The Wall Street Journal on Friday carried an amazing article on the Christian orphan movement. Its central thesis echoed the thrilling truth frequently noted on this blog: much like the early Church during Roman times, God’s people are again earning a reputation as “defenders of the fatherless.” An excerpt of the article is below, and you can view the full article here.
I had the privilege of spending the day the article came out with a small, informal group gathered solely to pray for orphans. Although our prayers ranged from foster care and adoption to the unique circumstances facing orphans in each region in the world, a single theme came up again and again. Prayer for orphans must always ultimately be a prayer for the Church as well. For unless God rouses his people in every nation on earth to open their hearts and homes to the fatherless, we will rarely do more than scratch the surface of the global orphan crisis.
This truth—although it need not discourage us from concrete actions we can take today—drives us to prayer that Christians would come to truly know and reflect the heart of God. What a joy to see such prayers increasingly answered, and confirmed by such unexpected sources as the Wall Street Journal.
From the Wall Street Journal:
…Foster children are also likely to be of a different race from their new adoptive parents. As more and more evangelical churches take up the cause of adoption on a large scale, their congregations have begun to look like the multiracial sea of faces that Christian leaders often talk about wanting. But it does involve parents giving up on having children who look like them.
All of this makes the growing evangelical interest in adoption seem particularly countercultural. With the widespread availability of artificial reproductive technologies such as in-vitro fertilization, many couples who previously would have chosen adoption can now use surrogates, donor sperm or donor eggs to have a baby who shares their DNA (or whose DNA they have carefully chosen), and whose prenatal care they can closely monitor. Taking a child as he or she comes to you may be a difficult choice for some parents to make these days.