Journal: Journal of Discipleship and Family Ministry
Volume: JDFM 01:2 (Spring 2011)
Article: Equipping the Next Generation: The Ascetic Character of Fatherhood
Author: Peter R. Schemm, Jr.

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JFM 1:2 (Spring 2011) p. 64

Equipping the Next Generation:
The Ascetic Character of Fatherhood

Peter R. Schemm, Jr.

Peter R. Schemm. Jr. (Ph.D., Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary) is Senior Pastor of Cave Spring Baptist Church in Roanoke, Virginia. He previously served as Associate Professor of Theology at Southeastern Baptist Theological Seminary. He is associate editor of A Theology for the Church (B&H). Pete and Vicki, his wife of seventeen years, have eight children: Charis, Colby, Jacob, Zachary, Parker, Anderson, Mary Kathryn, and Chase. He likes good Denzel Washington or Russell Crowe movies, sees chocolate and coffee as evidence of common grace, and enjoys the outdoors, a pocket knife, and a round of golf.

I don’t always do what is right as a father. I often miss opportunities to do what is right and best for my family. I tend, like most dads, to want what is best for me. That’s why I was so interested in what I read recently about the nature of leadership. It comes from an unlikely place, the memoir of a theologian.

This particular insight about leadership concerns those who hold offices of power and authority in the academy. In this context, theologian Stanley Hauerwas observed: “People who occupy such offices cannot let their likes and dislikes of this or that person shape the decisions they must make for the good of the whole. The ascetic character of the rightful exercise of power is seldom appreciated.”1 When I read that last sentence, I paused. “I like where he is going with this but I want to tweak it a bit by swapping ‘power’ for ‘leadership’ or some other less potent word.” Then I realized that, as with many Hauerwasian statements, this is well written. To remove “power” from the statement neuters the statement. His thought concerns the rightful exercise of power, not the rightful exercise of something less. “Ascetic” points here to the practice of strict self-denial for the purpose of spiritual formation.

Since I consider the vocation of fatherhood an office of power, I began to think about leadership and fatherhood in that context. Here “power” refers to the good, God-given authority and ability to influence the most basic of all societal institutions, the family. I want to steward well the power God has entrusted to me to lead my home. Yet I am also quite sure that I don’t know how to do this well. My tendencies are toward the wrongful exercise of power. Power is so easily misused.

God has entrusted to fathers the power to procreate, to make provision, and to lead. They are to do so in ways that display the gospel, in sacrificial and self-denying ways (Eph 5:25-6:4)—in ascetic ways. So...

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