Importance of Humility
The Lord has given us a 5th child, due to be born any day now. He will be our first son (after 4 girls). We thank God for him and pray that he will have a brother one day.
We have gone to several family integrated churches since the last update. We had left the previous church where we though a ministry opportunity would exist when that didn’t materialize and the people did not seem to be on board with family integration at all. We had gone back to a small baptist church of <25 people that was great, they were believers in sovereign grace, they were loving and compassionate, but as we found out, they were family integrated by circumstance and not by choice. They were looking for a new building and wanted children to be given their own class instead of keeping them with their parents. We were told one Sunday that our kids were a distraction. While they were moving around a bit, it was also 1:30 and they’re hyper. They were diciplined and calmed down.
Someone in the church complained about them and we were told that we needed to get them to sit still. While it was done ‘in love’, it made us realize that family integration does sometimes cause distractions, but it shouldn’t mean that every time an incident happens that there should be chastisement for it. Training children takes time, patience, and yes, a little distraction at times. As much as we hated to leave the church and hop once again, my wife and I thought it wasn’t best for our family to stay at a church that wasn’t truly welcoming of having children in the service.
We have made a church 85 miles away (one way) our home church. It is pastored by someone we knew from our non family integration days. He has 7 children and we share a lot of the same beliefs. While we do differ and the church is dispensationalist, it is nice to be around other large families and not be the odd man out. They understand that sometimes training children is noisy and are supportive of us and other families with young children.
It is refreshing being able to talk to a pastor that ‘is on your side’. He realizes that we all make mistakes and we all don’t know it all. He is humble enough to talk to others in the church about beliefs and realizes that we’ll all on a spiritual journey and we can all learn from each other and discuss beliefs with an open mind. Even though we can only go once every several weeks to church, it has been good for the kids to have somewhere they can play at after lunch and to see how the other children behave properly. We feel even with differences of opinion in religious beliefs and differences in discipline that we are still welcome as brothers and sisters in Christ.
Increasing in Him,
Paul
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