This is a message I gave last year, during our roadtrip across the United States. Often family-integrated churches misconstrue the reasons we worship together as families in the first place. These misunderstandings lead to what I call “infections” in family-integrated churches.

In some family-integrated churches, the family becomes the center of the church. That is never what the center of any church should be. Sometimes evangelism to neighbors, the broader community, and the rest of the world is compromised. Sometimes older men and women don’t fulfill their God-given responsibility to disciple youth in the church. All of these are examples of infections in family-integrated churches — blemishes that ought to be purged from our local churches.

It’s not just family-integrated churches that are subject to infections. In fact, you could argue that modern age segregation is an infection in the Church at large today. In Ephesians 5, we learn that Christ is sanctifying and washing His bride, the Church, by the washing of water by the Word. We will always live in imperfect churches that are being sanctified by our Lord, and we have a responsibility to purge the blemishes we see in her from the Word of God.