I am Your Father (eBook)

What every heart needs to know

Mark Stibbe (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2012
320 Seiten
Lion Hudson (Verlag)
978-0-85721-175-0 (ISBN)

Infos

We live in an increasingly fatherless society. Fatherless children are far more likely to be criminals or victims. In January 2009 Mark quit as the senior leader of a successful and progressive Anglican congregation, to found a ministry called The Father’s House, dedicated to taking the Father’s love to the fatherless. ‘The task of the family of God is to take the Father’s love to the fatherless. To do this, those who are already members of God’s family need to have their father wounds healed. This book will help those with hearts broken by their earthly fathers to find in their Heavenly Father the love of all loves.’ In Part 1, Mark describes the different ways in which fathers can hurt their children. In Part 2, he goes deeper, defining the wound as ‘the orphan heart’ and describing the main symptoms of this condition in peoples’ lives. In Part 3, he shows how Christians can find true healing through experiencing the Spirit of adoption

Textauszug

Chapter 1

A FATHERLESS WORLD

It is a compelling photograph. The scene is an airport arrivals hall. As you look at it you see two smiling faces. The taller figure is the father, who has just arrived from Africa. He is a Kenyan man dressed in an immaculate dark suit with a tie tied to perfection. He is wearing black spectacles and he is smiling, not at the person taking the photograph, but at someone to his left, invisible to us.

The smaller of the two figures is his son, a slightly chubby boy, aged ten, who has folded his arms tightly over the hand of his father, a hand that’s reached out across the boy’s shoulder and is draping limply over his son’s bright white shirt. The boy is clutching his father and has a look of joy on his face. The photograph seems to be portraying a picture of family bliss.

But the photograph is deceptive, and the camera lies. The boy – known to his father as Barry – has not seen his father for eight years. In fact, the last time Barry saw his dad was when he was two years old. His father had left his mother and returned to Africa. Now, for a few weeks, he will be reunited to his father in America. But then his father will disappear one more time, and this time the boy will never see him again. Not in real life, anyway. He will meet him in a dream later on in life – a dream in which Barry will find his father under lock and key in a prison cell, cutting a forlorn and tragic figure. He will tell his father that he loves him and wake up later with his pillow soaked with the tears he has shed while asleep.

Who is this boy so overjoyed by an encounter with his dad? Who is this son who will not let go of his father’s embrace? The boy was known to his father as Barry, but to us he is known as Barack Obama, the forty-fourth President of the United States. Barack Obama is the ten-year-old boy in the photograph. His story is told in one of the bestselling biographies of recent times, Dreams from My Father – an elegantly and honestly written account of Barack Obama’s search for his father. It is a story about a grown man’s attempt to arrive at a more informed sense of his own history and identity, through learning about the father who abandoned him, the father he never really knew. It is a book justly praised by all who have read it. And it is a book that reveals so much about the world in which we live today.1

A Father’s Day confession

On Father’s Day 2008, Barack Obama was invited to speak at a church in the south side of Chicago. He decided to use the opportunity to make a plea to the men of his own community – the African American community – to make fatherhood a top priority. You can catch the full speech on YouTube, but here are a few telling sentences:

 

If we are honest with ourselves, we’ll admit that what
too many fathers are is missing – missing from too
many lives and too many homes. They have abandoned their responsibilities, acting like boys instead of men.
And the foundations of our families are weaker because
of it… We know the statistics – that children who grow
up without a father are five times more likely to live in
poverty and commit crime; nine times more likely to
drop out of schools and twenty times more likely to end
up in prison. They are more likely to have behavioural
problems, or run away from home, or become teenage
parents themselves. And the foundations of our
community are weaker because of it.2

 

In this eloquent and memorable address Obama launched an appeal to African American men to stop abdicating their paternal responsibilities and stop deserting their children. He called on men, before anything else, to be present to their children as fathers. Obama has two children of his own. He has made fatherhood a primary goal in his life. Indeed, he has openly stated that before being a good President, his greatest ambition is to be a good father. In Barack Obama America has a President who understands fatherlessness from his own painful experience, but who also prioritizes fatherhood in his own private life. Whatever one’s political allegiances, this fact alone should give cause for hope in the fight against the curse of fatherlessness.

