I hear that the Family-Integrated “movement” is gaining traction. USA Today, Washington Post, and a few other national media sources have covered the phenomenon. As a pastor in an Orthodox Presbyterian Church out in Castle Rock, Colorado, and as one who has provided some significant coverage to the NCFIC on my radio program (GenerationsRadio.com), I thought I should comment.
I should say first that labels don’t do much for me. It’s easy to start a movement, grab a label, and put it on a T-shirt. It’s another thing to actually incarnate a heart-deep, passionate love for God and do something substantial for the kingdom! It’s one thing to curse the darkness, another to light a candle. So, time will tell what will happen with our little “movement.”
We have had a “family-integrated” church, as some call it, for eleven years. At the beginning, we didn’t have any label for what we were doing. But I know we do unusual things in our church. We hand out Family Bible Study Guides (available at GenerationsRadio.com) and ask our families to disciple their own children in intensive, daily discipleship over 16-18 years. We do our best to equip the fathers to the task. We’ve never had “age-segregated” Sunday schools. But I do have a three-day-a-week, comprehensive discipleship effort for young men ages 16-26 years old, which has been in operation for about two years in my own home. These young men stay overnight in my house. They eat at my table for seven meals a week. We had a thousand teaching opportunities with them last year, and they are growing into wise, sober, faith-filled, mature, knowledgeable, humble, God-fearing men of God ready to shepherd their own families when they get married. They are youth and they are a group. Does that make it a youth group? If anything, we want to be intensive and intentional about the biblical discipleship of our children into men and women who love God and serve Jesus in His kingdom.
Believe it or not, there is some opposition to what we are doing! I haven’t really received much encouragement over the years from my friends who avail themselves of the conventional approach. Perhaps some of us do deserve a little of the criticism we get. Whether we get the message out in the right spirit every time, we still think that we have a worthwhile challenge for the rest of the world.
To clarify my position, I am not saying that Sunday Schools are malum in se (evil in itself). I have never taken the position that age-segregated teaching is malum in se. But I agree with my Family-Integrated friends when they say, “Houston, we have a problem!” Indeed, our present systems are failing! Parent-child relationships are lousy, everywhere I look. 64% of children under the age of six are “latchkey kids,” and that’s a problem. There are almost twice as many girls with bachelor’s degrees at 23 years of age than boys. Parents and pastors alike are shamefully careless in their arrangement of an education for their children that is rooted firmly in the fear of God. They wrongfully separate the education of a child from the discipleship of a child in faith and character. Parents neglect Deut. 6:7, Eph. 6:4, and Heb. 3:13 responsibilities everywhere. With family worship/discipleship extremely rare in “Christian” households today, I conclude there are precious few that really love God with their heart, soul, mind, and strength (Deut. 6:4), such that they would teach the children they say they love about the God they love (Deut. 6:7).
Christians routinely displace the intent of God’s law by their own traditions, and practically every successive generation is worse than the previous. They ignore God’s law because their hearts are far from God (Matt. 15:8). Their pastors find many theological and pedagogical constructs to enable them so that they feel good in ignoring God’s laws. If you want examples of these theological constructs, I can give you the list I have collected over the years. But it gets more complicated than that—much more complicated.
This matter can be reduced to a call for discernment. Undiscerning pastors may not perceive there to be any problem with an education that refuses to acknowledge God as the source of reality, truth, and ethics— an education that disengages the fear of God from the history class, the science class, and the literature class. Unwise pastors may ignore the problem that 64% of children under six are latchkey kids. These pastors see nothing wrong with the social conditions of the dying family in America, the birth implosions among WASPs, the wholesale apostasy from the Christian faith in the west. They may ignore what the surveys tell us—95% of born-again parents have never even “tried” family worship. They may not see a need for the application of passages like Hebrews 13:3, Deuteronomy 6:7, or Ephesians 6:4. They may be content with the present condition of the Christian faith in their Baptist churches or Charismatic churches, or Reformed churches. Or, if they acknowledge a problem, they still don’t address it in any substantial way.
