CongreGate

Today we are discussing a couple of the current Supreme Court cases regarding religious liberty and how they affect you. Why are both the Trinity Lutheran Church Supreme Court case and the case regarding Masterpiece Cake Shop important to the average Christian?

We spend some time discussing the First Amendment and free exercise of religion, and a quick history of the Blaine Amendment. The First Amendment includes free exercise of religion, but it isn't freedom from religion.

We also discuss the Masterpiece Cake Shop case. The owner, Jack Phillips, never refused to sell baked goods to the gay couple, but because of his faith, refused to use his design skills to create a unique cake celebrating a gay marriage. This is not a case about discrimination, but another case about the free exercise of religion.

Can Christians keep their beliefs private and keep them out of the public sphere as many would have us do? We don't think so. How can we share our beliefs publicly with gentleness and respect?

1 Pet. 3:15-16 - "but in your hearts honor Christ the Lord as Holy, always being prepared to make a defense to anyone who asks you for a reason for the hope that is in you, yet do it with gentleness and respect, having a good conscience, so that, when you are slandered those who revile your good behavior in Christ may be put to shame."

Happy Independence Day! Today we chat about Independence Day celebrations and early American history.

Shawn recommends The Vanishing American Adulthood by Ben Sasse, the senator from Nebraska. Sasse shares some alarming statistics about how little American adults know about our country's history. We also quiz each other on some American history facts. Do you know the answers?

We share some ideas about how to celebrate Independence day with your family. Our families like to read from historical documents and patriotic poems, such as Paul Revere's Ride.

Finally, we share a couple of entertaining fireworks stories and Independence Day memories. Want to find out what happens when you set off a "sparkler bomb" in the vicinity of a former Navy Seal?

How are you celebrating Independence Day with your family? Are your kids learning the true significance of this holiday through your traditions? We'd love to hear your ideas!

Are you managing your time wisely? American culture seems to celebrate busyness, but is this really healthy? Today we chat about time management, stewardship, and some techniques we use to manage our own time well.

We talk about getting up early to use the quiet morning time wisely. Shawn makes the case that good time management starts with a good night's sleep and a regular morning routine. We recommend a few books that we have found to be helpful in creating routines and priorities.

We also talk about planning ahead, for the year, for the month, and for the week. We each have regular habits and routines (family dinner, for example) that are the priorities. Then we talk and pray about other opportunities and choose the best things. We like to do the hard things first. We also highly encourage you to put your phone down and consume less media.

Finally, Micah talks about creating flexibility for meeting other people's needs. We have a tendency to make all of our decisions about ourselves, but our time is not our own. As believers, we need to be available to serve other people as needs and opportunities arise.

Today's episode is about raising our children to be best friends. How can we help our children to value their sibling relationships and continue as friends into adulthood? Mark & Micah talk about how the Fox family worked to promote good sibling relationships and how that has carried over to their current relationships now that they are all adults.

Mark says spending time together is key to developing good relationships among siblings. The Fox family made the effort to play games together, read together, work together, and spend time just talking...even when the children were less than enthusiastic about it. They made an effort to guard evening time and limit outside activities so that the family could eat dinner together regularly.

As parents, we can help build good relationships among our children by planning intentional family time, but we also need to be careful about how we talk to the children about each other. We may be unintentionally fueling competition and comparison by pointing out their strengths and weaknesses to each other.

We also talk about how we can encourage the older kids to develop discipleship relationships with their younger siblings. When older children are willing to teach and give advice to younger children, the younger children feel loved by them and will continue to go to them for counsel.

Finally, we encourage you to make it a habit of praying for your children to love each other.

Do you have any other ideas or stories of things that have helped you to raise children to be best friends? We'd would love to hear them!

We open with a chat about Father's day and couple of funny kid moments.

Our main topic of discussion today is encouraging our wives to use their gifts. Most of the women in our church have chosen to stay home, spending the majority of their time raising their children. But many of our wives have other gifts from the Lord that they can use in ministry or business to bring glory to Him and to build up the body.

We have friends that teach dance at a local Christian arts studio. Other ladies spend time teaching at homeschool co-ops and organizing homeschool events. Some of our wives have creative sewing, decorating, homemaking, and DIY skills that they use in ministry or business. And others educate and encourage healthy living & fitness. All of these can be used for the glory of God.

We want to encourage our wives in their primary roles as wives and mothers, while also encouraging their them to use their gifts in other ways outside the home, as time allows. We talk about how to balance primary and secondary activities, both in our lives and for our wives.

We would love to hear how you encourage your wife to use her gifts (or how your husband encourages you, if you are a wife) and what those gifts are!

