When you take on entrenched cultural norms with the truth of God’s Word, you can expect resistance.
 
That’s what pastors Carlton McLeod and Scott Brown experienced as they forsook worldly approaches to church ministry and returned to the plain teaching of Scripture. 
But here’s the good news!
 
While the early years were hard, over time they saw rest, peace, and joy come to their churches and families, as they persevered in following God’s ways.
 
Be encouraged by the reflections of both men in this video conversation!  
 
Scott and Carlton were youth pastors who spent years advancing a worldly model of ministry and outreach — only to realize they had erred as they dug into their Bibles.
 
In this conversation, they reflect on their journey.
 
Both men saw a clear pattern in Scripture that families were to worship together, with their children, in the meeting of the church, and that dads were to take initiative in teaching their families God’s Word in the home.
 
As they taught their congregations these truths, they were met with slanders from without, and criticisms from within.
 
Yet as they discipled the men in their churches to diligently shepherd their families in the Lord, peace and joy followed.
 
This came as the women saw their husbands sacrificing themselves for their wives and children.
 
It occurred as the families — down to the smallest children — witnessed the beauty of God’s Word played out at church and home.    

Okay, so Carlton, we've been like partners in arms and this partners in crime. Partners in crime. It was like a crime. It felt like it at times. Yeah.

In fact, you know, I remember when, of course, the reason we thought, you know, churches should be family integrated is because that's the picture in the Bible. Right. But there is this huge outcry among a lot of people, and it was, you know, it was really weird. It kind of started with a lot of youth pastors. And these guys, they're in their youth ministries, they can't find their disciples after 10 or 15 years.

And then they start having kids. Then it changes. And now, so they've got this eight-year-old and they're saying, I don't want my eight-year-old in the culture of my youth group. Hey, I was a youth pastor. Yeah, well, me too.

Oh, really? Hey, almost all the family and church pastors used to be youth pastors. That's right. It's so funny. That is true.

I mean, you spend so many years and so much time trying to Teach somebody else's children and also you have children and as you're reading the scriptures that things change on yellow But you go wait a minute start questioning What are you doing and you're certainly questioned the fruit of it because the fruit of it hasn't been very good. Yeah, I mean that's statistically proven by this time. So yeah, I was the youth guy and the fruit was bad, and thank the Lord for the word. Because that's what changed us. It was going back to the Bible and figuring out, how does the Lord himself want us to teach the children that he's given us?

You know what, what totally shocked me, and we started a family-agreed church here in 2001, here in Wake Forest. What really stunned me is people were saying, this is a cult, this is a cult. And I would say, you mean because we wanna have children in worship, That's a cult? Right. Yes.

Yeah, yeah, anything counter-cultural is a cult. I've had that label thrown at me. It's like, why? We have children here, they're singing, they're joyful, their families are happy. Oh, it's cultic.

What do you mean it's cultic? It's right out of the Bible. Yeah. Hey, but you know, that's as a long time ago, it's not like that anymore. I think the first 10 years were like, I call them the slander years.

It was horrible. In fact, even right over here at Southeastern Seminary, I had a niece was in a class, and I'm the skunk in the garden party in this town because we have a family-grade church. And my niece is in a class at Southeastern and the professor starts talking about this ominous teaching, this really dangerous teaching in town. And the professor puts up my picture. You know.

What'd your niece do? Hey. So, but those were like the harder years. And hey, I was super duper grateful for Vody Bakum. He blasted this message further than anybody.

But really, I think, well of course, he was kind of the skunk in the garden Party too, as well, with a lot of people. But I was just super grateful for his voice, as blessed and powerful. We are too. And it was Vody's book, Family Driven Faith, that a friend gave me so many years ago, and it shook my whole foundation of ministry to youth. And shortly thereafter, I heard about a guy named Scott Brown who was apparently the skunk of the garden party down here in North Carolina.

And we met shortly thereafter. You were kind enough to, you remember right here in this office, you were kind enough to have me come down and spend half a day with me. I was trying to figure all these things out that, what is that, 12 years ago or so now? I think some like that, yeah. Maybe even more than that.

That just started between you and what you had learned and Vody and what he had written. It started a journey for us of shifting our entire ministry. And the fruit has been fantastic. I'm so grateful. Well, you know what?

