeks his own desire and rages against all judgment. Then you have people who just can't find anything good about their local church.

Their laundry list is so long that it's impossible for any church to comply with this list. Solomon exposes those who cannot find any good when he said, He who has a deceitful heart finds no good. And often people end up in these house churches because of that. So here's what I would say. If you're home-churching, then I just want you to consider that you're depriving your family of the kinds of relationships that God has designed for their own benefit, for their sanctification, for their preparation for marriage, for everything.

And if you're home-churching, there are two things I would recommend. First of all, do one of these two. Shut it down and go find a real church where there's biblical leadership, there are biblical practices, biblical discipline, and the things that really reflect New Testament church life. And to recognize that you're doing... You've invented something that doesn't exist in Scripture.

So shut it down and go find some biblical relationships. Or become a biblical church, become a real church. Here's one of the pleasing things about this road trip for me. I know that a couple of the churches that we visited that actually sponsored our visits were churches who I would call, several years ago, were unbiblical, leaderless house churches. And these people were home-churching.

But, somewhere along the line, they embraced the doctrine of the sufficiency of Scripture. And they began to believe that, yes, God has said something about church structure and church life and they embraced it and they became real churches and they had become wonderful churches, strong churches and I've seen that happen. So there is hope for anyone who's home churching. There's either hope for finding a biblical church or for becoming one. And that would be my counsel to anyone who is involved in that.

Another infection, doctrinal confusion. Doctrinal confusion exists in a number of different environments. One environment is this, when leaders themselves are doctrinally unclear, and as a result, they gather together a diverse group doctrinally. And often the result is the diversity is so great that they end up in a messy church split. Sometimes it results in men being unschooled themselves.

They may have been in churches for many years, but they did not use those years to train themselves in sound doctrine. And therefore, they breed an environment of doctrinal imprecision, lack of clarity, and therefore, they can't achieve doctrinal unity in their churches. And so what happens, what's happened many, many times in family-integrated churches, is that you have people who, they're in established churches, They see the worldliness of that church. They realize that they're being forced to send their children to that youth group and they're just not willing to do it. And so they find other people who are disturbed about these things.

And they should be disturbed about these things. And then they leave and establish a new church. And so you have five or ten families that have gotten together and they've gotten together around one principle, family integration. That's their rallying point. That was the center of their church.

And so the first couple of months, it's like heaven on earth. They're just amazed. So many of the problems, they've escaped to their family integrated church. Their families are growing. Wonderful things are happening to their children and in their families.

And some of the defilements have been taken away from their family life. But then the euphoria turns to concern, and the concern turns to realizing I'm in an untenable situation because now you have you've got you've got it you've you've got a gathering of people with a with a hyper Calvinist on one side and a hyper and a crazed Arminian on the other side. And they know they cannot live together. Or maybe there are other various distinctions. You might have a pedobaptist and a credobaptist and they realize, you know, this ain't going to work.

We really don't want our children baptized, or we really do want our children baptized. And so the twain cannot meet, and so they have to separate. But what happened was excitement overwhelmed, wisdom, desperation drove an enormous amount of diversity, and the result was doctrinal confusion that was really the baby of pragmatism. They wanted to do something so badly, and their hearts were right. And so it often happens as well when churches or leaders are unaware of historic confessions of faith and how important it is to establish a church on sound doctrine.

I really believe that a church without a historic confession of faith is in danger. I believe you should not go to a church that does not have sound doctrine at its base so that doctrine is preserved. How do you defend sound doctrine if you don't know what it is. If it's just the five of you who got together and came up with your own pre-cooked meal for the church. You know, there are men who are smarter than we were and worked harder and labored and established confessions that have stood the test of time.

I'm constantly urging churches to embrace historical confessions of faith that have stood the test of time that are expressions of biblical Christianity and historic Christianity. But doctrinal confusion is an infection in some family-integrated churches. Here's another. Fuzziness on biblical womanhood and the influences of feminism. Now when you start a church, people will come who have not shed various wrong ideas regarding manhood and womanhood.

Feminism is everywhere. You know, most of us went to feminist think tanks called colleges, where our brains were pickled in feminist formaldehyde. Because of that, in our blood, our whole circulatory system has been infected by the feminist music we listen to and the feminist movies we've watched. And the books have just made, instead of bibbling, our blood is now feminine. And it's poison.

