Imagine three friends come upon a raging river. They see children in the water rushing down the rapids towards a waterfall. One friend immediately jumps into the river and begins pulling as many children out as he can. Knowing there’s a waterfall downstream, the second friend runs down river and tries to catch as many children as he can before they fall to their deaths. The third friend, however, wonders why these children are in the river in the first place. He runs upstream to find out how these kids are getting thrown in and to stop whoever is doing it. All three friends are running in three different directions, but all of them are right and necessary places...
The goal of your church is not simply to start a peripheral orphan care ministry a few are involved in; it’s to establish a foundation culture of orphan care everyone has a role to play in. An environment where it's understood that while we're not all called to do the same thing, we're all certainly capable of doing something. That's the goal. Everyone. Doing. Something. If we're not careful, we may unintentionally define "orphan care" too narrowly - to simply mean foster care, adoption or some other form of bringing a child into your home long term. While these are of course crucial and essential places for the Church to engage...
Foster care can be cold and sterile. Like courtrooms. Medicaid office. Hospital waiting rooms. This is not to say foster care is boring and monotonous - it's anything but that. It is to say, however, that the places foster care takes you and the demands it requires of you can sometimes feel more legal than relational and more painstaking than life changing. The humanity of foster care is often lost in the beuaracrcy of foster care. In the midst of training hours, paperwork, court hearings and medicare appointments the fact that we are dealing with...
While orphan care undoubtedly involves changing the life of a child, it inevitably brings about significant and profound change in our own lives as well. For whatever change we may bring about for them, they will no doubt change us in ways we never knew possible.
I'm often asked questions like these: What is the best way to motivate people to get involved with orphan care? How do we recruit more foster families? Are there things we can do to get our church more involved? All good questions that are hard to answer - or maybe not. At the expense of sounding overly simplistic or theologically unrealistic, I can't help but believe the answer to these questions, and the many others like them, is not necessarily what we often assume it to be.
While I am incredibly grateful to see a movement towards orphan care well up within the evangelical church in unprecedented ways, I am equally concerned that the rate of growth in zeal may at some point outpace the depth of wisdom we have in how to most appropriately respond to the crisis before us. In the end, if our passion for orphans exceeds our understanding of how to truly serve them, we will do more harm in the cause than we will good.
We met her for the first time in a downtown courtroom - the same place we would see her for the last time nearly one year later. Although we most likely will never know her beyond that, a piece of her will always be a part of us - literally. It was the first court hearing since her baby girl had been removed from her custody by Child Protective Services and placed in our care a few weeks earlier.
