Sunday is Father’s Day. Perhaps I am a bit defensive, but it seems to me that our culture devalues fatherhood more and more each year. The message we hear from our sitcoms down to the social planners touting lesbian, civil unions as loving environments for raising children is this: "Dads are at best superfluous, and at worst a liability."

David Blankenhorn was courageous when he paralleled rises in teenage pregnancy, crime, violence against women, and family poverty to the trend of fatherlessness in our culture (Fatherless America: Confronting Our Most Urgent Social Problem, 1995). He contends that fatherlessness weakens families, harms children, causes or aggravates our worst social problems and makes adult happiness harder to achieve. "One primary result of growing fatherlessness is more boys with guns. Another is more girls with babies" (p 45).

Tonight forty percent of American children will go to sleep in homes in which their fathers do not live. In the history of our country, never have so many children grown up without knowing what it means to have a father.

The flight of males from their children's lives is, in my judgement, one of our most pressing social problems. For all to many, "to father a child" refers only to the act of insemination, and not to the responsibility for raising a child.

As a minister, I have a theological concern with our fatherless trend and the tendency to shrug it off as "no big deal." When earthly fathers abandon their children, what does this say to a child’s ability to trust the Heavenly Father who says: "Lo, I am with you always..." (Matthew 28:20).

On Father’s Day 2004, I am calling upon dads to get involved in the lives of their children - telling them about God - teaching them how to ride a bike - reading to them before they go to bed - being involved in their school. We must have this or suffer some austere consequences.

Fathers need to make promises to their wives and their children and become Promise Keepers. At every opportunity I am calling upon men to be the "Family Shepherd" who leads their family to God, to do right, to be responsible.

Dad, the FAMILY SHEPHERD - It is an idea whose time has come.