Obama’s call to the men of his community was and is a vital one. Much of my public speaking in the United States is done in churches from the African American constituency. Every time I speak about the unconditional love of God the Father, men and women of all ages start weeping. There is a visceral sense of father loss in the African American community. Friends of mine who are their bishops and pastors have told me that the African American community is into its third generation of fatherlessness. They also add that when you include in the mix the appalling history of slavery, you can understand why the message of God the Father’s unconditional love has such a deep impact.3 Many within these churches are bound by chains that derive from a deep sense of abandonment. Many are slaves to performance or pleasure, desperately trying to find value and love through making it to the top, or through toxic relationships. It is a tragic situation.

What is more tragic is the fact that fatherlessness isn’t just confined to one part of American life; it is now widespread throughout every segment of US society. Every part of the United States is now affected by the pandemic of fatherlessness, so much so that the country has recently been referred to as ‘Fatherless America’.4 And the social consequences have been dire. The research compiled over the last twenty years has demonstrated conclusively the following depressing statistics. Fatherless children in the USA are:

• 8 times more likely to go to prison
  
  
• 5 times more likely to commit suicide
  
  
• 20 times more likely to have behavioural problems
  
  
• 20 times more likely to become rapists
  
  
• 32 times more likely to run away
  
  
• 10 times more likely to abuse chemical substances
  
  
• 9 times more likely to drop out of high school
  
  
• 33 times more likely to be seriously abused
  
  
• 73 times more likely to be fatally abused
  
  
• one-tenth as likely to get A’s in school
  
  
• on average have a 44 per cent higher mortality rate
  
  
• on average have a 72 per cent lower standard of living. 5
  
  

US society is now reaping a whirlwind from decades of growing fatherlessness. And the saddest fact of all is that this same country is one of the most Christian nations on the face of the globe. How does that compute? If the Gospel is indeed the hope for a nation, then how have we arrived at a point where a country with more churches than just about any other has such a seriously sick and fatherless society? How come a nation so steeped in a rich history of Christian faith can be in a situation where nearly 50 per cent of its children no longer have any meaningful contact with their own fathers? What is going on?

Perhaps here we need to understand the deep significance not only of the time but also the place in which Barack Obama chose to give his rousing call to fathers. Yes, it is of course significant that he chose Father’s Day, the day in every year when fathers are honoured. But it is even more important that the President-to-be chose a church building to deliver this rallying cry. Christians are supposed to be salt and light in society. By delivering his speech in a Christian congregation, Obama was sending a clear signal to every church from every denomination in his country that they are not to be fatherless communities. Put in another and perhaps more dramatic way, Obama was rightly saying that the churches are called to be a part of the solution to fatherlessness, not a part of the problem. That is a call that stretches beyond the shores of the United States to every country in the world, including my own nation, the United Kingdom.

Fatherless Britain

In 2008 I was called up for jury service for the first time. For many years I had managed to get away with avoiding the call because I was a pastor. But then the law was changed and I found myself invited to a crown court not far from where I lived. I remember going rather reluctantly because of the inconvenience to my schedule. I came back after two weeks very glad that I’d been.

My abiding memory of the two cases was this. Both of the accused were young males from a local town. Both had been charged with extreme violence. Both had mums in court. But neither of them had dads anywhere in evidence. In the end, both were convicted and, as it turned out, our “guilty” verdicts were vindicated by a long list of antecedents (previous cases of criminal behaviour). Indeed, there was a certain amount of gloating in both juries. People were saying, “We got it right.” But I was left asking the question, “Where are all the dads?”

A few months later I found myself in the town where the two boys lived. I was at an afternoon tea party in support of a local inter-church outreach initiative. A lady came to sit next to me who turned out to be the Mayor. We started talking and she asked what I was doing. I replied that I was about to move to her area to begin a charity dedicated to reversing the pandemic of fatherlessness – a charity called The Father’s House....

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 12.9.2012
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Kirchengeschichte
• Themenwelt: Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Moraltheologie / Sozialethik
• Themenwelt: Religion / Theologie ► Christentum ► Religionspädagogik / Katechetik
• ISBN-10: 0-85721-175-7 / 0857211757
• ISBN-13: 978-0-85721-175-0 / 9780857211750