Volume 28, No. 21
June 15, 2003                        

Pop Culture   

   Sermons put some people to sleep but one in 1910 led to a great awakening for Sonora  Dodd.

   While listening to a minister preach about Mother’s Day, which had been officially observed for the first time just two years earlier, the married daughter realized that, in her family, it had been her father who had sacrificed everything.  William Smart had returned from the Civil War to his Spokane, Washington farm and raised six children alone when his wife died in childbirth.  Sonora thought her dad, and all other loving fathers, should be recognized, just like mothers.

   Her plan for a Father’s Day celebration got strong support from the Spokane YMCA and local ministers.  But the target date of June 5th – William Smart’s birthday – was just three weeks away and the ministers wanted it pushed back to the 19th, saying they needed more time to prepare sermons on such a new topic as the value of fathers.

   When newspapers across the country carried stories about the unique observance, interest grew steadily.  Preacher and politician William Jennings Bryan supported the plan for a national Father’s Day holiday, telling Sonora that “too much emphasis cannot be placed upon the relationship between parent and child.”  In 1916, President Woodrow Wilson observed the day.  Eight years later, President Calvin Coolidge encouraged state governors to endorse Father’s Day “to establish more intimate relations between fathers and their children.”  Even so, the holiday wasn’t officially recognized until 62 years after it was first proposed.  President Richard Nixon established it in 1972.

   The founders of the holiday were right, of course.  Too much emphasis can’t be placed on the relationship between father and child, and we still need to do everything possible to establish more intimate ties between mature, Christian dads and their kids. Those ties are pivotal and of the utmost importance because the best and most balanced way to understand our connection with God is to see him as the loving Father He is.  Whether we know what that looks like because of our relationship with a wonderful dad, or because it represents everything we missed in our physical father, it’s a powerful picture of God’s unbending, unending devotion, patience, and faith in what we’ll be when we grow up.

   Regrettably, our culture continues to portray Christian dads in cartoonish caricature.  Fathers with a strong faith are either harsh, excessive disciplinarians with minds as rigid as the sticks they use to  beat their kids, or piety-in-the-sky patsies who don’t have a clue what’s going on in the world around them. In the movies and on TV, Christians kids spend a lot of time cringing, or rolling their eyes.

   Even more regrettably, the church has done little to create a culture that equips fathers to be the strong, wise, spiritual leaders God expects.  We train our guys to read, pray and preach, or sit on committees, but fail to put the “men”  in “mentor”, teaching them how to love and lead their families.  Proverbs 22:6 could just as easily read, “Train a father in the way he should go and... he won’t depart from it.”  Thankfully, there is a training Manual.

   As it is in most relationships, the key to success in fatherhood is love, humility and balance. For the sake of our children, we need fathers who, day by day, lay down their lives before they lay down the law;  who love their wives, even above their children — which is the greatest gift and example they can give their kids — and who never forget the faithfulness, mercy and patience of their own Father.

   Speaking directly to dads, Paul says, “Don’t make your children angry by the way you treat them.  Rather, bring them up with the discipline and instruction approved by the Lord.”  (Eph. 6:4)  Whatever’s said or done, it must meet the Lord’s approval. That’s the standard because, despite how “pop” culture has changed, Father still knows best.

By Rick Gamble, published in Cross Current, the weekly newsletter of the Followers of Christ congregation in Brantford, Ontario, Canada.  Reprint at will in not-for-profit publications.  To subscribe, contact sgamble@bfree.on.ca