The Role of Father in Christian Education: A Child’s Image of God through Father’s Education

This article discusses an approach to the connection between the father’s role and imaginative faith in child development. A child’s faith begins at home within the context of the family. Both father and mother provide important ingredients for early faith development of children, and the father’s role in the child’s faith development is as important as the mother’s role. At a very early age, a baby begins to develop the image of God and worldview with his / her socialization by interacting successfully with other people. Increasingly, effective parenting in the home should be considered to be one of the significant issues for the community of faith as well as for parents. Teaching for effective fathering in the home is one of the most important tasks in Christian education in our time. This study discusses generative fatherhood based on Erik H. Erikson’s and John Snarey’s understanding of fatherhood. It explains the father’s influence in a child’s coping with strange adults and with his / her new peers. This study also describes a way to understand faith development in early childhood based on Fowler’s understanding of selfhood development as well as faith. It also discusses a child’s first realization of God and suggests the father’s role and image for a child’s image of God derived from faith and selfhood development. Finally, developing a theological concept of fatherhood in the Korean context explores the understanding of the image of father biblically and theologically. This study uses Thomas Groome’s methodology, “Shared Christian Praxis” for exploring a suitable image of father in the Korean context.