One of our guys came to me and he said, hey, Mr. Brown, there's this black church up in Chesapeake and they're like saying all the same stuff. It's a family integrated church. And so I went to your website and there you have it. Yeah.

You know I can't remember when you when did you start D6 because that was... Yeah D6 was after we shifted and we had gotten our feet under us a little bit. So that was, let's see, that was probably 2014, 15, somewhere in there, but we had been family integrated for five or six years by the time we got D6 Reformation going. It's a great website. Tell us, so what's it like?

D6reformation.org. It's just, basically the entire website is a primer on how to get started with family worship essentially and how to start taking more ownership for parents, for the discipling of the children. That's really, that's all it is. I went up to your church and I thought, hey, there's real men in this church. That was like one of the big fruits.

Well, that happened here too. Exactly. You know, When you encourage men to actually take the helm of leadership, spiritual leadership, and bringing scripture, family worship, taking your family to church, worshiping together, it changes a man. It does. In fact, I always thought, just from observation over the years, if you can get a man to have family worship, it'll change his life.

It'll change the whole course of his family. It'll stabilize his family, and it'll also actually console and stabilize his wife. Generally, I mean, you know, you do have some arubalice wives, but mainly pretty much across the board, it solidifies and consoles a family, it makes them more mature. I agree, and it's one of those missing pieces. The question often is, what do you do with the men in your church?

How do you disciple the men in your church? How do you have more involvement with the men in your church? Where you give them that mission right there that God has already given them, to lead and shepherd their families, And in addition to the other means of grace, but that mission right there shifted the men in our church radically. We were teaching, we were preaching, but when they had the responsibility to prepare and to study and to lead and to pray for and to disciple and to equip their own families, it completely changes their spiritual posture, completely. Because now it's not just the pastor.

Now it's just the elders, but it's me, I'm in charge of this. And that was a major shift in transition. It took a while, It took a while to get out of that mindset of the pastor feeds and I just kind of halfway bring them to, I'm supposed to not only bring them, but I'm supposed to lead them. It took a minute, took a couple years, but the fruit has been, again, for me, fantastic. And people come to our church and they go, I'm sure they do it yours, and they go, what did you do to the men?

They read a certain book, they're all leaning in, they're leaning forward, they're singing loud, and I look at the wives, they seem happy, they seem joyful, they seem secure. What did you do? Well, family, we challenged them to didn't do nothing. They worshiped. Hey, you know what, like in our church, almost every man in our church can accurately handle the Word of God.

Like we just had a thing going on here in our town. The town announced they're gonna have an LGBTQ festival here. We had like 12 men go in and preach to the civil magistrate. And you know what, I was so proud of them. They graciously, forthrightly, not crazy, told the truth about everything.

And when you have a man who's doing that at home, he takes responsibility for it. And then he's involved in a church where the church is shepherded through the preaching. And that father is shepherding his family through the preaching. When you have those two things, it's like a 20 megaton bomb. It's really powerful.

It is. Isn't that weird? It's so simple. It's so simple and it's actually been a blessing for me and for our elders too because once your men get to a certain level it makes you kind of, you have to up your game a little bit. Like you can't, as we say in our church, you can't come with that weak sauce.

You've got to. You know, I can't get away with too much, frankly. You can't get away with much. Not at all, not at all. I joke with them, I'm saying, if I do something stupid, There'll be like 15 of you at the back door and they're just very loud, amen!

You know, it's like, okay, thanks guys, I appreciate that. But that's true, it's this wonderful mutual accountability that happens too, that's a great benefit. You mentioned wives. Yes. This was another shockerini to me.

You get happier wives. If you have a shepherd, if you have a man who's bringing truth and love into his family, and he sees himself as an Ephesians 5 kind of husband who loves his wife, like Christ loved the church. He's not a jerk patriarch. He's washing his wife in the water of the word. He's not whooping her.

I mean, he's caring for her. Your counseling load drops. Your marriage counseling load drops big time. Did you experience that? I absolutely experienced that.

So tell me about that. Well, first, our church transitioned from being kind of a more standard, pragmatic church with lots of ministries for everybody to a family integrated church. In that process, there were many things that I discovered in the process or later. One of them was just how much feminism was in the church to start with, and that's another topic for another day. Well, maybe we can talk about that.

