Thoughts on the Family Integrated Church Movement - the "FIC movement is reactionary"

Karen Campbell (thatmom.com) is another resource for this topic.

http://www.thatmom.com/articles/pros-and-cons-of-the-family-integrated-…

She has done a lot on the FIC and patriarchy movement, stuff that is really in full-swing in the home school realm. If you look under her podcasts, there are many interviews and talks on these subjects. She is an excellent thinker.

…what I hear from people who come from FIC churches is that there is no nursery, Sunday School classes, children’s programs or youth groups. Not because they don’t have the resources, but because they look down upon such programs and practices. All the kids sit in the entire service with their parents from beginning to end, even the ones who dirty their diaper and the folks sitting next to them have to smell it. Some other distinctions are that the families are adamantly against any kind of birth control and have a strictly “home-school only” philosophy of education.

Nothing like generalizations, exaggerations, and passing on idle gossip to bring clarity to an issue.

What rubs me the wrong way is that the FIC churches are making some of these practices as their primary distinctive identity.

I agree that some churches make their particular distinctions a badge of pride, ranging from a conservative dress code to a disco ball in the youth center- all of which are inappropriate and usually manage to sabotage the very thing one is trying to accomplish or avoid.

The stated objections remind me of many of the complaints I hear about homeschooling… from those who have never homeschooled or been involved in any way with homeschooling. It is easy to stand on the outside and imagine everything that could go wrong, but quite another to be involved in an activity on a daily basis and know firsthand how problems are identified and dealt with. Furthermore, conclusions are always going to be highly suspect when they are based on extremists and fringe elements of any ‘movement’. I don’t understand the fear-mongering by the FIC or those who oppose it. Everyone’s looking for the boogeyman, and quite frankly, the boogeyman is US.

I also just saw a new film that came out about the FIC churches and their grievances with the youth group churches. It’s interesting, I can sympathize with their concerns, but their solution doesn’t seem to hit the mark. I wrote another post about it here:

http://reformingbaptist.blogspot.com/2012/01/fic-film-identifies-proble…

It is impossible to mandate from the New Testament that one follow all the preferences taught in the FIC movement.

On the other hand, if the FIC movement is indeed reactionary, I would suggest it may be in part because there are things worth reacting against in “The Church of What’s Happening Now.”

I dare say that I would not be who, what or where I am today — anything good of which is only by the grace of God — if my parents had taken me to First Mega Church, picked up an ID tag number for me, and dropped me off in Kiddie Land.

The older I get the more I realize how deeply ingrained within me are the verses, hymns and catechism portions that I learned, memorized, sang and recited in our Lutheran church and school from four years old and up. Everything else I have ever done is building on that foundation. I never spent one minute in Kiddie Church — and I even lived to tell about it 8-)

I am not “FIC only” and I do believe that it is possible to go WAY TOO FAR in trying to implement the ideals of the FIC movement. We visited one such church (IFB, if you can believe it) where it seemed like we were gathered to worship the family more than to worship God. There are dangers on ALL sides.

On a side note, my wife and I attended a mega church on Christmas Day this year as part of our Christmas getaway. Due to the special nature of the day, the morning worship service was the ONLY activity on the church campus that entire day. We did not sense any smelly diapers or even any distractions in the service. The service was video and audio recorded as normal. It was a very wonderful service. So I guess that is still possible in this video game world of the 21st century.

I’m still looking for that “nuclear” family (Dad, Mom, and kids) from the inner city to start attending our Inner City church. The fact is, most people in lower-income areas don’t have a “regular” family. (Single, divorced, single with kids, etc.) If a F.I.C. is the only way to have a correct church, we are completely out of luck.

to attending a F.I.C. service is when I attend the Russian Evangelical Christian-Baptist church I serve as a liaison. But, toddlers do have a tendency to wander around, usually to find grandma or up to the choir to mommy. A mother\older sister\single aunt taking a child out for a diaper change is treated as business as usual.

