You can read or hear me read that here.

For your typical church-going family today, the idea of having children in the worship service is pretty off-putting. And it’s understandable because your typical church-going kid today is pretty undisciplined. So to be clear, there are two ditches to avoid. The first is the ditch of no kids in the worship service. The other ditch is a disordered worship service where kids take over.

What we want is a church that helps families commit to the journey of raising well-disciplined, respectful, joyful, worshipping children. That’s the goal. The goal isn’t just obedience, but joyful obedience. The goal isn’t just having children who sit still – it’s having children actively join in with the worship of the church. It’s a challenge, but it’s a challenge worth facing. It requires work, but it’s work that’s worth doing.

Before we talk about that work, let me introduce another distinction I want to make. A distinction between comparing ourselves with others, and simply being willing to learn from others. It is unhelpful to compare ourselves amongst ourselves (2 Corinthians 10:12), but it is very helpful to look at others who are doing better than we are, and humbly learn from them.

What I mean is this: we must not compare, say, our ill-disciplined children with the little puritans over there on the other side of the sanctuary. That’s a recipe for discouragement in you as a parent, and in your kids when they realise you prefer someone else’s kids to them. Comparison will cause you to retreat and get defensive. But just because we don’t compare ourselves with the family who are doing it better than us doesn’t mean we shouldn’t actively try and learn from that family. Rather than retreat, this gets us to lean in and learn. Is that father doing a better job of raising disciplined children than you? Don’t fall for the comparison/insecurity trap, but do try and learn from him. Is that mother ensuring her children are always well presented, hair brushed, faces not covered in two-hour-old breakfast, whereas yours look like they just came in from a faithful reenactment of Lord of The Flies? Don’t compare, but you do need to learn. This is our duty as parents. Are their kids singing in worship but yours just want to escape? Find out how they’re doing it. Don’t compare, but be willing to learn.

The right kind of comparison should then occur a little while down the line. Not between your family and theirs, but between your family now, and your family six months ago. If you’re willing to learn, willing to listen, willing to take advice and apply it, you will see incredible progress.

And so, for what it’s worth, here’s my two cents on some key things we need to do in order to help prepare our children for Lord’s Day worship.

Using the analogy of diet and exercise, something I know a tremendous amount about, we can understand that to grow in health, we need to do three things: We need to stop consuming stuff that hinders us; we need to start consuming things that strengthen us; and we need to train our bodies by putting it into practice day by day.

First, we need to stop consuming stuff that hinders us. With diet, this means the junk food. It means the stuff that might well taste delicious, but is not feeding you. Not really. How does this translate to preparing our children for worship? Put it this way: if you expect your kids to be able to sit down and eat a roast dinner with family on the Lord’s Day, with all the attendant vegetables and trimmings, but have fed them fast food and chocolate all week, you’re going to have a problem. They’re not going to want to eat the veg. They’re going to be asking for ketchup with their roast beef. And no one wants that to be a thing. We have to stop feeding our kids the kind of content and entertainment that wires them in a way such that they find the Sunday service indigestible. If they have been feeding on the kinds of attention-span dulling forms of content and entertainment that is so ubiquitous now, if they are watching lots of TV, playing video games, if they are on tablets or phones – they’re not going to easily enjoy the richness of Lord’s Day worship. They won’t eat the roast beef because all they want is chicken nuggets.

Second, and this follows from the first point, we need to start giving our kids the kind of content that really feeds them and trains their appetites to appreciate and enjoy more complex activities. We need to retrain their tastebuds, away from Disney Plus and onto good books. Replace screen time with reading time, both individually and together as a family. Replace video games, played in isolation, with family games played together at the kitchen table. Get out and do physical activities with your kids – go for walks, play football in the garden. Start creating opportunities for them to accomplish rewarding tasks in the real world. Teach them to cook, to mow the lawn, to fix the car, to build the furniture, to make money, to serve someone else in the church. This will build their self-worth and identity far more than beating the video game will. Get rid of Disney Plus and subscribe instead to Canon Plus. Establish family worship habits. Read the Bible together, pray together, sing the songs of the church together. And that takes us to our third point.

Third, we need to not just have the right diet, we also need to exercise. We need to practice what it is we want to be good at. If you don’t have a culture of respect and good manners at the dinner table, you can’t expect the children to display respect and good manners in the congregation. If you don’t read whole chapters of Scripture together as a family from time to time, the kids will find that part of the service really hard. If you never pray together, then that too will be five to seven minutes of time in the service that they’re just getting through. You won’t have children who are able to sit through a service and join in with a service if you don’t train the habits at home.