We've been breathing feminist air for so long. And people come into our churches with inclinations that they have brought with them out of this environment that we live in. And leaders must have clarity regarding the roles of men and women in the church or they're going to have trouble. And often an infection in churches is fuzziness on this whole matter. Now if you're a leader in a church and you don't understand what Scripture has said about what women are permitted to do and forbidden to do, you're going to reap a whirlwind.

Because the Bible actually does say that women are permitted and forbidden to do certain things. And if you say that to somebody whose brain has been pickled in feminist juice, you got yourself a riot on your hands. Now, it's good to have riots over these things. We should be willing to have riots over sound doctrine. Our friend Paul Washer says all you have to do to cause a riot in a church in modern evangelicalism is just preach sound doctrine.

I think he's right about that. But, you know, Paul said in 1 Corinthians 14, 34, let your women keep silent in the churches, for they are not permitted to speak, but they are to be too submissive as the law also says. And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home, for it is a shame for a woman to speak in the church." Now, thems fighting words, thems, you know, riot material. I mean, if you quote it in your local church, people are going to get upset because you're saying that there are certain things women can do and there are certain things women can't do. Feminism says you can do anything with your body, anything with your baby you want to.

You can do anything with your energy and your career. You can do anything you want, girl. That's what the devil has wrought in feminism. But the Bible says something totally different. The Bible doesn't allow anyone to be governed by themselves, but God alone and His Word.

And so feminism is really striking at the heart, at the very authority of God. And you have people coming into your church who do not understand the rock from which they've been hewn. And Paul said to Timothy, let a woman learn in silence with all submission. You know, these are again, these are so disturbing upon a woman's ears who has embraced and not rejected as devilish the propositions of feminism. And there's nothing more divisive in a church than upset feminists.

And often these mad feminists, they lead from the rear. They hen-pick their husbands to death and drive them to do shameful things, even though they know in their hearts they shouldn't do them. But their wives are driving them, and that's really often the heart of the problem. If you don't establish husbands who love their wives, you've got big problems in your church. Husbands that don't cherish them, nourish them, wash them with the water of the word.

You've got a feminist uprising in the making. And, you know, fortunately we should have practices in the church that actually forbid and allow certain things. And our practices drive the discussion. So that the practices drive us to the Scriptures. They say, why do you do that?

We open up the Bible and say, here's why. You'll find women who do not even know these passages exist in Scripture. They need to know. It's interesting, many years ago there was a woman in our church and she had never heard those things before. And this was a genuinely Christian woman.

And we read these scriptures in one of our services and she was mad as fire, almost cussing mad. And then we sat down, and she was shocked at what the Bible said. And This is what we need to do. Our practices will drive the discussion and the discussion needs to be had. But fuzziness on biblical womanhood and the influence of feminism is often an infection in family-grade churches.

Another is disregarding God's ordained authority. This often happens among independent people. Often homeschooling people are very independent. They've already stepped out of a stream of society and have done something pretty radical. They've already learned how to defy society.

But they've never really understood that there are three governments, there are three jurisdictions that need to be honored. And they go in and they cause division in churches because they do not understand divinely established authority. They cannot get along with others with whom they disagree. And so they cause problems in churches, and they try to overthrow the duly appointed leaders that God has established in that church. And it's a wicked thing that they do.

But it's often an infection among those who embrace principles of age integration. Here's another. Lack of love for scripture. Often in family-in-greated churches, you find people who want something better than God. They want something more interesting, more innovative.

They want to hear their hobby horse. They want their special interests dealt with. It may, they may always want a sermon about the family or some element of politics or debt reduction or something about food or something like that, but they don't want to hear the whole counsel of God. They want something that interests them more. When the focus of a local church is on anything but the Word of God.

Not only is it vulnerable and underfed and underweight, it just makes for a very pinched, truncated, and sick church when Scripture is not the center of it. God leads His church by His Word. And Jesus intends that His church would be nourished on the words of truth alone. It's an infection when there's a lack of love for Scripture. Here's another infection.

Parents who allow their children to run wild after the service on Sunday. One of the most common questions that I'm asked by people either leading family-ready churches or who attend them is what do you do with your children after church and You know, it's interesting some people For some reason assume that the other children in the church are somehow good companions for their children, which is not true. But because of the problem, various alternatives end up getting proposed. Sometimes people will come and have come to me and our elders and proposed that the older boys teach the younger boys and we find a godly girl to teach the younger girls. These are just more inventions.

This is just the roadway right back to where we are right now with age-segregated youth ministry, and it's the wrong direction. Some offer organized sports. Some attempt to appoint a babysitter to organize activities on a rotational basis. But there are a number of problems with these kinds of things, other than the fact that they're inventions. Often the real problem is that parents are not discipling their children.