[juitdeflesch] I’m still looking for that “nuclear” family (Dad, Mom, and kids) from the inner city to start attending our Inner City church. The fact is, most people in lower-income areas don’t have a “regular” family. (Single, divorced, single with kids, etc.) If a F.I.C. is the only way to have a correct church, we are completely out of luck.

I don’t understand why this is the perception of a FIC church- that they somehow manage to not allow or include singles, divorced, or singles with kids (“You aren’t married? You don’t have kids yet? Then please leave immediately!”). The only difference between a traditional church and a FIC church is that they don’t segregate into classes for seniors, singles, young marrieds, college/career, youth group, Sunday School… The dynamic I have seen to date is that these groups are involved and embraced instead of being separated from the general church population.

I have been in many meetings in my lifetime, Christian and otherwise, where children were included in the mix. Nothing horrifying happened, children were not swinging from the ceiling fans, and no one puked on anyone else. Sheesh.

I simply cannot grasp why age integration is looked on with such trepidation and disdain- apparently no one here has ever seen Anne of Green Gables or Little House on the Prairie. I agree that it isn’t the ONLY way to minister and teach, but let’s stop acting like it is a concept that was invented last week.

it is always just is about having kids in church with their parents. I dont’ think every fic church is like http://www.thatmom.com/articles/pros-and-cons-of-the-family-integrated-… thatmom describes, but it’s possible that they tend to be this way:

[thatmom] As you put into practice family worship, discipleship of your own children, caring for the needs of extended family, etc, you begin to see how the bureaucracy of the local church, especially if it can’t accommodate your own convictions, can become burdensome and frustrating. It only seems natural to turn to the family-integrated church model and many homeschooling families do just that.

Growing both in the number of churches and in membership, these churches have been established to meet the particular needs of homeschooling families and will eventually be available in most areas of the country. In fact, the National Center for Family Integrated Churches, … claims a membership of 1677 families who desire to further their mission.

While this organization does not represent all those who wish to follow a family-integrated approach to church life, they certainly have had tremendous influence through their conferences and publications. Founder and leader of the NCFIC, Doug Phillips, considered one of the most popular homeschooling speakers around the country today, promotes this off-shoot of his Vision Forum ministry while at homeschooling conferences along with other voices for pro-family-integrated worship such as Voddie Baucham, a SBC-ordained pastor, and Kevin Swanson, ordained in the OPC.

Not associated with Phillips but also a founder of what he calls “home-discipleship churches,” former church planter with the CRC, Pastor Henry Reyenga, is the head of the Christian Leaders Institute that seeks to launch churches and to prepare young men for leadership within those congregations. In recent years he has established his own denomination … that reflects his family discipleship priorities and interpretations of Christian education.

…

In contrast to the traditional structure found in most denominations and eschewing the long-established polity in most conventional churches, NCFIC churches each struggle to carve out their own paths and even theology based on the premise that homeschooling is the best and most biblical lifestyle for Christian parents. Placing fathers in leadership of these churches is to be the norm. To this end, the NCFIC mission statement says that they “deny/reject two unbiblical extremes of our day, authoritarian, one-man leadership/one-man ministry that impedes the biblical functioning of the body, and leaderless house churches that disregard the biblical necessity of elders.”

…

And there were other occasions where it was obvious that visitors felt awkward. We quickly came to realize that it was mostly because the church had taken on the appearance that everything had a kid agenda. Rather than simply welcoming children into the worship service and not practicing age segregation with Sunday school programs and youth ministry, everything was now geared toward upper elementary aged children, which was the age of the pastor’s own two children.

Worship services included children taking offering and playing the piano, leading singing, and handing out bulletins. While we thought it was great to have them involved, one of our concerns was that the service soon began to have a Bible school program flavor with children participating, adults looking on at what they were doing, and the phrase “boys and girls” was repeatedly used during the entire service.

