Missions Textbook 25
and Father

We Never Saw It Coming: An Introduction to Christian Missions (textbook)

I remember Karl and Lisi came to dinner one evening, and after dinner we told the boys to play quietly in their room. A bit later, we told them it was bedtime. They left the room, brushed their teeth, and came out to say good night. I went to tuck them in and when I returned to the living room, Floyd was in a deep discussion with them about what the Bible had to say about raising children. It was not the direction an evangelistic evening usually took, but they were fascinated that our boys went to bed without a temper tantrum, bribed by a bowl of ice cream. They eventually got married and had four lovely children who have grown up to be responsible adults, some of them involved in their local church.

It is possible for a missionary father to be an absentee father. If you have children, then you are called to be a father! We have met some missionary kids (or pastor’s kids or Christian worker’s kids) who resented “God’s work” because it robbed them of the presence of their fathers, who were traveling around the world being great missionaries. Fathers are necessary in the lives of their children, and it’s important that a father choose to spend regular time with each child, getting to know each child, and developing a unique relationship with each child. The only teaching in the New Testament on fathering is Ephesians 6:2: “Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger, but bring them up in the discipline and instruction of the Lord.” The apostle Paul refers to good fathering when he tells the church members in Thessalonica, “You are witnesses and so is God, how devoutly and uprightly and blamelessly we behaved toward you believers; just as you know how we were exhorting and encouraging and imploring each one of you as a father would his own children, so that you would walk in a manner worthy of the God who calls you into His own kingdom and glory” (1 Thessalonians 2:10-12). There is a lot in those verses for a father to chew on.

We Never Saw It Coming: An Introduction to Christian Missions (textbook)

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