And it's just symptomatic of that, Where adults just want to talk to adults. And as much as everybody wants the glory in being family integrated, their eyeballs are family segregated. Because all they want to do is talk to the eyeballs that are horizontal to theirs. They don't want to engage the younger generation. They want to just let them run wild.

So that's what you get. We want to have serious conversations with adults, And there's a good part of that, but we don't want to take the time to instruct our children for how to conduct themselves in the Church of God. And of course, we want to make Sunday this big, wonderful family reunion of rejoicing and celebrating the work of Christ, tying us together with our fathers, our spiritual fathers and mothers and sisters and brothers and grandfathers and grandmothers. We want to do that, but parents need to break out of their intuitive patterns of communication and learn how to engage their children in conversation and relationship with other people. So parents need to prepare their children and they need to be prepared to understand how they should conduct themselves in the household of God.

And this is not just an adult time. Often the problem is a lack of understanding of the nature of the celebration of the Sabbath day. That there are certain things that are required of that day in terms of what you speak and what you do and how you conduct that day. And often children running wild after the service is really Children who do not understand what Scriptures say about the celebration of the Sabbath because their parents are unclear about it. Because they don't know and they don't know what to say.

So here's an admonition. Understand what the Bible says about it. Teach your children to observe the Sabbath. It will be a great blessing to their souls. Yes, it will, it probably will be a break in a pattern of your life, but it will be a greater blessing than going your own way and inventing your own Sabbath day mentality.

But parents who allow their children to run wild after the service can be an infection in family-integrated churches. And don't think that Hope Baptist Church has this perfectly wired, okay? Because it's a struggle, because we have a struggle discipling our children and bringing them up in the training and the admonition of the Lord and helping them to fulfill the commandments of God by giving them a day of rest. Here's another one. Children not getting anything out of the gathered church services.

Now the root cause of this is the parents' fault. They give poor instruction to their children. And they might begin meeting in a family-grade church, but after a few years, they realize that their children are zoning out. And they're zoning out because their parents are not helping them to learn and be instructed. And so what started out as something so revolutionary became passé and the parents stopped helping their children to get as much from the gathered worship time as they possibly could.

So they're in the service with their bodies, but their hearts are all over the place. And it may stem from lukewarm parents who do not say in their hearts, I was glad when they said unto me, let us go into the house of the Lord." There's much to say about that, that we'll have to reserve for another time. In terms of exactly what parents can do and also what preachers can do and church leaders can do to help this along. And then there's also an absence of humility. This is another infection.

People find something that's been neglected and they think that somehow their church is superior and their chests swell. They think they've found a missing jewel of the church, family integration. And they exalt the importance of that obedience. And it stems from a misunderstanding of sin. And it comes from minimizing the other areas of blindness to sin.

So when a man has been able to have a victory in a certain area, it should not suck the humility out of his body so his chest swells up and he thinks he's such a hot shot because he has finally embraced the missing jewel of the church, family integration, because it's not. It's just one of the things that God has established for church life. And then finally, the final infection is lack of love for the church. And the question I would just ask is, do you feel the same way about the churches Christ did? Do you labor for the church?

The Lord Jesus gave Himself up for the church of the Lord Jesus Christ. He worked for the church, zeal for His Father's house consumed Him, and often people use the church as kind of a convenience institution, something to fit into their schedule. They exalt their family's schedule so much that they let it take priority over all church meetings and they end up in a pattern of life where, well, if I have time this week, I'll be a part of prayer time. If I have time, I'll do this." And they leave it up to each week to just sort of decide on the fly. That's hating the church.

People often sit on the sidelines. They participate in Sunday churches where there's no Pet and Fellowship throughout the week. Or maybe they got their feelings hurt and they just don't want to be vulnerable anymore. Well, all these things are sinful reactions and it's required of us to treat the church the same way that Christ treated His church. And he loved her and he shed his blood for her and he had zeal for her and he worked for her.

He said, I am working even as my Father is working. And they were working for the Church of the Lord Jesus Christ. So these are a number of common infections. My prayer, my burdens for the Church is that we have humble churches, not wise in their own eyes, obediently trusting the sufficient Scripture, family life and church life ordered by Scripture alone, her members courageous, willing to suffer in a wicked and perverse generation, always reforming, Always, always crying out for the healing salve for all of her infections which will continually be discovered until He takes us home to glory. Let's pray.

Lord, may it be So that we love Your church as You have. Amen.