Another thing that concerned us was that a type of uniformity was expected both inside and outside of time spent at church. For example, there were certain methods of child training that were taught and encouraged as the “biblical” way and tapes and CD’s by certain authors were advertised, promoted, and stocked in the church library. Since there would be no church nursery, it was also assumed that parents would only take their children out of service to “discipline” them and I was even told that moms were to make the time outside of worship so miserable by holding their toddlers down in an empty room that they would beg to go back into the service.

…

It was with a great sense of sadness that we decided we would have to leave the church and also that we would need to leave the family integrated church model because we saw that the things that were important enough to us to make us leave were all the things that that model represented.

Our daughter and son-in-law had been encouraging us to visit their church for many months and so we finally did. Initially it was hard to assimilate ourselves into a church that was more than 10 times larger than the church plant. But within a few months, we came to see the Lord’s righteous hand of mercy in our lives. Experiencing God-honoring worship and challenging, expository preaching began to change our hearts and our minds. Our children started discussing the things we heard during the sermon and we soon began to see more clearly the mission of the church and the role that families have as part of that church, not as the center of the church.

…

I would like to add just a couple more things that have bothered me about the FIC model of church.
The first is that there tends to be a penchant for doctrinal goofiness, that is, a blending together of some of the teachings that are orthodox with ideas that came from ancient pagan cultures rather than from the Word of God.

One of the greatest areas where this has happened has been in the obsession with the gender issue. Fertility, the promotion of militant fecundity, the concept that dad is the prophet, priest, and king of the home, all have their roots in the pagan Greek and Roman cultures. The modern spin that is put on these subjects and how Scripture is twisted in order to embrace them and teach them as part of the “grand sweep of revelation” today is really quite frightening when you realize that they are taught to be doctrines as orthodox as the trinity or the virgin birth of Christ.

Another area that I see within some FIC church models is the emphasis on the Old Testament as the standard for life rather than realizing that the coming of Jesus brought with it a new covenant and all that that entails… . Finally, one other concern I have is that the family integrated church model, with its long list of requirements for “biblical family life” incites, in its us against them mentality, the temptation for families to compare themselves among themselves rather than enjoying the family that God has given to them and trusting that the Lord, in His timing, is working in the lives of every mom, dad, brother, and sister.

The paradigm that they have established leaves no room for personal convictions of young people in the areas of courtship, dating, college, etc. and many are forced to conform to ideals they don’t believe.

The problem with trying to point out a particular boogeyman in a denomination or movement is that those issues can be pointed out in every kind of church on the planet.

They are the same kinds of objections as I hear about homeschooling- the kids will be shy, or lacking in social skills, or they won’t be well educated. Well let’s think about this- how many shy, unsocialized, or uneducated kids graduate from public and private schools every day? But no one cared about socialization until people started homeschooling, and then good night nurse- everyone is suddenly concerned with socialization.

Doctrinal issues are a problem in every church- legalism, demagoguery, manipulation, and flat out heresy. FIC churches aren’t more prone to problems than any other church. Which is why I said earlier that the problem is US, not the FIC or IFB or BBI or BJU.

Are the ideas the FIM propose status quo ante? I would agree that they are- but is that a bad thing?

[Susan R] The problem with trying to point out a particular boogeyman in a denomination or movement is that those issues can be pointed out in every kind of church on the planet.

Not really. Not at all. Regardless of whether the accusations are true or false, they seem pretty specific to this type of church.

1. Singles feel unwelcome - definitely doesn’t fit any accusation of other types of churches I’ve ever heard

2. Pagan fertility ideas - kind of caught me off guard, but I definitely haven’t heard that before

3. Patriarchy (father as prophet, priest) - definitely haven’t heard that charge often

4. cater specifically to homeschoolers - pretty unique!

So, at least a few of the alleged problems with the FIC movement are quite specific to that movement and derive directly from their professed principles. One might think that the issues are incorrectly framed, or even that some things adduced as negatives are actually positives. I don’t think, though, that it’s reasonable to suggest that FIC churches can simply say tu quoque and reflect criticism.

[Charlie]

[Susan R] The problem with trying to point out a particular boogeyman in a denomination or movement is that those issues can be pointed out in every kind of church on the planet.