Christians today have become frogs in slowly boiling water. The water is the culture that says family worship is weird, that says on the one hand that children are a mere lifestyle choice, and on the other hand that everything should revolve around children. Both are errors and both are in the water. And you add them together and you get churches that see kids as a distraction, and that simultaneously create enormous programmes for them but that don’t actually disciple them very well. It is the prevailing culture today that is an aberration to the way God intended family life and worship to be. It is not the Christian family that prays, sings, and reads the Bible together that is weird. It is the Christian family that watches and does everything the world does, and then prays for 30 seconds at bedtime and thinks that’s Christianity. Don’t be coolshamed. Pray with your kids, sing with your kids, read the Bible with your kids, and then bring them to church and enjoy the Lord’s Day together with glad and thankful hearts.

It takes work, but the best views are at the top of the highest hills.

You see, as a church, we have all the children, of all ages, in the Lord’s Day worship service with their families. And I want to explain the why behind that, and I hope, some of the benefits of this decision.

First of all, the why. Why do we have children of all ages with us in the Lord’s Day worship service?

To begin with, and I’ll do more on this soon, the worship service is more than just an encouraging community event for Christians. I used to think that the worship service was perhaps primarily about teaching Christians the Bible, or primarily about reaching non-Christians with the gospel. For sure, both of those things are good things and they both tend to be the results of a good worship service, but they are not the primary, foundational reason, purpose, or design of the worship service.

The worship service is covenant renewal. Again, I’ll do more on this soon, but let me give you a metaphor just to explain what it is this means. Take a married couple. There is a moment in time when they got married. The entered into a life-long covenant with each other in the presence of God and man. Now, the husband and wife consummate the marriage in the marriage bed. And every time they go to the marriage bed for marital intimacy, it is a kind of covenant renewal. Without the sex, they are still married, but they are weakened as a married couple. The sex strengthens their bond because it is a means by which their covenant with one another is renewed and strengthened.

Similarly, many Christians can point back to a moment or time in life when they became a Christian. They entered into covenant with God through faith in Christ. Now, the Lord’s Day worship service is the Christian’s covenant renewal. It is when the covenant bond is renewed, strengthened, and fed.

Now, how does this apply to children in the Lord’s Day worship service?

First of all, we believe that the children of believing parents are in a sense, holy (1 Corinthians 7:14). To baptise a child is to bring them into covenant with God. So, every child of believing parents who has been baptised has been brought into the covenant in an objective, legal, as it were, sense. We believe that children can and should be members of the covenant. In a real organic relationship with God.

Now, with that in mind, listen to what Jesus says about children in Mark 10:13-16. It says,

13 And they were bringing children to him that he might touch them, and the disciples rebuked them. 14 But when Jesus saw it, he was indignant and said to them, “Let the children come to me; do not hinder them, for to such belongs the kingdom of God. 15 Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it.” 16 And he took them in his arms and blessed them, laying his hands on them.

First of all, note that Jesus was indignant, He was really angry about the children being kept from Him. These children were infants as it says in Luke’s parallel account (Luke 18:15). He says that the Kingdom of God belongs to such as these. In other words, the Kingdom of God belongs to those who have a childlike faith.

So He welcomes them, He says that they are capable of receiving the kind of faith that is able to inherit the Kingdom, and He blesses them. This all is an argument for infant baptism.

Now, hearing this, many would say, sure, but that’s why we have a children’s programme that runs parallel to the worship service. The children go into that and they can come to Jesus in their own child-like way. But I want to suggest that this is really the product of our modern culture, and not biblical thinking.

Let’s see what the Bible says about what should happen when the people gather together for covenant renewal.

First of all, Deuteronomy 31:12–13, “12 Assemble the people, men, women, and little ones, and the sojourner within your towns, that they may hear and learn to fear the Lord your God, and be careful to do all the words of this law, 13 and that their children, who have not known it, may hear and learn to fear the Lord your God, as long as you live in the land that you are going over the Jordan to possess.”” Note what it says: bring the ‘little ones’ (12) and the children (13), so that they ‘may hear and learn to fear the Lord your God.’ This is one of the purposes of bringing the whole family together in the worship service. Children are then learning from day one what it means to fear the Lord. They see the older children and the grown ups, and they learn by imitating. They see how seriously Dad takes the covenant renewal steps of responding to the call to worship, how he sings, how he kneels in confession for his sin, how he listens and submits to the authority of the pastor in the sermon, how he participates with sober-mindedness in the Lord’s Supper, how he raises his hands in the doxology… all of this is teaching the child.