But in the process of challenging the men, it was also a challenge to the women, too. And for them to be able to see the beauty of the Word, the beauty of the order that God has laid out, and to trust that took some time. And the men were really helpful in that because they began to see that as their husbands loved them, as you said, as Christ loves the Church, as they begin to lay their lives down for them. They saw the effort that went into teaching and training. They were able to just kind of calm down, relax, and begin to fight against some of those other kind of maybe ideologies that had filtered in, whether they knew it or not.

To now, all these years hence, I look around now and I have this thing after church where I go around the church after I'm finished preaching, shaking hands, talking to everybody like a lot of pastors, but the ladies know I do what's called a smile check. I'm looking for smiles. Okay. Because, you know, Because as good men, it's really important that our wives are taken. The women in our church are cared for, love provided for.

You mentioned jerk patriarch. That's not what we are and what we advocate for. And I just, the happiness, the joy that I see in the preponderance of the women in our church, the vast majority of them are being so well cared for. They're treated so gently, loved on so much, knowing that their husbands will die for them if necessary. It's just one of the greatest benefits of it all, truly, to see happy women in the year that we're living in, in this culture, they're with happy, non-bitter, joyful sisters.

What a wonderful thing. Serene, serene, right? So comforting. And part of the serenity I think comes from they know that, well they know their husband is their head, but they also know that Christ is head of the husband. That's right.

So they're not afraid of their husbands. They're not frightened by any fear like Sarah. It's not like, you know, they're cowering in front of their husbands because they're not afraid. Not at all. But they're comforted that God is taking care of them through the creation order.

The way that God ordained everything to work. So they're like more at peace. And hey, you know, the church that I, you know, the non-family-integrated church, you know, you had a lot of women on all kinds of antidepressants, and it's different in a family-integrated church. They don't need it. And not to say that there aren't marriage problems and difficulties and things, but it's nothing like it used to be.

Not at all. Nothing. You mentioned counseling load dropping. That's true. Counseling load has, you know, because the Lord handles most of that within the home.

With the Word of God. With the Word of God, and praying together does this amazing thing, too. Families praying together, husbands and wives praying together, and just bringing that mindset into the church has made my job a lot easier and a lot more joyful. Yeah, there's another thing on the men too. The men are more independent.

They're more independent of you. They're not dependent on you as a pastor. They're not walking around with their umbilical cords trying to plug into the power source. Right. Because they have the Word.

Right. God. And so you've got, you have men who are actually more independent in a really good way. It's not like that they, it's not like they don't ask you questions or anything like that, but they frankly don't need to ask you as many questions. And that was part of the goal.

The goal was to equip them so that they can find the answers for themselves, they can build their own libraries because they're charged with teaching their wives and their children. And again, I get the occasional call, but it's nothing the way it used to be, where there was this almost kind of codependence upon the pastor, which isn't very healthy long term. So yeah, it's been fantastic. I remember I was at your church one time and you had taken your church through the Nehemiah Institute. You're gonna bring that up.

That was so amazing. So, you gave the whole church this worldview test, and it categorizes you, do you have a Christian worldview, or do you have a Marxist worldview? And you got up this terrified me. You got up there, and you told the church, I found out that a lot of the people in the church don't have a Christian worldview. And then you said, and I'm gonna show it all up on these slides, and I'm sitting there.

But it wasn't like names of people, right? It was just the stats. No, Carlton, don't do it, don't do it. I'm screaming inside. Well, it wasn't like the names of the people were next to their test score or anything like that.

But no, I recall that. It was a men's conference and we put all the men through the Pierce test, which measured worldview. And I wanted them to see what the results were, you know, and it showed that we had some work to do. But what was so amazing about that is you got up there and you didn't use it to beat the sheep. You said something like, hey, this is who we are, But I'm here to lead us through this.

Mm-hmm. Let's go. Yeah We see it in that was so inspiring brother Dan Smith wick and from the EMI. He gave us a bunch of Piers manuals and and here just recently we had some leftover manuals from all those years ago and I gave them out to newer members just so they can continue to work on worldview stuff with themselves and their wives and children. Yeah, so it's important that we think through things biblically.

We're in such an age with so much confusion, and it's so easy to get swept away if you're not constantly going back to the Word prayerfully and humbly, saying, Lord, how should I look at this? What should I? And that's what we want our men to do, and our women to do, and our children to do. We want to equip them to look at something in the midst of the culture and go, wait, what did our master say here? What does the king say here?

