Jesus Army: Magazine - Rant and rave

THE WORLD is full of fatherless people: broken families with broken lives. This moulds our society and the culture that we live in. Absent dads. No fathers. People grow up without role models to shape their character.

Youth become what the culture around them tells them to be: what to wear, what to say. It can spiral out of control - "join a gang; get yourself a knife, a gun" - or destructive - "hang yourself." All because the only sense of security becomes a security pulled together with other broken people.

The world is crying out for fathers, crying out for role models, for love and acceptance. The world is broken.

Daniel Driscoll So we're the church of Jesus, the counter culture; the new society, a brotherhood, a people of love. But are we relevant to the world around us? Will we "father" this fatherless generation?

I grew up "fatherless" - I never knew my dad and it left me broken and insecure. But as I grew up in the Jesus Army I found that people loved me - and I found "fathers": people who just loved me, showed me character love and vision and through good and bad stuck with me. Some of them had known what it was like to not have a father but, healed themselves, now they fathered me.

If our society is fatherless, surely the church should be full of fathers?

What makes me angry is a church that knows the fathering love of God, but is too scared to show the same love to others.

If a radical church like the Jesus Army can't be fathers and mothers to a fatherless generation then who can? It's hard to step out of our own hurts and insecurities, to believe in ourselves enough to give ourselves to others - but if we won't who will?

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