A little over a month ago I posted a blog article entitled Answering Scott Brown’s Challenge Concerning Age Segregated Education. In that article I challenged Scott Brown, the director of the National Center for Family-Integrated Churches (NCFIC) and a major advocate of the Family Integrated Church Movement (FICM), either to show that my arguments for age segregated instruction in the churches clearly are not Biblical or to revise his statements asserting that such a Biblical case has not or could not be made. As the blog’s readers no doubt know, over a year ago I had written a three part series offering a Biblical defense of age segregated instruction in the churches and, as I noted in the aforementioned article, I had let Brown know about my own series in a comment on his blog. Then, when I posted last month’s article, I even sent him an email message via his church’s website, to which I have received no response. In addition, on August 23 I posted the following message on the NCFIC Facebook page:
Scott Brown has publicly asserted that he has never seen a Biblical case for the use of age segregated instruction in the churches, but I wrote a series of blog articles over a year ago presenting such a case. I have invited Scott Brown to respond here: http://reformedbaptist.blogspot.com/2014/08/answering-scott-browns-challenge.html [This note is visible if you scroll down the page and look on the left-hand side in the “Posts to Page” section. By the way, the only “Like” it received was from my wife.]
I also received no response to this Facebook posting. So, now I am writing a second blog article to call upon Scott Brown to defend his arguments. As I see it, if he is going to publicly say things like, “I have yet to hear a biblical case for age segregation. Why? Because it does not exist in Scripture” (here), or things like, “After many years, I have never seen a credible exegetical argument FOR age segregation. I have heard dozens of arguments for age segregation that are not based upon the Bible, but none that are grounded upon the Bible” (here), then it behooves him to back it up when challenged. This is especially so since his organization currently has this statement in Article XI of its Biblical Confession For Uniting Church And Family:
We affirm that there is no scriptural pattern for comprehensive age segregated discipleship, and that age segregated practices are based on unbiblical, evolutionary and secular thinking which have invaded the church ….
These are the kinds of accusations that Scott Brown and other FICM advocates have leveled at the rest of us for years — even those of us in Reformed Baptist circles — simply because we may have age segregated Sunday school classes in our churches. They have essentially accused us all of having given up faithfulness to Scripture in favor of “evolutionary and secular thinking.” So, as I see it, since such extreme and unfair accusations regarding age segregated education are present in the foundational document of Brown’s organization, and since he has apparently based such accusations upon the assumption that there is no Biblical case to be made for such a practice, he has an obligation to respond to someone who has publicly challenged his assertions. Yet, unless I have missed it while doing numerous internet searches, no such response has been made. Will he respond? Will anyone of note in this movement respond? I guess we will have to wait and see. In the meantime, I guess I will also have to get used to the sound of crickets chirping.