They can’t see how all the typical youth group scene, the Sunday School classes, Child Evangelism, Youth for Christ programs, etc. have failed to accomplish much for the kingdom of God over the long haul. They can’t see how all of these professionalized approaches to “youth evangelism” have displaced the will of God concerning parental discipleship of their own children. They don’t see the breakdown of generation connections. They see no real importance to improving parent-child relationships. What’s more, they usually can answer the arguments posed by this ragtag band of “Family Integrated Churches” with relative ease. Addressing the flaming rhetoric of these incendiary prophets is ridiculously easy. They give a blank stare, and they say,
“We see no problem!”
“Statistics lie.”
“You’re overstating the case on this generational apostasy business.”
“I don’t see any food offered to idols around here anywhere.”
“Stop impinging on my Christian liberty.”
“I haven’t seen one tradition of man ever displacing the laws of God in MY experience.”
“My kid has a Christian teacher in his public school who prayed silently once before he ate his lunch. That’s enough fear of God in the classroom for me!”
There it is. The debate is over.
But if you think about it, undiscerning pastors have always cried “Peace, Peace!” when there is no peace. If there is a heart problem in this country, would the pastors ever detect it themselves, especially if they were part of the problem and their relationships with their own children were distant and disengaged? I wonder. If you never saw a problem, why would you ever look for a solution? You wouldn’t see a need for repentance. Some may tell us that they’ve already repented—500 years ago. They are “reform-ed,” in the past tense. They see little further need for ongoing repentance, ever since the formation of their own “most excellent” denomination.
How would a pastor ever know if he had displaced the commandments of God with his own tradition (Matt. 15:6), especially if his heart was far from God (Matt. 15:8)? I wonder sometimes if this is the condition of many of our pastors in our “best” churches in the present day.
In the end, I know that our Lord will sort it all out for us. If the pastors have failed to discern, to their own Master they rise or fall. If I have discerned wrongly and reacted too abruptly, then my Master shall correct me for this. In another forty years from now, we will see the results of the social, economic, cultural, and ecclesiastical breakdown in this country. The fire will burn, and the fire will tell. Some will have gold, silver, and precious stones, and some will see their wood, hay, and stubble burned to ashes (1 Cor. 3:12,13).
Meantime, in the midst of the corruption of this present world and the raging apostasies of the day, I will continue to cry out for God’s mercy for my poor family and my struggling church family without ceasing. If God will save us from this present evil age, it will be His pure mercy. I have no recipe that will work for all. Any one of us can fail to teach the fear of God in our homeschools or our academically-intensive classical schools, just as well as the ungodly fail in the average public school. We have the “technology” to fail. My only plea is that my pastor friends would encourage more fear of God, more love for God, more love for our sweet children, more worship in the chemistry laboratories, more intensive discipleship everywhere, more sincerity, and less hypocrisy. Give me more fear of God. Don’t give me sixteen essays on why you don’t need to bring the fear of God into your children’s public school education. Tell me how you can disciple a young woman or young man into honoring his or her parents more. Tell me how you can encourage father and mothers to love God more (Deut. 6:4) and to obey the will of God for parents found in Exod. 12:26, 27, Deut. 4:10, Deut. 6:7, Eph. 6:4, 1 Thess. 2:11, and Proverbs 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. . .31. How are your churches equipping parents to aggressively address their parental responsibilities while trusting in a sovereign, gracious God who is “the rewarder of those who diligently seek Him?” How are your pastors encouraging fathers to love God passionately, such that they would disciple the children they love to the God they love, as they sit in their house, and as they walk by the way (Deut. 6:4-7)? Are their enough men who actually love God enough in your churches?
The Christian faith is at a low ebb in this country. May God raise up discerning men who have eyes to see, and the faith to repent, and the courage to call a nation to repentance!