Why Should the Church Engage in Orphan Care?

In the last two days I've had several conversations with CGGC pastors and a regional director about how we can continue to use our adoption story to get people's attention about orphan care.  My hope is that we can help others make the connection between what we're doing and what the church is commanded to do.  Several authors that we've read have suggested that bad things happen when someone tries to get between God and orphans.  Our goal is to continue in our own journey of adoption and bring others along as well.  

Will you join us?

Two of the major factors that impact how we view our adoption are related to our family and our faith. As far as family, we are a married couple (12+ years) with a five-year old biological child.  As far as our faith, we fall somewhere in the broad range of evangelical Christians.  Since readers of this blog aren't really interested in our family dynamics, I want sort through some implications for our faith. 

A quick Google search reveals that almost anyone can adopt regardless of whether a person's relational status, sexual orientation, age, or religion.  Therefore, the fact that we are working from a Christian perspective changes the agencies we can work with, the grants that we are eligible for, and our overall thoughts about adoption.  In many ways our faith makes us unique.  But in other ways I believe many adoptions are very similar.  One of the first things that comes to mind is that there is no way we could do this alone.  We have been overwhelmed by the amount of people who have offered some form of support whether to watch Zoe when we travel to Haiti, pray for the paperwork to move quickly, assist in coordinating our fundraiser, or offering some kind of financial support.  If a person sets out on their own adoption journey with an I'll do it myself mindset, they'll quickly learn how impossible that truly is.

The idea that we can't complete this process alone reminds me of one of the major points of conversation at our local church when we often hear that we are designed by God to live in community.  I fully believe this idea and that is one of the major reasons I believe that the church is well-positioned to respond to the orphan crisis both in the United States and around the world.  By some estimates (most notably UNICEF in 2010) there are approximately 163 million orphans around the world.  [Note: since there are nuances in the definition of orphan this does not mean that all of these children are in need of adoptive parents.]  The local church is one of the few institutions that can provide healthy support networks for those who want to pursue orphan care - this could be in the form of foster care, domestic or international adoption, mission trips to assist orphanages, orphan hosting, and many other opportunities.  When we combine the idea that we can't do this alone with the church's emphasis upon living in community we find a motivator to work for the cause of the orphans. I've had the conversation with some CGGC leadership about whether orphan care is a mission issue or a discipleship issue.  We all agreed that it is both.  This leads to the third thought for the evening.

Why should the church engage in orphan care?  The two reasons above are completely legitimate on their own, but the most powerful is simply because the Bible tells us to.  There are multiple verses such as James 1:27 that speak to this concern: Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.  Psalm 68:5 refers to God as a Father to the fatherless.  As if this isn't enough, one of the most striking examples of God's view of adoption comes in Matthew 1:1-16 where the lineage of Jesus is traced through his father, Joseph.  Why do I find this significant?  In order for the Old Testament prophecies about Jesus to be fulfilled, he had to come from the family line of David.  The problem, for those who don't see God's role in adoption, is that Joseph is in the line of David, not Jesus's mother, Mary.  In other words, the only way that Jesus is able to fulfill the Old Testament prophecies about him is through his adoptive father who shares no blood relation with his son.  There are enough scriptural references to justify another post which may be worth writing in coming weeks.  But my goal tonight is to provide some thoughts about why orphan care should have a special place within the ministries of the church.

I'll be happy to talk more about what your church can be doing to become more active in orphan care.  Or, if you have an active ministry please provide some details for those of us who are interested.

NOTE: I've posted a modified version of this at http://adoptingfromhaiti.blogspot.com/