Now look at Joshua 8:35, “35 There was not a word of all that Moses commanded that Joshua did not read before all the assembly of Israel, and the women, and the little ones, and the sojourners who lived among them.” What I want you to see here is that Joshua read everything that Moses had commanded. He was giving the congregation the whole counsel of God’s Word. And it says that there were present in the congregation the little ones. So the little children were hearing, alongside their parents all the Mosaic law. Including the weird and nasty stuff we don’t know what to do with today (by the way, the only reason we don’t know what to do with it is because we haven’t studied it properly). There’s a real practical benefit to this. Your children will learn in the context of the church about the kinds of things the world can’t wait to teach them in a wrongful and corrupting way. They will learn about the concept of adultery. They will learn about it one way or another. If they learn about it in isolation from the church, in isolation from parents, let’s say, in school or with friends, or from a family situation, then they are almost certainly going to learn about it in a warped and deficient way. How much better to learn about the concept in a godly environment, where the subject should be treated with sensitivity and care, where parents have heard what their children of heard, so they can then follow up at home. This is how children are discipled. I am confident that for the most part, children in the kids’ programme next door while the sermon’s happening in the sanctuary are not going to discuss these sorts of things. Therefore, they aren’t learning the godly view on these things when they’re young and when they are establishing firmly held convictions.

Now Joel 2:15–16, “15 Blow the trumpet in Zion; consecrate a fast; call a solemn assembly; 16 gather the people. Consecrate the congregation; assemble the elders; gather the children, even nursing infants. Let the bridegroom leave his room, and the bride her chamber.” Here are the assembled people of God; and the children, right down to the nursing infants, are together in covenant renewal worship before the Lord. They are involved in, participating in, connected to, the covenant renewal that is taking place in the worshipping community.

In the New Testament, we can see in Ephesians 6:1 that Paul commands that children are to obey their parents in the Lord. The children were a part of the assembly who heard this letter. They were in the worshipping community, sat with mum and dad, participating in the life of the church alongside everyone else.

So I think we have, just basically there a strong biblical rationale for having our children with us in the worship service, and some good outcomes for doing so. I am convinced that it is not the church that keeps the kids with the parents that is unusual. I think it is unusual (or it should be) that we don’t expect our children could ever sit in a service, could ever participate in a service, could ever enjoy a service! We don’t think they are ‘mature enough’ to handle it. Christ says, you have no idea what a childlike faith can handle.

What other Sabbath-keeping tips have you found useful? Do you have any questions? Leave a comment.

I was ordained in the Free Methodist Church in May 2015, the day before the birth of our first daughter. The question then is, how could a Wesleyan-Arminian, pentecostal, egalitarian guy like me go from that to Reformed and Presbyterian?

There are two main reasons. The first is that, over many years, I had already been becoming Reformed theologically. The second was, because of some damaging and unhealthy things that happened in the leadership of my previous church, all the tensions I’d been holding onto for years were all of a sudden cut right through. It’s like I was carrying around those theological tensions in a great net. Then, circumstances conspired to cut that net open at the bottom, and all those suppressed convictions came tumbling out. More on that some other time. But for now suffice to say that when you come to a conviction about what obedience looks like, delayed obedience is no obedience at all.

So, as with most overnight changes, it was a long time in the preparation. I was never completely comfortable with Wesleyan theology. I tried calling myself Reformed Arminian for a time, and dabbled with Molinism to try and explain what I thought was the irreconcilable problem of God’s sovereignty in salvation and man’s responsibility. Furthermore, I know in my own Christian walk that I didn’t choose Christ. He chose me. I was therefore already experientially Calvinistic.

I had also been Presbyterian in my church polity for some time. I was coming to believe that bishops and elders were scripturally the same thing; and that churches should be led by a plurality of elders. The longer I was in a ‘Senior Pastor-led’ church, the more tensions I was having to manage day to day.

Ultimately, I left my previous church because of disagreements with the leader regarding issues related to the authority and sufficiency of Scripture. I won’t get into the issues here, but it became clear to me that I had to make a choice between submitting to man, or submitting to the Scriptures, and I chose the latter. In a genuine attempt to avoid hurting that church, I left quietly, and kept my reasons private. This inevitably allowed speculation to fill the void and that’s understandable. But more difficult than losing the salary was losing some friends and reputation among some people who didn’t know the whole story.