School is out here in North Carolina and it's time for summer vacation! Today we chat about building memories through family vacations.

Mark and Micah share some of their annual family beach trip traditions. What started out as a single family vacation has grown into a large event with all of the kids, their spouses, and children enjoying the beach together. Some of their favorite family memories are crab hunting at night, question nights, games & movies, and family devotions.

We also talk about some of the reasons we put off taking vacations. Financial issues can be one reason families don't vacation, so we share some ideas about how to make vacation work when finances are tight. We also talk about how visiting extended family isn't necessarily restful, so it's important to have vacation time set aside in addition to visiting relatives.

Rest is a spiritual discipline. The Old Testament feasts and festivals teach a pattern of rest and rejuvenation. Whether you can afford a traditional vacation or just take time at home to disconnect and rest as a family, your family will benefit from that rest.

This week we are answering a listener question about age-integrated church.

He says, "I'm intrigued by this age-integrated church idea. Our church has lots of programs and sometimes I wonder if we are losing community because of it. How about a follow-up program where the Professor summarizes his book...?"

We start by sharing our church backgrounds and talk about how we ended up in a church that promotes family-integrated worship. Then we share our observations about the benefits of age-integrated worship.

We view our children as participants in worship, rather than as distractions. We consider them part of the body of Christ and able to serve in ministry with their families. We train children to become men and women and include our teens in the men's and women's ministry events.

We teach that parents should continue to be the primary disciplers of their children, but that doesn't mean that we don't have other programs and meetings to disciple church members and develop community. We have regular family & community events, as well as ministry meetings for men and women and age-integrated small groups. We do have targeted programs for a season, as the Lord leads, to meet the needs of the body, including Bible studies for specific age groups.

The fruit of decades of age-integrated church is that the majority of our young people are not leaving the faith, in contrast to the church in general. Many continue to worship and serve at the church. There are several multigenerational families that attend and worship at our church together. Others have grown up and been sent out to serve in various ministries and communities around the world.

We end with some recommendations for books and websites if you would like to further explore the idea of age-integrated church.

This week, we discuss managing your family's tech habits. As smartphone use has grown in the past few years, more and more families are fighting the negative effects of technology on their time. While computers and smartphones are valuable in many ways, we need to make sure we are modeling healthy tech habits to our children.

We share a couple of extreme phone addiction cases, as well as some of our personal habits and struggles. We each use apps & tools that help us organize our lives. But there is always a danger in good things becoming idols. How can we balance smartphone use and guard against our phones becoming an idol? We have a few practical suggestions.

Mark talks about the students in his college classroom and some of their tech habits. He requires students to keep their devices put away and asks them to take notes on paper. Many of the students find that they learn more from writing notes and listening without distraction.

We also recommend a few books we've been reading that address the topic of personal and family tech habits. If you have any phone stories or tips for managing your family's tech habits, we'd love to hear to hear them!

Today we tell the story of Antioch Community Church, and it's 30 years of healthy church growth. As a church, we just celebrated our 30 year anniversary.

We chat about how the church began and how God used circumstances early on to shape the church into what it is now. Mark and the original elders didn't set out to build an age-integrated church. We talk about how God brought about that change in thinking. Circumstances required that we include children in the service, but we continued doing it after we saw the benefits. It wasn't until a few years later, Mark realized that "family-integrated" churches were growing across the country.

Micah talks about why he moved back to be a part of the church after college. We have several families with 3 or more generations. Children that were raised in the church, have followed Christ and continue to stay and serve with their growing families. This is uncommon. What draws many of the young people to stay and be a part of the church?

We also talk about some of the challenges that our church has faced in the past 30 years, including disagreements in the church and situations where families left.

We are thankful that God has blessed Antioch with 30 years of healthy church growth and we look forward to what the Lord will do in the future!

Today we are talking about some of the challenges blended families face. Though none of us come from blended family situations, we do shepherd blended families in our congregation. With over one-third of marriages now resulting in blended families, the church needs to be involved in encouraging and ministering to these families. We discuss how we can better love and minister to blended families in our church.

Blended families face many of the same challenges that traditional families face, but often with the added challenges of parenting step-children and complicated expectations. As in any marriage, regular prayer and communication are vital to a thriving blended family marriage.

In a blended family, it can be tempting to have a child-centered marriage, but it is important to make a unified marriage the priority, while still pursuing the hearts of your children and step-children.

As a church, we can help to support the blended families by including them and recognizing that they may face additional struggles in their family dynamics. Children may be living in different homes at different times of the year. We can reach out to these children and include them when they are attending our churches. Parents may be struggling when their children are living with another parent. We can sympathize and encourage them through these circumstances.