Faith Of Their Fathers

Happy Father's Day. Hopefully even the secular media is starting to grasp just how important the role of fathers is in childrearing.

The following is an except from the June 3, 2007, Syracuse Post Standard. It is a message to every father who wants his children to grow up respecting the precepts of God.

Church attendance among men had already fallen to 43 percent in 1992, according to the Barna Group, which specializes in researching trends among Evangelicals. Then that number crashed to 28 percent in 1996...

The American numbers are sobering [...] but they are nowhere near as stunning as another set of statistics in an essay titled "The Demographic Characteristics of the Linguistic and Religious Groups in Switzerland," published in 2000 in a volume covering trends in several European nations. The numbers that trouble traditionalists come from a 1994 survey in which the Swiss government tried to determine how religious practices are carried down from one generation to another.

Apparently, if a father and mother were both faithful churchgoers, 33 percent of their children followed their example with another 41 percent attending on an irregular basis and a quarter shunning church altogether.

But what if the father had little or no faith? If the father was semiactive and the mother was a faithful worshipper, only 3 percent of their children became active church members and 59 percent were irregular in their worship attendance -- with the rest lost to the church altogether.

If the father never went to church while the mother was faithful, only 2 percent of the children became regular churchgoers and 37 percent were semiactive. Thus, more than 60 percent were lost.

The bottom line from the Swiss study is this:

IF THE FATHER DID NOT GO TO CHURCH, ONLY ONE CHILD IN 50 GREW UP TO BE AN ADULT WHO REGULARLY ATTENDED CHURCH.

THE STRENGTH OF THE MOTHER'S FAITH WAS IRRELEVANT.

More recent surveys in America (Rev. Rick Kingham, National Coalition of Men's Ministries) found that if a father made a decision to become a Christian, the rest of the family followed 93 percent of the time. If the mother made a similar decision, only 17 percent of the family followed her example.

"It seems that when a man takes that kind of spiritual stand, it usually affects everyone else in the whole constellation around him, including his family and even other men that he knows."

Men, are you regular church goers? Those beautiful young eyes of your children are watching you constantly and YOU provide the examples that guide them the rest of their lives.