Together with my now fellow-elder, Andy, we took time from November 2024 to meet together, to encourage one another, and seek God’s will for our future. During these conversations, it became clear that we both had convictions regarding some very Presbyterian things (although we didn’t know that was the case until a bit later), especially regarding covenant children, that weren’t being emphasised in the churches we had experienced in Preston. It was at this point we were introduced by a good friend to the International Presbyterian Church. Having its roots in the work of Francis Schaeffer, we started exploring this small but rapidly growing denomination. Through conversations with one of the IPC elders in Leeds, and a couple of other wise advisors, we finally decided that Preston needed a Presbyterian church. By the end of January 2024, we had decided to plant.

At that time, we had two families, and a handful of supportive parents. A grand total of 7 adults and 6 children. When we announced the church soon after, two other couples told us they would join. 11 adults and 6 children.

We launched publicly on the 2nd June 2024 with 17 people. A year on and God has graciously added to our number. God brought people together with the same convictions, with people travelling significant distances to join the church. One family moved from Sheffield to be a part of the work. We are near to needing a bigger venue in which to meet. None of this was our doing. None of it was born of gifting or charisma or strategy. God did it.

I never, ever, ever wanted to plant a church. I have always hated the idea. But man makes plans and God laughs. The first sermon I preached in our first pre-launch service was on Psalm 127. Unless the Lord builds the house, the workers labour in vain. That is still our conviction today. God has to build it. And if God’s going to use us to build His Church, we had better do it His way. As elders, we are committed to pastoring the church in a biblical way; we are committed to feeding people with the means of grace: Word and sacrament. We are trying desperately to stay faithful to Scripture in all we do. We hope to start a Christian school. We hope to find a beautiful old church building, buy it, worship in it, and stop it becoming a shop or a mosque. We hope to plant other Reformed and Presbyterian churches in Preston, Lancashire and beyond.

All of that is of course in God’s hands. So much of it seems impossible. But I also thought it would be impossible that I could be involved with a church plant that survived past a few weeks. But here we are. All by God’s grace.

By way of introduction, let me explain exactly what’s going on here. A year ago, we planted Veritas Church, a Reformed and Presbyterian church here in Preston, North West England. A year on and one of the things that has become clear to me is that we need as much help as possible in applying the Word of God in everyday life. There’s a lot of Bible and a lot of life to which we must apply it.

The Gospel is not a narrow message, useful only for individual salvation. The Gospel is the announcement that the King has come. Christ is that King. He is saving His people, and He is redeeming all Creation. That Creation includes our work, our families, our leisure time, our communication, our interaction with technology, our relationships, and so on. When Paul in 1 Corinthians 2:2 tells the Corinthian believers that he decided to know nothing among them except Christ and Him crucified, he goes on to speak about how Christ and Him crucified applies to unity in the church, sexual immorality, legal proceedings, marriage, singleness, and widowhood, idolatry and food laws, worship and order in the church, how men and women should behave in the church, the Lord’s Supper, spiritual gifts, love, the resurrection, giving, and more. In other words, the gospel Paul knew applied to all these things.

Think about it this way. Everything is downstream from worship. What, who, and how we worship dictates everything else about us. And so, you can tell who or what your god is by the way you live. So for our purposes, consider the Lord’s Day service as the worship engine of the Church. The aim, then, of this blog and podcast is to be a kind of drive shaft that connects that worship to the wheels of our lives when they hit the road on Monday mornings. Hence the title: ‘Sunday’s Done, Now What?’ Now that Sunday is over, to quote Schaeffer, “how should we then live?”

Or to put it more simply, we’re talking here about applied theology. We’re fond of saying here that Christ is either Lord of all or He isn’t Lord at all. Abraham Kuyper said that Christ’s Lordship covers every square inch of Creation - it is all His. And the square inches that make up our lives are under that Lordship.

This, then, is my attempt to help the people of the church I pastor (and anyone else who wants to listen) to apply the Word of God in the Scriptures to every square inch of life. We need to do the hard and detailed work of trying to figure out how to apply the timeless Word of God to the complex contemporary times in which we live. There are a lot of steps to take there, and you can’t always do that in detail during the Sunday morning worship service. But it does need to be done.

So like, share, subscribe, and all of that. I look forward to welcoming various friends and guests to help speak about a variety of different topics, and I expect that I’ll be posting once or twice a month. Remember that this is primarily for the people of Veritas Church, but if you listen or read from somewhere else, I hope it’s a blessing to you too.