What does the word of God say here? And then live accordingly. You know, when we first started this family of your church right here, we had this, you know, this new group of people who had never done this before. And I wanna talk about feminism for a minute. Sure.

Okay. And so, you know, these people came out of a conservative church, and we're sitting here in this family integrated church, And I quoted 1 Corinthians 14, 34, let your women keep silent in the churches for a shameful, for a woman to speak in church. And it like caused a revolution. Like it was upheaval, man. I, It was really hard.

But unraveling the feministic mindset was one of the most difficult things in the first few years of this family integrated church. Amen. Imagine me having an established church already, having to wait. And that's the one thing when people ask me, hey, how did you do this? Well, you know, it started for us with a desire to see our children grow.

We were losing too many of them to cultural and worldly mindsets. So we went back to the scriptures to try to figure it out. But what I didn't know was that the heart of the sufficiency of scripture, developing that heart where you just want to go to the Bible, as you always talk about the desert island challenge. Like, what would you do if you were on a desert island and you just had the Bible? What I didn't know was that it would impact not just the training of the children, not just bringing them in to sing with us or sit with us, but it would touch every part of the church up to and including dealing with this the feministic kind of mindset that's so prevalent and revolution I may be light well I don't know in my church it was more than that.

We lost people. Explosion, you lose people and you're the people you know make websites about you and stuff like that. But God's design is best. And so, you know, when we have every new members meeting that I have with a new couple or a new person coming to the church, particularly if they're female, I will commend them and bless them and thank them, because it takes a certain mindset concerning the Word of God to be at our church. It's not that we preach on these things every Sunday.

We work our way through large portions of the Bible, right? But they are markers, right? They are different when you go to the quote-unquote standard church and you come to a church like yours or like mine, not that we're saying we're better, but it's different. It's just different. It's different.

And people ask questions about those differences. In the community that I'm a part of, it's very common to have women preaching, women pastors, women elders. Our church doesn't. That's different. So questions come up.

And so I commend them for having done their research. They've asked these questions, they've looked at it, they've gone and researched. So many will tell me, we went and, when you were working through this passage, we went and found that on YouTube to see what you said about it, and we agree, and that's why we're here. And we get those kinds of comments, I'm very grateful for that. You know, we had an enormous amount of opposition at the beginning.

I remember at the time there was this well-known CCM group, Casting Crowns. I think this might have been when we'd released the film Divided, which caused me a lot. That film caused me so much trouble. But I remember he did this video clip about us and he said, what kind of bubble are you living in? And I thought about that, I said, you know, well, it's a bubble where fathers are taking care of their families, where children can actually hear sermons, they get saved hearing mature sermons, not kiddy sermons.

And you've got wives who are serene. And I thought, I like our bubble better. I like our bubble a lot better than your bubble. That's right. That's right.

Yours is like super-duper jacked up and exciting. Ours isn't really that way. It's very plain. One thing I love about the bubble that is it has biblical precedent and that's what got me. And like I said, in the black community, you know, I can't quote a lot of, and I have trouble quoting a lot of authors that people haven't read, but I don't have any trouble quoting the Scriptures.

And one of the things that really helped our church was to work our way systematically through the Scriptures to try to figure out, how does God want his people to meet? And how does he want children, does he want them to worship with us or not? How should we teach them? How should we train them? And from Genesis to Revelation, the pattern is so wonderfully clear.

I'm so grateful for that. The pattern is so clear that God invites little babies, and He invites women, and He invites men, and He invites us all into this time before him. And out of that mindset has come all these other beautiful things, teaching, discipleship, and training. But I like our bubble too, because our bubble is biblical. In the Bible, you don't have this radicalized, segmented, generational ministry.

You don't have that in the Bible. You got, we picked that up in the 20th century. Right. And the rise of the modern youth ministry movement and the church became age segregated, really copying the public school system. But we weren't copying the Bible when we did that.

We did that. We did that. Promoted it, built churches based on... Lots of money around it too. A lot of money, you know, there's, who was it?

I think Vodi Bakum calls it a, it was a cottage industry. Youth ministry is a cottage industry. Indeed. With all kinds of nonprofits feeding it and nonprofit ministries. And then of course, you know, the machine inside the church.

So, we believe the Bible presents an age integrated discipleship format So we want to do that too. We want to do it like they did in Ephesus, where the children are addressed right there in the meeting. There they are, they're right there in the meeting. Children, obey your parents in the Lord. Husbands, love your wives.

