About the Event

Dear Friends:

Preserving the Remnant

The Church of Jesus Christ is the true centerpiece of history. She is the object of God’s love. To know the true state of a nation, look at the state of the Church. To know the state of the Church, look at the families who populate her pews. To know the state of her families, look to the fathers who lead them. Destroy the vision of the father, and you render impotent the family, thus creating a chain reaction that spreads throughout civilization.

On the other hand, when fathers turn their hearts to families, then children turn their hearts to their fathers, and the result is that the Church victorious emerges ready for battle. This is why you can never truly know the heart of what is happening in the Church unless you know the status of family life within the Church.

Progressive Sanctification

Progressive sanctification is the doctrine of God’s gradual work of spiritual maturity in the life of the believer. The same principle applies to the progress of the Church. For more than forty years the Lord appears to have been preparing the Church victorious “to make ready a people prepared for the Lord.” Here is my take on this progress:

During the 1960s, Christian parents concerned about the rise of youth rebellion and evolution began an exodus from the government schools that resulted in the rise of the Christian school movement. Unfortunately, the Christian school movement at this time was characterized less by a change of worldview and educational methodology, than by a change of venue.

With the 1970s came the recognition that it was not enough to take our children out of government schools, we must teach them to think differently. I attended one of the first Christian schools in America to emphasize biblical worldview. The content was wonderful, but the philosophy of education de-emphasized the role of parents and continued to perpetuate the age-segregated, one-size-fits-all classroom model developed by the humanist educator John Dewey. The result was a generation of worldview-conscious youth, many of them spiritually lost, who still rejected their parents.

The 1980s birthed the modern home school movement. Home educators realized that neither content nor methodology were neutral. The results were phenomenal: Wise children with a solid worldview who recognized the importance of multi-generational faithfulness. The ancient biblical methodology of daily and comprehensive parent-directed discipleship was restored to its rightful place as the centerpiece of Christian education.

One flagrant error persisted: Home education was primarily a mother’s movement. Dad had not turned his heart to home.

Fathers Come Home

Enter the 1990s. After almost a decade of home education, the results were manifestly self-evident: Home education was producing respectful and intelligent children with vision. Dads began to take notice. The Holy Spirit moved. Hearts softened. Many fathers longed to build a foundation for family renewal. The “lost Book of the Law” was opened. Men began to hunger for their families. Their practices changed. For the first time in two-hundred years, they adopted a new emphasis on child discipleship, family worship, and a unified vision for family life. During that decade, home school conference attendance by fathers rose more than 400%. Words like “patriarch” and “multi-generational vision” were dusted off and once again introduced into the vocabulary of the Christian man. A genuine revival of biblical manhood broke out. It is still breaking out.

But What About Church?

Crisis led to home education; home education led to fatherhood; fatherhood led to a renewed vision for the family — “a turning of the hearts of fathers to their children.”

But a new crisis emerged. The same Scripture that directs fathers to turn their hearts to their families directs families to turn their heart to the local church. So what happens when the local church has bought hook, line, and sinker into the very same father-emasculating, family-destroying philosophies which created the problem in the first place?

The result is chaos: Families are grieved at pastors for compromising. Pastors are grieved at families for disloyalty.

All the while, the gap between church and home grows bigger and bigger.

Dictators, Nomads, and Rebels

Sadly, many churches have taken it upon themselves to actually persecute families who want their children to worship with them rather than attending “kiddy church,” or who will not participate in the church youth group or Christian School. The debt-burden carried by many local churches and the perceived need to subsidize the debt by bringing in new members through ever-more innovative programs, youth groups, and church schools only makes the matter worse. Parents who object to such activities are deemed troublemakers. The church leadership is tempted to adopt a dictatorial approach which includes squashing anything which questions the methodology for church growth that they learned in seminary.

Equally sad is the fact that many families have responded to the crisis of the local church by simply giving up. The tragic results are nomadic families who flit from church to church, or renegades who refuse to place themselves under the accountability of a local church. Quite popular in recent years is the notion that the Sabbath meeting of the church is made up of Dad, Mom, and children reading the Bible in the family living room. This is non-normative at best and downright heterodox at worst. God requires his people to be under biblical local churches with biblical preaching, biblical church government, biblical ordinances, and biblical discipline.

So how do we bridge the gap between Church and home? Thankfully God’s Word provides us with all the answers we need so that we can be “perfect, thoroughly equipped unto every good work.” These answers presuppose a biblical view of the sufficiency of Scripture which allows us to develop a biblical understanding of church growth, outreach, socialization, ministry, education, authority, loyalty, and much more. It is in pursuit of these answers, and to equip the body of Christ, that Vision Forum Ministries launched the National Center for Family-Integrated Churches under the directorship of Scott Brown.

This ministry was founded after a group of several dozen elders and church leaders from around the country met for an historic dialogue to evaluate the growing tension between the modern local church and the Christian family. The NCFIC was started to help fathers and church leaders bridge the gap between church and home by returning to biblical methods of worship, discipleship, and church life.

For Such a Time as This

We live at an historic time in the life of the Church. The Lord is at work and there is great reason to be encouraged. For decades, God has been progressively sanctifying the church and preparing the Remnant. Perhaps future generations will look back on our generation and this decade, much as we look back with thanks upon the Great Awakenings of our own past. Who can say what great things the Lord will do as we turn to Him and remember “the old paths?”

Blessings,
Doug Phillips

To learn more about the NCFIC, please visit the NCFIC homepage.