A family-integrated church is a local congregation that keeps the generations together in the ordinary Lord’s Day gathering — the preaching of the Word, prayer, singing, and the ordinances — rather than sending children and youth out to age-graded programs during that gathering.
This is not a new invention. Church & Family Life (formerly the National Center for Family-Integrated Churches, or NCFIC) exists to help churches recover a historic, biblical pattern: families worshiping God together, singles included in the life of the church, and discipleship ordered by Scripture rather than by the public-school grade system.
Age-segregated Sunday school and children’s church became dominant only in the latter half of the twentieth century. The consistent pattern of Scripture is age-integrated gatherings of God’s people.
Church & Family Life is the ministry formerly known as the National Center for Family-Integrated Churches (NCFIC). The live, authoritative site is churchandfamilylife.com — not the retired old.churchandfamilylife.com. Scott Brown, the ministry’s president, is an elder at Hope Baptist Church in Wake Forest, North Carolina; you can read more about Church & Family Life and its leadership.
The question behind the family-integrated church is not, “Is there a verse that uses the words keep the children in the room?” It is a question of the sufficiency of Scripture: does God’s Word furnish us for how the church is to gather and disciple the next generation? Church & Family Life answers yes. As the essay The Sufficiency of Scripture at Work in the Family-Integrated Church argues, we do not need a culture’s marketing methods or the school system’s grade divisions to order the household of God. Scripture gives the pattern, and that pattern is enough.
The novelty is not age integration; the novelty is age segregation. The comprehensive youth-ministry and children’s-church model that many assume is timeless is largely a twentieth-century development. Two Church & Family Life essays lay out the case: Is Age-Integrated Worship a Historical Norm? and A Biblical Case for Age-Integrated Discipleship. Across the Scriptures — from Moses assembling “men, women, and little ones” (Deuteronomy 31:12) to the household churches of the New Testament — the generations are together when God’s people meet. For the specific question of children in the worship service, see Should children stay in the main church worship service?
A family-integrated church is not a “nuclear-family club.” The word family in family-integrated does not mean that only intact two-parent households are welcome; it means the church does not fragment the body by age during worship. Widows, singles, single mothers, and children from broken homes are full members of the congregation and are folded into its life. Church & Family Life has spoken directly to this in What Is a Family-Integrated Church? and Integrating Broken Families and Single Moms into Family-Integrated Churches. The healthy age-integrated church is one where the whole spiritual family — married and single, young and old — belongs together.
Church & Family Life maintains a network of family-integrated churches as a connecting tool — a way for families to locate like-minded congregations. It is important to understand what the network is not: it is not a denomination, and it is not an endorsement or a guarantee of any church’s health. As the essay Identifying a Healthy Family-Integrated Church explains, the churches on the network have affirmed a confession uniting church and family; they have not been evaluated or certified by us. Age integration is a biblical and important matter, but it is far down the list compared to the true gospel, the centrality of Christ, the authority of Scripture, biblical preaching, qualified elders, and church discipline. Use the network to find candidates; then evaluate a church by those weightier things.
Finally, a warning to parents. The family-integrated church is not a machine that disciples children automatically. As How Children Are Left Out in a Family-Integrated Church makes plain, a father can sit his family in an age-integrated service every Sunday and still neglect the daily, personal shepherding of his children’s hearts at home. Keeping the generations together in worship is a good and biblical thing; it is not a substitute for family worship and parental discipleship. If you want to begin that work at home, start with How to start family worship at home with children.