Every child Needs a Dad

How “Dads for Life” was pioneered by Jason Wong

By Goldie Chong

Broken families

In his 20 + years in the Singapore Prisons Service (Ministry of Home Affairs) and Rehabilitation & Protection Division (Ministry of Social and Family Development), Jason has seen many broken families and what happens to children who grow up in such homes.  He has seen enough to realize that fathers play an important role in these broken families. Some men turned to crime because they came from broken families themselves. A big percentage of these men, having no father to model after, look for love and security from all different sources like sex, gangs, drugs, homosexuality, etc. Jason felt prevention must go to the source – to build stronger families, especially to have fathers who care. Seeing this dire situation, Jason felt he needed to do something.  He could have continued in his career to get a fat salary, own another house, buy a new car- but he felt these were not worth spending the rest of his life on. He had a vision to alert fathers of their responsibility to be strong and thus to strengthen the whole family and ultimately to strengthen the nation(国家).

Pursuing his vision

It was not an easy decision to resign from his good job. He firmly believed and practiced his motto: we have only one life to live; live it well and make it count. After resigning he spent his time studying, researching, talking to different people, etc. to share his vision. He went to USA to do more research, preached, lectured and to spread the hope of change wherever he can. At the beginning, not everyone was encouraging. They said dads were generally too busy with their careers or won’t consider giving up their golf, their TV, newspapers or whatever other priorities. Besides, the general mindset is taking care of children is a mother’s job.  But Jason was convinced that every child needs a father who is a hero and he would do all he can to convince them of this.

Jason’s message was to raise awareness that the increasing problems of homosexuality, divorce, abortion, same-sex marriage,  etc are  destroying more and more families. Why is the family constantly facing challenges?  It should be no surprise that the family, being the basic building block of society as designed by the Master Designer would be attacked by His Arch Enemy who wants to destroy all His creations. God’s order for human relationships is: God & man (God created man in His image), husband & wife (male and female He created them), parents  & children (Be fruitful and increase in number). From this basic unit of the family, people gathered into tribes, societies and nations and when the basic unit the family is destroyed, all these are destroyed – ultimately the nation is destroyed. Country and family are linked ( 国家 Guo Jia in Chinese).

Why does Satan want to mess up the family? Because from there all relationships will be affected like dominoes. In this century, country after country is going down the slippery slope of dismantling God’s model for the family.  Starting with the Netherlands who legalized same-sex marriage in 2001, Belgium followed two years later, with South Africa, Spain, Canada, Norway, Sweden, Portugal, Iceland, Argentina, Denmark, UK, NZ, France, Scotland following and the latest Ireland and US in 2015.

At the heart of homosexuality is fatherlessness. An ex-gay man reported, “In reality, what I needed was what God created me to need, an affirming character modeling, loving relationship with my dad. In fact, that’s what my homosexual journey was always about – finding a man to love me.  Sex was just the means to an end.”

Two prong solution

Jason realized that Sauls cannot be transformed to become Pauls by force, persuasion or arguments. Transformation cannot come about with the weapons used by the secular world. We are fighting not against flesh and blood but against principalities and powers in spiritual high places. Spiritual weapons are essential to defeat Satan’s tactics. We need to use weapons like prayer, binding and casting out evil spirits, spreading the gospel, declaring God’s truth, etc.

At the same time people need to be informed, educated and taught what is the truth, e.g.  that nobody is born a homosexual. Research of twins showed that family, environment, social factors, not genetics caused homosexuality. It can be prevented with proper education. One of the aspects of educating the public is understanding the conflicting prevalent worldviews: the humanistic system of values are now predominant in most power centres of society. People pick and choose whatever they want to believe, with no absolute standards. Change cannot be left to the politicians or law makers. Those who have God’s truth must educate their circle of influence.  Jason is doing just this: since 2013 he has spoken to over 100+ churches, conferences, parents, youth groups, etc.

Jason has gone to more churches to speak than probably any pastor in Singapore. His message is similar to Elijah’s “to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children and the hearts of the children to their fathers”  Mal.4:5.. 

Jason was Dy Director /Chief of Staff, Singapore Prisons Service, Senior director of Rehabilitation & Protection Ministry of Social and Family Development for twenty plus years. He founded the Yellow Ribbon project which offers second chances to ex-offenders. (see Transformed in May Issue # 17) and the Dads for Life movement in 2009. Currently he is Board Chairman of Focus on the Family Singapore, board member of Centre for Fathering Singapore. He will be speaking on Father’s Day on 4 Sept. 2016 in Zion Praise Harvest Church, Perth.

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