Not really. Not at all. Regardless of whether the accusations are true or false, they seem pretty specific to this type of church.

1. Singles feel unwelcome - definitely doesn’t fit any accusation of other types of churches I’ve ever heard

2. Pagan fertility ideas - kind of caught me off guard, but I definitely haven’t heard that before

3. Patriarchy (father as prophet, priest) - definitely haven’t heard that charge often

4. cater specifically to homeschoolers - pretty unique!

The problem with many of these criticisms is that is hard to figure out who they are leveled against- Doug Phillips? All NCFIC churches? The FIC model itself?

Then one has to ask- are these accusation even true? And if they are, are they really specific to the NCFIC, or the FIC model? Am I to believe that singles are embraced by the general membership in a heavily segregated church?

Anecdotal, but since anecdotes are being used as evidence here, I’m going for it. I have visited a few FIC and FIC-type over the years (2 did not call themselves FIC, it was just their dynamic), and I have some friends who currently attend a FI church, but it not a ‘member’ of the NCFIC. This church, and this family in particular, go out of their way to include singles, and there are plenty who attend, mostly from local colleges and universities. The church body has undertaken on more than one occasion for single parents and widows. They don’t have any weird ideas about fertility- as far as they are concerned that is private and not appropriate for a church body to get involved in each other’s bedrooms. There is no patriarchal element in the ‘father-prophet-priest’ sense. And while most of the families that attend are homeschoolers, it’s the result of ‘birds of a feather’ and not at all intentional. And when I asked them what they thought about Doug Phillips, they said “Who?”

The church we visit now has Sunday School classes in the morning, but otherwise, everyone, kids included, are together (kids’ clubs and YG take place before church on Wed. nights). The church offers a small ACE school, but many families homeschool and some use the public schools. I would say they probably would affirm many of the beliefs of the NCFIC (from what I’ve read of it) but they were organized in this way long before FIC became headlines in IFBdom. I have seen no ostracizing of singles whatsoever. They appear to be a very active element in this church. And only a few people in the church have ever heard of the FIC movement, and one family gets the Vision Forum catalog but has no clue what Doug Phillips believes, any more than I know what the management at Walmart or Target believes when I shop there.

I think most of the criticisms leveled against FI churches are imagined out of thin air, wildly exaggerated, or true of a very, very few. I think we should be careful about bearing false witness against our brothers in Christ, or assigning thoughts and motives when we do not have that kind of access. If there is a serious doctrinal problem with a church meeting together and not separating into classes or special programs, then fine- I’d be glad to hear the Biblical basis for those objections. If there is a serious doctrinal issue with the NCFIC in particular, then by all means- point those out. But trying to generalize about the FI ‘model’ is like generalizing about Fundamentalist churches, and we’ve all been there a thousand times. It’s just not fruitful and doesn’t really address anything.

people just have to be very careful of what church they are getting into. No one here is claiming that all fic churches are this way, not even thatmom, who wrote as quoted above: “While this organization [NIFIC] does not represent all those who wish to follow a family-integrated approach to church life, they certainly have had tremendous influence through their conferences and publications.” I’m not sure i’d even say that the church you visit now is fic, fully. it has separate, age-segregated programs for children, even though all are together during the main services.

For major theological errors to watch out for, here are a few thatmom listed/observed:

One of the greatest areas where this has happened has been in the obsession with the gender issue. Fertility, the promotion of militant fecundity, the concept that dad is the prophet, priest, and king of the home, all have their roots in the pagan Greek and Roman cultures. The modern spin that is put on these subjects and how Scripture is twisted in order to embrace them and teach them as part of the “grand sweep of revelation” today is really quite frightening when you realize that they are taught to be doctrines as orthodox as the trinity or the virgin birth of Christ.

