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Thank you, Christianity Today and Russell Moore, for shedding light on the responsibility—and opportunity—of adoption ["Abba Changes Everything," July]. When God chose adoption as the means by which he would save us, he knew fully what it would cost him: incarnation and crucifixion. Having made us his children, he left us in a world of orphans, exhorting us to imitate him (Eph. 5:1). What more obvious, explicit way could we do so than by rescuing forsaken children?

Ron Ogden
Winona Lake, Indiana

As the parent of two adopted children and the director of a poverty relief agency, I would tweak Moore's mandate that "every Christian is called to care for orphans." Every Christian is called to help the poor, of which orphans are but one subset. Depending on gifts and resources, all members of the body need to engage with the least of these: the hungry, the fatherless, and the imprisoned. To do so will push us past the "carnal sameness" that Moore rails against and let the church model unity in diversity.

Marianne Haver Hill
Pacoima, California

As the parent of eight kids between ages 10 and 15—five of whom were once orphans in another country—adoption is of course heavy on our hearts. It is so hard to explain to others why we do what we do. Many say that we are either saintly or crazy. Yet how could we not? Jesus loved us enough to bring us into his family. We are only following his commands.

When people ask if we are done adopting, our response is generally "no" or "we shall see," even though we have no idea how we would afford another adoption. But God provides, and this is his journey. We are just grateful to be on it.

Christy Oswald
Luxemburg, Wisconsin

My wife and I spent ten rather fruitless years in Bangladesh. In 1972, as a furloughing missionary at Trinity Seminary, I was looking for an innovative methodology to help our team bring Muslims to Christ. Our textbooks, authored by Fuller professors, provided a theoretical basis for hope. But we lacked concrete examples where contextualization actually worked in reaching Muslims.

Enter Moishe Rosen ["An Evangelist with Chutzpah" (Online version)," July], who provided our team with the boldness to strike out into uncharted territory. Yes, Rosen had huge feet of clay. But I salute him as one whose footprints lie heavily on the worldwide harvesting of Muslims into the kingdom.

Phil Parshall, SIM Missionary at Large Charlotte, North Carolina

I knew Moishe Rosen for 50 years. As a new Gentile believer in Christ, I was drawn to him because he was a Hebrew Christian. He encouraged me to leave my secular career to become a missionary in East Africa for 32 years. I simply cannot imagine my life apart from the influence of this remarkable man.

"An Evangelist with Chutzpah" includes the blanket statement that Moishe said "friendship evangelism is no evangelism at all." I recall Moisheɳaying that friendship evangelism didn't work for him, because most Jews reject friendship with Jewish Christian believers who always want to talk about Jesus as Messiah. He believed that Jews more readily accept Gentile Christian friendships and conversations.

Darwin Dunham
Minneola, Florida

CT's July editorial ["Bearing True Witness"] was excellent. Embellishing conversion stories dismisses God's actual activity in our lives as inadequate and misrepresents him terribly. And many of the embellished stories similar to Ergun Caner's only play to our culture's anti-Muslim bias. An embellishing Western Christian knows he will have a sympathetic audience because so many listeners already believe the worst about non-Christians.

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September 2010, Vol. 54, No. 9

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