Comments from Dr. James Dobson on How His Own Father Played a Key Role (Behind the Scenes) in the Ministry of Focus on the Family

[Pictured: publicist and friend Sarah Kittle and Dr. James Dobson]

It’s not every day that one gets the privilege to see the private childhood home movies of someone famous. But I had such a privilege some 30 years ago, when I produced a feature on the late Dr. James Dobson, who died last week.

He founded and led for decades the worldwide ministry of Focus on the Family, which became a virtual media empire, reaching millions of people worldwide.

In 1993, I traveled to Colorado Springs with a camera crew for Coral Ridge Ministries and interviewed Dr. Dobson about his ministry.

Despite his amazing accomplishments, Dr. James Dobson gave credit first, of course, to the Lord Jesus Christ, but also to one man. His own father, Rev. James Dobson, Senior. What follows are some of Dr. Dobson’s (Jr.) remarks from our interview.

His father was a humble evangelist and pastor for the Nazarenes denomination in the Western states. He was known for his diligent prayer life.

Dr. Dobson said of him in our interview, “He traveled an awful lot. He was gone for a month or six weeks at a time. But when he came home he was mine. When he would come home, we would hunt together, we’d fish together, we’d build things together. There was just an awful lot of love and camaraderie that took place when my Dad was able to be at home.”

But as the son began to experience his early teens, he began to show signs that he needed more attention from his father. So his father “decisively” changed his plans to give that time to his teenage son.

Dobson told me, “He had a four-year slate of revival meetings scheduled. He was probably the prominent evangelist in his denomination at the time. He instantly canceled that slate, all of those meetings.”

The senior Dobson sold their house, moved the family 700 miles south (to Texas) and took a pastorate, so he could be home with James, Jr. for the two years of high school. Notes the famous son: “He actually put me ahead of his profession. The moment I graduated from high school, he went back into the evangelistic field. But he knew I needed him those two years, and he saw that he could lose me during that time, and he wasn’t about to let that happen.”

As I was putting this story together for said television segment on Christian TV, Dr. James Dobson lent me access to his private home-movies. But he warned me—use these only for this segment. I don’t want to see these in any other context. I kept my promise. What a privilege to see those old black-and-white films of the Dobsons, fishing and hiking and so on.

Years went by, and James Dobson, Jr. had a family of his own. He earned his Ph.D. in psychology and became a professor of pediatrics at the University of Southern California and a psychologist at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. But Dr. Dobson was getting so busy that his father began to be concerned. So he wrote a letter to his son, that changed the son’s life.

The essence of the letter, Dr. Dobson told me was this: “Be careful, you could lose your children.” The father wrote the son: “Failure on this point for you would make mere success in your business a very pale and washed-out affair, indeed. But this…demands time. Time that cannot be given if it’s all signed and conscripted and laid on the altar of career ambition.”

The letter from the father helped him grasp how short life is and his need to make his children a high priority. Dobson added that leter helped give him “the end of life test: where you project yourself to your final days on this earth and ask yourself: Looking back over your life, what will be important to you then? Will it be the plagues on the wall, the degrees, the money, the business successes?”

What matters is peace with God through Christ and “who you love and who loved you. Everything else just fades away.”

Not only did his father help Jim Dobson to focus on his family, helped play a key behind-the-scenes role in his son’s ministry. When the elder Dobson was fasting at praying at age 66 for direcetion for the rest of his life, he felt as if he heard from the Lord: “I know your love for My people. I know your love for the Gospel and I’m going to answer your payer and you’re going to reach millions of people, coast to coast and around the world. I’m going to bless your ministry around, but it it is not going to be through you. It is going to be through your son.”

The next day his father had a massive heart attack from which he never recovered.

At its height, Focus on the Family became a worldwide outreach and was heard on 4,000 radios stations worldwide, reaching millions of people.

And the son recognized that his Dad played a pivotal role in the whole thing. Dobson, Jr. said, “And it really is true, that this ministry is a product of my father’s ministry and especially of his prayer life.”