Another area that I see within some FIC church models is the emphasis on the Old Testament as the standard for life rather than realizing that the coming of Jesus brought with it a new covenant and all that that entails… . Finally, one other concern I have is that the family integrated church model, with its long list of requirements for “biblical family life” incites, in its us against them mentality, the temptation for families to compare themselves among themselves rather than enjoying the family that God has given to them and trusting that the Lord, in His timing, is working in the lives of every mom, dad, brother, and sister.

The paradigm that they have established leaves no room for personal convictions of young people in the areas of courtship, dating, college, etc. and many are forced to conform to ideals they don’t believe.

I agree that not all these are limited to ncfic/fic churches, but a most probably are.

Susan, I welcome your anecdotes as just as valid as any others. However, they may not be as relevant to this particular discussion. The conversations seems to be addressing not simply churches that integrate families (an innocuous thing in my opinion), but churches that self-identify with the FIC movement, including the popular figures and organizations. Now, maybe that distinction has not been sufficiently drawn so far. I for one would like to draw it, since I see quite a large difference between a church that self-consciously attaches itself to a recognizable movement and a church that happens to implement a certain approach toward age-segregation/family.

So, in my case, I would not take your main example as an FIC church, but merely as a church that integrates families. In terms of examples, I am interested in churches that are members of NCFIC and consciously embrace the teachings of Doug Phillips and others promoted by NCFIC.

So, how about an anecdote from me? When I was in college, I had several close friends who wanted to go in the FIC direction. They found a church in Greenville and attended for a while. An awkward situation arose. One of my friends was a single female with no father figure in her life. Now, that church took fatherly headship very seriously and also viewed the church as “a family of families” (a common FIC term). So, they told her she had two options: come under the surrogate headship of the pastor or be “adopted” by one of the families. In any case, she could not just be an autonomous woman. A woman always needs to be under headship.

I have had other friends who had similar experiences, but that one stands out to me since I was there at the time it happened. So, I don’t think that the majority of accusations against FIC churches are made up out of thin air. In fact, I think most of them can be factually established just by reading the literature of FIC proponents. Thus, certain (potentially) objectionable features are not just evidenced by radical zealots, but are actually part of the mainstream of the movement. But, to pull this around full circle, I have no problem with churches that integrate families. I think that when family integration becomes a defining feature of the church, something central to its identity, deleterious consequences often follow.

What really concerned me about the FIC movement was after watching that film “Divided” which had some Vision Forum people and other organizations that are calling out all churches with Sunday Schools and Youth Groups as unbiblical and borrowing from pagan ideas. This sets them up as the elite who get it right as opposed to the entire rest of the body of Christ who are duped by Satan. http://www.reformingbaptist.blogspot.com/2012/01/fic-film-identifies-pr… From my blog post that I followed up on after this one, I wrote some difficulties that I have specifically with things mentioned in their video:

1. The structure of age segregated classes is the fundamental problem - I think this is an absurd diagnosis. It may aid the problem, but it is not fundamentally the problem. The kinds of churches that they caught on film with the crazy punk youth groups have a problem - age segregated classes are not it!!! Their # 1 problem is their watered down theology and watered down, false gospel of easy believism that they are being taught regularly. The problem doesn’t go back to the institution of the Sunday School, the problem goes back to the false gospel of Charles Finney that breeds every kind of rotten means to lure people to make an unregenerate decision to become a false convert! Most of these FIC churches are Reformed people and they should know this! But it’s easier to trash something tangible and concrete (youth groups and age segregated classes) than it is to trash ideas in the abstract (Palagianism, Finneyism, Arminianism). You can see with your own eyes if your church has a youth group, but if you’re not theologically savvy, you can’t see if your church is preaching Palagianism. Even though the film doesn’t advocate for people to leave their churches if their churches have a youth group, they certainly leave that door wide open by introducing the Family Integrated Church as the other option. I see right through this as a divisive way to siphon off discontent people from these churches to make theirs grow. I have to give Paul Washer credit however for answering a guy who asked: “What should I do in my church if I do these things that I know are right? They’ll kill me!” Washer answered: “Then Die.”

