Father's Day research:

Fathers4Justice:

Nearly 1 in 3 children in the UK now lives without a father

• The UK has the highest rate of family breakdown in Western Europe. Eurostat, 2014
• The cost of family breakdown across the UK is £48bn a year. Relationships Foundation, 2016
• Fatherless young people are almost 70 per cent more likely to take drugs and 76 per cent more likely to get involved in crime. Addaction, 2011
• More boys aged 15 have a smartphone than live with their father. Centre for Social Justice, 2014

Kids growing up in homes without a dad:

• 5 times likely to commit suicide
• 32 x likely to end up in prison

UNICEF:

UNICEF describe father absence as the greatest social issue of our time

Psycholotytoday.com

Psychologist Edward Kruk:

According to the 2007 UNICEF report on the well-being of children in economically advanced nations, children in the U.S., Canada and the U.K. rank extremely low in regard to social and emotional well-being in particular. Many theories have been advanced to explain the poor state of our nations’ children: child poverty, race and social class. A factor that has been largely ignored, however, particularly among child and family policymakers, is the prevalence and devastating effects of father absence in children’s lives.

Researchers have shown that for children, the results of growing up in a fatherless home are nothing short of disastrous, along a number of dimensions:

85% of youth in prison have an absent father.

71% of school dropouts are from fatherless homes.

90% of runaway children have an absent father.

-physical health problems (fatherless children report significantly more psychosomatic health symptoms and illness such as acute and chronic pain, asthma, headaches, and stomach aches)

Physcologists: Moore and Gillette commented over 30 years ago:

We face a crisis in masculine identity of vast proportions. Increasingly, observers of the contemporary scene­, sociologists, anthropologists, and depth psychologists-are discovering the devastating dimensions of this phenomenon, which affects each of us personally as much as it affects our society as a whole.

The Federalist blog

IMAGE: Dad trying to watch TV     humour 

http://thefederalist.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/shutterstock_390887836-998x666.jpg 

Written by a dad on the responsibilities of fatherhood:

After all, the only reason we are being celebrated is because we are dads, and being dad comes with myriad responsibilities. It’s not just guarding the thermostat, mowing the grass, and putting our dirty laundry in the general vicinity of the laundry basket. It’s also attempting to do projects we said yes to when we weren’t really paying attention or because we watched a YouTube video.
In the end, though, our wives and children do appreciate us, and they take time to show us just how much.

Nicole Russell (journalist):

My dad represents the Holy Grail of fatherhood. He attended every sporting event, spoke affirmingly to me all the time, and we spent hours on a bike, boat, or in the backyard. Dad taught me how to shoot a rifle, how to engage my mind before I engage my emotions, and what to expect of a man who expects to spend his life with me. We wrangled science and faith, politics and government, boys and my brother.
It was through the lens of my relationship with him I gauged every single relationship I had with a male. Few made the cut as friends or otherwise. If I thought a man couldn’t live up to the kind of man my Dad was—or, let’s be honest, maybe half that—he might as well hit the road. Up until I left for college, when my dad returned from work, I always greeted him at the door with a hug.

On the strange response of criticism she sees in herself toward her husband:

Funny though, how when my husband and I became parents, I felt less starry-eyed at first, and much more judgmental about the kind of dad my husband could be. My husband is no dummy, but I’ve rolled my eyes at the outfits he puts our kids in, instead of just being thankful he’s clothing their naked bodies. Or I’ve prepared a speech in my head when I overhear the way he plays, or disciplines, or speaks to one of our four children, ages 8 to 18 months.
Yet I’ve come to realize that, while my husband parents differently than I do, it’s no worse, and probably no better. My husband is one of the most engaged fathers I know. Whereas I tend to be more serious, analytical, and task-driven, he brings levity, adventure, and a joke when one is needed. He regularly engages our children in spiritual discussions, takes them on day-trips around Virginia (bentures, my three-year-old calls them) and throws pillows across the room at their heads. For this, they squeal when they hear him walk through the door and they run to greet him, just like I did with my dad. 

Study from SWITZERLAND on Father's in church:

In short, if a father does not go to church, no matter how faithful his wife’s devotions, only one child in 50 will become a regular worshipper. If a father does go regularly, regardless of the practice of the mother, between two-thirds and three-quarters of their children will become churchgoers (regular and irregular). If a father goes but irregularly to church, regardless of his wife’s devotion, between a half and two-thirds of their offspring will find themselves coming to church regularly or occasionally.

The story of Francis Bok: 

10years a slave in Sudan, escaped and now living in the US working as an abolitionist. Aged 7, he could not count to ten and knew very little of the outside world. On his first trip to the market without his mother where he was sent to sell eggs and peanuts, he was captured by raiding Islamic militia and enslaved.

He was beaten with sticks by his captor's children, told he was no different from the animals, He was forced to tend the family's herds of livestock and soon realised that his father was not going to be able to save him. He was alone and kept in constant isolation, unable to talk to anyone and threatened with the loss of a limb if he laughed or spoke out of turn. He was forced to convert to Islam and given a new name. When he was 17 years old he escaped.