Everybody's there. Everybody's there, That's right. And which way is more beautiful? That's one of the questions that I ask people that I learned from you. Which way is more beautiful when you look out?

It depends if the kid's one and a half years old. It's harder. It's a lot harder to keep it. It is harder. There is a bit, it's a little bit messy.

Yeah, from, you know, from birth, of course right at the beginning of birth, it's pretty super duper easy. Then it gets a little harder, but if a parent can hang with it, till about age three, that child is going to be like cool as a cucumber in the worship. And hey, in our church, we have five, six, seven, eight year olds getting saved from our preaching, from the preaching. Like for me, you know, when I'm finished preaching, kids come up and talk to me. Same.

They really understand a lot more than you think they do. One of the great benefits I've seen that's not always present in the other case is what it does for family. You know, it's almost like the spiritual life of our children is kind of bequeathed to the church, and it's not alive in the home when parents don't understand their role. And I saw that change. I saw parents get to know their children on a different, kind of a different level, if you will.

You know, of course you know about soccer, and of course you know about their schooling, but their walk with the Lord now becomes this primary thing that you're charged with. And they got closer, and relationships improved, and the kind of the generational missteps and issues that sometimes arise didn't come up as quickly or stay as long because they were intimately involved in the life of their child. Simply because we went back to the Bible, that's it. We didn't do anything special. We just said, a youth pastor can't do this.

And when I was a youth pastor and when I did work with youth on that level, when I was really doing well I was just parenting. I was spending an awful lot of time with... Right, it wasn't like the little lesson that I did on Sunday. It was the other days. It was the other time It was the phone calls.

It was the spending time in prayer, you know, being a surrogate father if you will. And I think what we want to do in our churches is focus the entire church on the Scripture, everything, every single person dialed in on the preaching. And in our church, we do different things even throughout the week to focus the whole church on the word. That's what we want them to go away with, the whole family, all together on the same page, singing the same songs, hearing the same prayers, hearing the same preaching, participating in the... What does that do during the week?

What does that do on a Monday? Because you're saying that you're still singing the same songs. You're still thinking about the same message notes or what the pastor said. You have these points of connection of talking about it. For the younger ones, you're making it applicable for them, but it's still the same message in the same song, and it works.

God's design works. One of the things that I've noticed is if you have a family that has come out of a mainstream church, and their kids are seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, they're kind of jittery, and it's not because they're nervous about what's going on. They've just been in a different culture. But after a few months, it's like they level out and they're way more mature because they're with mature people. Have you seen this, the parents that figure it out, maybe they're teens or pre-teens, not so much, and so they come to give it a try, and they're getting blowback from their youth.

How would you encourage parents to kinda, what would you tell them to hang in there, stick in there, how would you help them with that? Because the teens are ready to go back to, you know, the video games and clowns for Jesus. What would you, how would you encourage those parents? Well this is why you have parents, is to lead you, to lead you to the green pastures and the still waters. Kids don't always know where the green pastures are.

They have to be led there. Hey, most kids don't know where the green pastures are. Probably no kids know where the green pastures are, But that's why you have parents to lead them And that's why the Bible says children obey your parents in the Lord for this is right honor your father mother That it might be well with you So, you know if you encourage parents to lead their children out there a lot let their children lead them This is the biggest problem is when children start leading their parents. And that happens in family-agreed churches where children grow older and the parents are afraid to try to lead them. And now the children are leading the family.

That happens. It does. Sometimes right out of a good church. Right out of a good church. Yeah, you know, we've had some actually, you know, legitimate questions and criticisms, critiques about us, they've been written and we've tried to answer that.

All the answers are on our website. But, yeah, so, let's talk about that, various criticisms. Yeah, The two that come to my mind, after we transitioned, or during and after the transition, was one, you don't love children, which is ridiculous because, of course, the whole church shifted to demonstrate our love for children. Like the whole point was to pull them, oh my goodness, right, loving them, be able to get to pull them in as close as possible and to spend more time with them, not less, to worship with them, not move them away. And so that was quickly disproven just by being immersed in the model a little bit and seeing that we haven't dropped our children off at all.