2. That age segregated classes is part of a Satanic conspiratorial design starting with Plato and moving all the way through time to the modern educational system championed by John Dewey. I don’t doubt that there may be a direct connection between Platonic philosophy and the Atheistic educational philosophy of the modern education system. But trying to make that connection to the church as if churches adopted evolutionary theory as a part of educating our kids is a stretch. Do you really think you’re going to be able to put a 1rst Grade who is still learning his numbers in the same class with a 12th Grade Senior Calculus student? That’s ridiculous. But this is what the FIC churches do when they make a third grader sit in a sermon where the pastor is doing an exegesis of scripture and the kid doesn’t even have his vocabulary developed yet! That kid needs the milk of the Word dispensed to him in portions he can swallow! This is why we have the kids stay with us during the singing, offering, etc..to participate, and then dismiss them for teaching that is on a level they can understand. If you want to call that a pagan philosophy, then….I’ll just bite my lip.

If age graded classes and youth groups are responsible for destroying families, and they have been the problem for over 200 years in the church, then why are we only now in this generation having a problem with kids leaving the faith in droves? I really think that attacking the form instead of the substance of the church is naive. This logic is the same as looking at the fracturing of the African American family in modern times and pointing back to the abolishment of slavery as the cause! You could argue that Black families were whole back then! They had a dad and mom in the home back in the Antebellum south! Logically, the FIC calling for the abolishment of youth groups is like calling for slavery again as a social structure to put Black families back together.

3. The historic timeline of educational philosophy that is shown in the film is THE leaven that must be purged out of the church. First of all, in that time line there were huge gaps like 1,700 year gaps!
This reminds me of the arguments by the KJV Only movement who string together a list of less than credible people who had their hands on the manuscript evidence and make the case that ALL Bibles translated from these texts are corrupt and the only alternative is the King James Bible (nevermind the corrupt people who had their hands in that manuscript family…but I digress.)

4. They portray the modern youth group culture as the only way that it can be done as opposed to the FIC model which is a false dichotomy and is ironically divisive! Is it utterly impossible for parents to disciple their kids at home if their kid is in a Sunday School class for one hour a week? C’mon! Get real! If dads are not discipling their kids, it’s not the youth ministry’s fault, it’s the fault of the father for not manning up. I agree that the blame can be shared with the church that does not teach the parent to do this. But that is a substance problem not a structure problem. You could hash everyone together in the same room every Sunday and still have ungodly homes if the substance being given is as weak as Willow Creek!

So, in conclusion…I am not against my friends and fellow pastors who want to structure their churches this way. I wouldn’t break fellowship over it, but I just think that it is an unnecessary movement that only further fractures the church. Mark my words, the FIC churches will end up becoming their own kind of denomination and they will see themselves as the elite in Christianity and as soon as they do, their pride will kill whatever good they’re trying to accomplish. I have seen this in the IFB movement and this kind of elitism is a real temptation for whatever group that thinks they have found the silver bullet.

This may serve of no interest to anyone at all, but in the interest of being up front, I am a member of Hope Baptist Church in Wake Forest, NC. One of the elders at the church is Scott Brown, the current Director of the NCFIC. We are a confessional church that uses the Second London Baptist Confession as our doctrinal statement. We are also, as you might imagine, a family integrated church.

As has been mentioned in this thread, one of the problems with a discussions like this is that many issues are anecdotal and therefore difficult to deal with in a faithful way. Additionally, there are many different churches that call themselves family integrated that may have nothing to do with any deliberate movement or organization. The NCFIC on the other hand is an actual organization, has a web site with an active blog, frequently asked questions page, and, something which is quite useful for a serious discussion about church doctrine, http://www.ncfic.org/confession] a confession relating specifically to church and family.

I would encourage anyone who is interested in discussing this, to visit the confession linked above and to use that as a basis for critiquing the movement as it is associated with the NCFIC. I would also recommend Scott Brown’s book, https://www.ncfic.org/a-weed] “A Weed in the Church” , as it deals with these issues in much greater depth than the movie Divided.