Francis remembers his mother as beautiful and loving. His father was a strong and cheerful man:

. . . he would tell me important things: ‘I know you’re little but you must listen to what I say. . . You will grow up to be like your father. . . . I want you to be a good man, a good member of the community. I want you to have a good life. . .’ My father had always encouraged me, treated me as special.

But most of all, Francis remembers his father telling him he was strong: “You are muycharko!” which means “You are twelve men!”

‘God is always with you,’ my parents had told me. ‘Even when you are alone, He is with you. . . . When you ask God for what you need, He will help you . . .’ Alone at night sitting in my hut, I remembered that. My father once said to me, ‘Even when you are one, you are two. If you are two, you are three.’

I was really muycharko . . . I began to believe that my father had been right: I was really ‘twelve men.’

First Things Magazine: The Preferential Treatment of the Poor
Russell Reno

A Christian who hopes to follow the teachings of Jesus needs to reckon with a singular fact about American poverty: Its deepest and most debilitating deficits are moral, not financial; the most serious deprivations are cultural, not economic. Many people living at the bottom of American society have cell phones, flat-screen TVs, and some of the other goodies of consumer culture. But their lives are a mess.

Want to help the poor? By all means pay your taxes and give to agencies that provide social services. By all means volunteer in a soup kitchen or help build houses for those who can’t afford them. But you can do much more for the poor by getting married and remaining faithful to your spouse. Have the courage to use old-fashioned words such as chaste and honorable. Put on a tie. Turn off the trashy reality TV shows. Sit down to dinner every night with your family. Stop using expletives as exclamation marks. Go to church or synagogue.

In this and other ways, we can help restore the constraining forms of moral and social discipline that don’t bend to fit the desires of the powerful—forms that offer the poor the best, the most effective and most lasting, way out of poverty. That’s the truest preferential option—and truest form of respect—for the poor.

Doug Wilson: Father Hunger

The Kingdom:

It has been said that you can't make an omelet without breaking a few eggs, but it has also been said that it's amazing how many eggs you can break without ever making an omelet. 

If a man lives without reference to the kingdom, regardless of how conservative and traditional his family values might be, he is only breaking eggs and not making omelets.

Masculinity and fathering:

In their families, men are much more important, crucial, and influential than they believe themselves to be. It is the easiest thing in the world for a man to grow up, get married, have kids and still think of himself the way he did when he was a boy. In the words of Mark Driscoll, he is 'a boy who shaves.' He believes that he is just one more person living in this household - just one more of the roommates. 

Gilder says: Masculinity [in our society] is treated like sex in Victorian England: a fact of life that society largely condemns and tries to suppress and that its intellectuals deny...

Masculinity does not mean talking out the side of your mouth. It doesn't mean swagger, or machismo, or a swaggering machismo. It does not mean bluster or bravado, or wearing wife-beaters. It does not mean brittle egos or cinder blocks for brains. It does mean quoting [the Bible].

Masculinity is the glad assumption of sacrificial responsibility. A man who assumes responsibility is learning masculinity, and a culture that encourages men to take responsibility is a culture that is a friend to masculinity.

...biblical authority knows how to bleed for others.

Christianity and Deliverance:

John Ortberg comments on how Christians and Christianity has brought huge changes to the needy in society:

Since the birth of Jesus babies and kings and everybody else look different to us now. Jesus bestowed dignity, worth and honour on not only children but every human being whether healthy, sick, male or female. On the following people, Jesus gave dignity:

The autistic or Downs syndrome or otherwise disabled child... the derelict or wretched or broken man or woman who has wasted his or her life away; the homeless, the utterly impoverished, the diseased, the mentally ill, the physically disabled; exiles, refugees, fugitives; even criminals and reprobates. 

These were viewed by our ancient ancestors as burdens to be discarded. To see them instead as bearer of divine glory who can touch our conscience and still our selfishness - this is what Jesus saw and Herod could not see.

One of the most famous sermons in that century was by Gregory of Nyssa (brother of Basil who introduced the vision to create communities that cared for sick people). This is what he said:

Lepers have been made in the image of God. In the same way you and I have, and perhaps preserve that image better than we, let us take care of Christ while there is still time. Let us minister to Christ's needs. Let us give Christ nourishment. Let us clothe Christ. Let us gather Christ in. Let us show Christ honour.

That was the beginning of what would come to be known as hospitals. The Council of Nyssa (same council that produced the Nicene creed) decreed that wherever a cathedral existed, there must be a hospice, a place of caring for the sick and poor... They were the world's first charitable institutions.

Another follower of Jesus named Jean Henri Dunant couldn't stand the sound of soldiers crying out on a battlefield after they had been wounded, so this Swiss philanthropist said he would devote his life to helping them in Jesus' name. This started an organisation in the 1860s that became known as the Red Cross. Every time you see the Red Cross, you are seeing a thumbprint of Jesus.

Years ago I was in Ethiopia when it was under a Marxist regime and the church was mostly underground. One or another of the leaders of the Christian group would frequently be arrested and put into prison, which was horribly over-crowded and unspeakably foul. Other prisoners used to long for a Christian to get put in prison, because if a Christian was jailed, his Christian friends would bring him food - actually, far more food than that one person could eat, and there would be leftovers for everybody. It became the 'prisoner's prayer'; 'God send a Christian to prison.'