We've actually rededicated ourselves to spending time with them. And then the other was that, what do you do with single people or unmarried people? This seems to be a married folks only movement. And I've actually left several, several single people in our church, not just younger ones either, but some older ones, and they're just as immersed in the processes of the church as anybody else. I mean, and for those single moms, for example, that have little ones, our diaconate and the members of the church just surrounded her and loves her, and you know, and those kids just get adopted into the life of the church like anybody else.

And so it didn't actually, nothing changed. We didn't do anything different. We didn't do anything special. We challenged her to disciple her kids and love on them, and then we came alongside her like we would come alongside anybody else, and it just works. And it was no mindset of lesser than, or married people are better, or anything like that, no.

It's just one big family that loves Jesus and wants to see our kids love Jesus. You know the thing about not loving kids, you know, what's more loving? To have your children with you in the worship of God, singing together the songs. Or, and I'm not gonna say that all Sunday school classes or child care are like this, but a lot of them are. And everybody knows it.

You have unqualified people in these classes. And, you know, they're they're they're glowing popsicles, sticks together popsicle crosses for their Sunday school and say look at who Jesus is. Which is more loving. And again, every Sunday school class isn't like that, but many of them are actually because it's really hard to staff a Sunday School program. I've tried to, I've done it, I've tried to do it, it's a pain in the neck, it's really hard.

And you, a lot of times, they're just ended up relying on warm bodies who will plug in, and they're not really qualified to shepherd your children. And not to say that there aren't wonderful people in these kinds of scenarios, but it's a problem. Every single church has that problem to some degree that has a proliferation of age-segregated programs. Well, I mean, which is more loving? I guess my calculation is it's more loving to have your children together hearing, preaching, where there's rich doctrine, you can talk about it, you can lean over and say, did you hear what he said about Jesus?

Even the picture is more loving. I'll look out from the pulpit and I'll see a dad, and then he's got one, two, three, four, five in between him and the wife's on the end, and they stand up and they're all singing, right? And then during the message, there may be some moving around, and they're helping the little ones with this or that. And in our church, we do some children's notes for them to help them track with the sermon as well. But you just look at this picture that's so counter-cultural but so desperately needed.

There's a father, there's his wife, they're their children, and they're worshiping God together. I don't think there's any question about which is more loving. Now it may be more work, as we said, but is certainly more loving. Well, okay, I'll put it another way. Is it more loving to have a family in church together, singing together, or to put your kids in a place where you have to do a background check and check the sexual offenders list?

Right. Which is more loving. Exactly, exactly. I think that's, I mean, you kind of said it all. One of the mindsets that I used to not even think about that this entire kind of Reformation has helped me with is the mindset of walking into a church for the first time.

You may have a member there that you know, but you don't know the greeter, and you don't know necessarily the pastor, and you don't know the deacons, and you don't know the children's staff, and you walk in and they give you a buzzer or something and you give them your child. That's an awful lot of, I mean, don't get me wrong, like you said, there are good people doing good things, but that's an awful lot of trust for people you don't know. You know, I remember when we first started this, I went over to Southeastern Seminary, where Page Patterson was the president at the time. He became a good friend, I really appreciated him. And I read him everything on our website.

I said, we want to start a family in a great church. Do you have our blessing? And he asked us two questions. The first question was, how do you do missions in a family or a church? Well I said just like you do in any church.

And then the other thing he asked was how are you how are you going to minister to kids that don't have parents? That was a great question. And you know at the beginning you know we didn't have a roadmap for that we didn't know we know how that would work out. We did have you know kids not very many you know that didn't have parents that went to go to the church. But you're not scooping all kinds of kids off the street that way, you could, I don't think there's anything wrong with that.

But what you are doing is you're actually shepherding the people that are in your church. So there's a lot of value in that. A church should be a wonderful place for a kid that doesn't have a family because then he's part of a big family and he has spiritual fathers and spiritual mothers and He can you know, he can relate with the older men in the church and the others that are his age He is a good question. I mean when we started we didn't have that dilemma like We didn't have all the kids that he'd probably be talking about were all brought by their parents or brought by a relative or something like that, a grandmother, something like that. Rare has been the instance where a 14-year-old wanders in the church on Sunday morning.

And that's just, in our context, that's rare. But we do have younger people whose parents aren't necessarily there with them. 18, 19 years old, et cetera. And we minister to them like we minister to anyone else. So, Paige Patterson asked those questions, great questions, and then he turned to me and he said, somebody needs to do this.

