Practically, in your search for spiritual fathers, you’ll want to find the ones who don’t care how big or small their influence is. Their ambition is to be faithful with the talents they’ve been given — be they one or five. Those who are constantly calculating their speech, and maneuvering their public profile, are (jedi hand wave) not the spiritual fathers you are looking for.

For though you have countless guides in Christ, you do not have many fathers. For I became your father in Christ Jesus through the gospel. 1 Corinthians 4:15

Most have heard about the long-term negative effects of fatherlessness — poverty, substance abuse, and promiscuity among other things. A less-discussed side effect is how fatherlessness often leads to children who are especially vulnerable to exploitation and radicalization. Wilson Muna notes:

The role of fathers in both recruitment and prevention of violent extremism cannot be ignored or dismissed. In many cultures, the father-son relationship is defined particularly when sons become of age. Empirical literature has shown that in the cases where the father figure is absent, feelings of resentment and isolation become evident. These may at times contribute to a young person’s vulnerability to recruitment into violent extremism.

It’s not hard to see why.

Fatherless children, not having grown up around the sacrificial stability that a father provides, are easy targets for would-be “influencers,” who often position themselves as a safe place to land for outcasts. Such tribes offer the purpose, camaraderie, and belonging they never had growing up. Only those who have endured the wasting pain of loneliness know just how alluring such “communities” can be.

Fatherlessness is a debilitating rot at work in the heart of the West. But here I want to address a related, though not equivalent theme — the absence of spiritual fathers. Such an absence, I believe, is partly to blame for the rise in extremism we are increasingly seeing in evangelical circles.

Ideal Conditions

Megan Basham’s recent book Shepherds for Sale provided an honest but bleak survey of hireling culture that has been simmering underneath broader evangelicalism for the past several decades. Many Christians leaders who were once held in high esteem were revealed to have been laundering woke ideas. Others have disqualified themselves amidst public scandal. Here in Canada, it was revealed during the dark years of covid measures that many pastors were more concerned about offending Caesar than feeding Christ’s sheep.

Because there are so few spiritual fathers left, and so few biblical churches on the evangelical landscape, many Christians find themselves as spiritual orphans. Combine this with a culture in which there exists no civic consensus, no trust in institutions, and no exposure to history, and you have ripe conditions for extremism to take hold. As indeed it has.

This isn’t just a modern problem either. In ancient Rome, children would often be left to be raised by mothers and servants. Roving bands of teachers called sophists would easily capture the hearts of these spiritual orphans, using them to inflate their own reputations. Even many teachers in the fledgling Christian church were out for their own benefit (i.e. Hymenaeus, who loved the preeminence that a position of authority gave him). Into such a culture Paul speaks, offering himself not simply as one more guide, but a spiritual father.

What is a spiritual father? Perhaps we should start with what it isn’t. It isn’t a biblical office, such as a pastor or deacon. Nor is it a title, in the Roman Catholic sense, that we should ever ascribe to anyone in any official capacity. Perhaps we could describe spiritual fatherhood as older Christian men who, through their demonstration of sober-minded leadership, provide a model of imitation for younger believers. Much as Paul described himself in 1 Corinthians 1:11, “Be imitators of me, as I am of Christ.”

How do we identify spiritual fathers?

Evidence:

“You, however, know all about my teaching, my way of life, my purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions, sufferings—what kinds of things happened to me in Antioch, Iconium and Lystra, the persecutions I endured. Yet the Lord rescued me from all of them.” 2 Timothy 3: 10,11

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