The Church's Response to Orphans

My wife, Teresa, has become quite the blog follower. In particular, she has found a community of mothers who have adopted African children. That interest, along with a good dose of the LORD's providence, has led us to a group of families in the Central Mississippi area who are in various stages of the process of international adoptions.

At a get together the other evening, Teresa began sharing an article she read in "Christianity Today" called Abba Changes Everything by Russell Moore. Mr. Moore is author of Adopted for Life: The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches and is senior vice president and dean of the School of Theology at the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in Louisville, Kentucky.

The entire article can be found by clicking here.

One particular passage really caught my eye. It was under the sub-heading Orphan Care: Spiritual Warfare. Now I have to admit that parenting a 6-year old boy while in my 50's could be classified as warfare. However, I had never considered it to be Spiritual Warefare. Moore poses the question "Would our gospel be more credible if 'church family' wasn't just a slogan, if 'brothers and sisters' was more than metaphor? What would happen if the world saw fewer 'white churches' and 'black churches,' fewer 'blue-collar churches' and 'white-collar churches,' and fewer baby boomer and emerging churches, and saw more churches whose members have little in common except being saved by the gospel?"

And then he answers the question by stating that God is using adoptive families to teach the church that there are no natural-born children in the kingdom of God. We are all adopted by Abba.

Specifically he says "Our churches ought to be showing the families therein how love and belonging transcend categories of the flesh. Instead, though, it seems God is using families who adopt to teach the church. In fact, perhaps we so often wonder whether adopted children can really be brothers and sisters because we so rarely see it displayed in our pews. Some—maybe even you—might wonder how an African American family could love a white Ukrainian baby, how a Haitian teenager could call Swedish parents Mom and Dad. The adoption movement is challenging the impoverished hegemony of our carnal sameness, as more and more families in the church are starting to show fellow believers the meaning of unity in diversity.

That's why adoption and orphan care can ultimately make the church a counterculture. The demonic rulers of the age hate orphans because they hate babies—and have from Pharaoh to Moloch to Herod to the divorce culture to malaria to HIV/AIDS. They hate foster care and orphan advocacy because these actions are icons of the gospel's eternal reality. Our enemies would prefer that we find our identity and inheritance in what we can see and verify as ours—the flesh—rather than according to the veiled rhythms of the Spirit. Orphan care isn't charity; it's spiritual warfare.

Does this resonate with you? I encourage you to read the entire article.