Louie Giglio, pastor of Passion City Church in Atlanta and founder of the Passion movement, has a theory about why so many people struggle to trust God: it starts with dad.
“God is not the reflection of our earthly dad,” Giglio said, “but He is the perfection of our earthly dad.”
Giglio has a long-running teaching that the mental picture people carry of God rarely forms in a vacuum. It forms at the dinner table, in the car after a bad report card, in whatever room a father was — or wasn’t — present, Relevant Magazine said.
Giglio leans on theologian A.W. Tozer’s famous line that what a person believes about God is the most important thing about them, then pushes it further. Most people, he argues, quietly assume God will let them down the way an earthly father did.
“Can I trust anyone after what my dad did to me?” is the question Giglio says sits underneath almost everything, whether people realize they’re asking it or not.
That question doesn’t get resolved with a pep talk, in Giglio’s telling. It gets resolved at the cross, where he says God demonstrates a Father who never falls short of what fatherhood was supposed to be in the first place.
Related: Stay ‘Engaged With God’ No Matter What. It Makes All the Difference.
Giglio also reframes discipline through the same lens. A father who redirects, corrects, or closes a door isn’t punishing out of frustration — he’s protecting a kid who can’t yet see what’s ahead.
“He’s just being a father,” Giglio said, “saying: ‘You have no idea, but that is not what you want.'”
The clearest picture, for the pastor, is still the prodigal son: a father who doesn’t wait at the door with a lecture but runs down the road to meet a kid who squandered everything.
“He waits until the kid hits rock bottom and returns,” Giglio said, “but is already waiting for him.”
It’s a theme Giglio has returned to for years, most fully in his book Not Forsaken: Finding Freedom as Sons & Daughters of a Perfect Father, and one Movieguide® has tracked across his ministry — from urging believers to stay “engaged with God” through spiritual dry seasons to naming the lie that Satan sells people mid-battle. The through line in all of it is the same: God is more patient, and more present, than the people who raised us.
Giglio has built a sizable platform to make that case. Since launching the first Passion Conference in Austin, Texas, in 1997 with roughly 2,000 college students, his Passion movement has drawn more than a million young adults, and Passion City Church now anchors a broader network of worship, publishing, and resource ministries out of Atlanta.
None of that changes the plainness of his point. Fatherhood, good or bad, leaves fingerprints on faith — and for Christian parents raising kids in front of screens as much as at dinner tables, that’s worth sitting with.
Giglio isn’t asking families to diagnose every hangup as daddy issues, and he isn’t handing out easy fixes. He’s making a narrower claim: the God of the Bible holds up even when an earthly father didn’t, and that gap is where grace tends to do its best work.
For Movieguide®’s audience navigating a culture quick to blame and slow to forgive, that’s a distinction worth carrying into any conversation about fathers, faith, or the stories — on screen and off — that shape how a family sees both.
Read Next: Louie Giglio Dismantles the ‘Big Lie’ Satan Sells Humans in the Midst of Spiritual Battle
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