Now, he wasn't endorsing broadly or anything like that, but I think he understood the doctrine of the family. He understood the jurisdictions really, really clearly and was really a warrior for those things. So I think he actually ended up endorsing my book of Weed and the Church. Not to say he agreed with everything in it, okay? Right.

Which is great, But I mean that just plays into, what were some of the questions that were asked of us at the beginning, the criticisms that we've had? We've had a lot of criticism. I wish I could remember. I've got a whole like list as long as your arm. Jesus was a youth pastor, is that true?

What about Nehemiah's nursery? Where were all those kids? Nehemiah was speaking and Everybody was there except those who couldn't understand. Well, if you read the book of Nehemiah, you know that half the people spoke the language of Ashdod. They couldn't understand Hebrew.

That's what I think. I think the ones that they couldn't understand, that included adults, okay, who spoke the language of Ashtar. But the problem, you know, in Nehemiah's day is that they'd raised a culture of people that had so rejected really the ordinary means of grace that you had a generation that didn't know the Lord and they still spoke the language of Ashdod and they couldn't understand Nehemiah's speech, but there was no nursery. And we had to take into account the positive commands to gather everybody together as well. Right, exactly.

Absolutely. So there's this whole litany I like spent, you know, for like two years just answering all... I was on dozens and dozens of interviews and and one time I was on this interview, this very well-known talk show guy, he invited me to this interview, and then I show up to the interview, and there are like 12 people in bleachers pounding away at me, just, you know. This sounds like an inquisition. It was great, It was, I loved it, it was really fun.

So, you know, I've been in, but I always, in my interviews, I always really default to one question. Just, I only have one question. And it's, can you show me one single place in the Bible where you have a positive testimony of segregating the generations in worship or discipleship? Just one. Well, they say, oh, but the rabbis did it.

Well, wait a minute, the rabbis are not our pattern. But it works better that way, you know. Like the public schools, they discovered something that was so brilliant, you know. No, no, no, just the Bible. I just want to know what the Bible says.

I think an argument can be made against the fruit of these things too, but yeah. And it totally cracked me up. One time, I can't remember when this happened, but Jason Dome, he said, he was preaching, and I can't remember what he, but he said, he said, read the Bible till your eyes bleed. You will not find one verse that looks like Jason Dome. But it's true.

Right. And that doesn't stop the argument because pragmatism is so inculcated the way that we think about church life and family life. We want to go make it up our own. The Bible gives us everything we need for church and family life. Scripture is sufficient.

Amen. Hey, one of the things that has happened over the years is that the proposition has spread. I remember the slander years, those are gone. And there are more and more and more churches that are age-integrating. And a lot of times they'll just age-integrate the worship service, you know, and then they'll age-integrate their Sunday school classes.

I think that the next decade is the decade that you'll see more family-integrated churches than any time in the last 75 years. That's what I think. Amen. I hope you're right. I pray you're right.

There does seem to be, again, like you said, the slander years are gone. There does seem to be this renewed interest in it, and you know, I'm not getting any criticism, quite frankly. They may criticize other things that I do, but it's not the family integrated pieces anymore. It's not the pooling kids' clothes. It's not the homeschooling or the Christian schooling pieces that are the natural outgrowth of this mindset.

No one's criticizing that anymore. At least thoughtful Christians aren't, because they're seeing what's happening in the culture, they're seeing what's happening with youth. And as more and more people, by the grace of God, turn back to the Word, you know, Scott, I pray in the name of the Lord that you are right, because we need it now more than ever. And you know what else? I think what one thing has happened is people at the beginning said, this is all about the family.

All they care about is the family. Well, I think most people have seen what happens in these churches and what we've been saying. It isn't all about the family. The family is a little piece of it. Right.

What's big in the proposition is Scripture. Right. So you have churches focused on the Word of God, not the family. Right. Every sermon is not about the family.

Very rare. It's expositional preaching. Expositional preaching. Right. If the family shows up, then there you have it.

But it's not, the family is not the center of it. And people at the beginning, they would say, oh, these people say that the family always has to be together and never can be apart. We've never said that. But what we have said is that the biblical pattern is really clear. The church is a generational community.

Hey Carlton, praise the Lord. It's been a joy to be banging around over the last, over a decade. Two troublemakers. In all this, I really, I'm just so thankful for you. Love you, brother, appreciate it.

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