Later on today hundreds of people will be descending upon our little town for the “Father’s Heart Conference”. Ken Whitelaw the local Apostolic Church Pastor has worked hard to bring this event to the town. I wish him well and hope that the whole day is a great success. Last year I visited the Clan Gathering in St Andrew’s and heard Dr Mark Stibbe, the day before I took a group from the church over to India to visit our partner churches. He is an excellent communicator and I found myself engaging with his message. He is a man of great compassion. Much of what he said was a preparations for us as we headed out to India.

I believe Mark has a passion to encourage people to think about God as a caring and loving father. He believes we are living in an age where people feel lost and alienated from their heavenly father. Many people feel they have little sense of what fatherhood is, because they have experienced poor role models in this area in their own lives. Father’s Heart is a call to everyone to re-engage with the love of God as expressed in the person of God the Father. Tom Smail another brilliant theologian has engaged with this subject long before Stibbes in a book entitled ” The Forgotten father