The Adoption Crusade
Ultimately, "The Evangelical Adoption Crusade" spotlights many complex questions and sad stories, but misses the far larger reality. That reality is that there are millions of children who will wake tomorrow morning without the love of mother or father. Many of them live in orphanages and on the streets. These children need families. Yes, great wisdom must be applied in discerning what is truly best for each child. Some can be reunited with relatives. Some will need to spend years in an institution. But a great many, we can pray, will find the love and belonging of family via adoption, both local and international.
Christians must always pair compassion with knowledge in caring for orphans, and even an article like "The Evangelical Adoption Crusade" is an important means for weighing how best to do so. But it provides no excuse to ignore the cry of the orphan. The world is hurting, and to address this hurt wisely will always come with difficult questions. But we dare not turn from sacrifice and hard decisions and return to comfortable homes and lives simply because the cost and complexity are too great. That was never Jesus' way—and it must not be ours.
Jedd Medefind is president of the Christian Alliance for Orphans and formerly led the White House Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives.
"Speaking Out" is Christianity Today's guest opinion column and (unlike an editorial) does not necessarily represent the opinion of the publication.
Copyright © 2011 Christianity Today. Click for reprint information.
Related Elsewhere:
Previous articles on adoption include:
Strong on Zeal, Thin in Knowledge | Lessons from Haiti's arrest of American Christians trying to take children out of the country. By Jedd Medefind (Feb. 2, 2010)
Abba Changes Everything | Why every Christian is called to rescue orphans. (July 2, 2010)
Churches Adopt Adoption | Churches are getting real about adoption's challenges—and helping families after the child arrives. (July 6, 2010)
210 Million Reasons to Adopt | Haiti's devastating quake reminds us that orphans matter to God. (April 7, 2010)
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Original Anna Anna Anna
Gregg: I'm not the ones trying to close Christian adoption agencies using law because a Christian adoption agency doesn't want to violent one of its major beliefs and turn over parentless children to homosexuals. Law & homosexuals have a major hate issue towards children wanting to deny them the right to a mother and father as other community children have. Like abortion, the law puts the demands of a population segment over the needs of children. The concept being pushed to "get" children by homosexuals is that Christian parents are the worst to raise children as compared to parents of other religions. In Islam, both girls and boys as young as three are used as sex slaves legally by Sharia law. That is not better than having a child being adopted by western Christian parents out of love. I'm not an evangelical whatever, just an adult who was a child adoptee who fared better with non government Christian adoption. I was lucky not to be handed over to government people. What are you?
Greg Peterson
I think you just added more fuel for the hardly new accusations of evangelical cultural imperialism and a sense of a God given entitlement that was tacitly addressed in the Nation article, Original Anna Anna. Do you represent the average conservative Evangelical?
Original Anna Anna
Well, there is a solution in these foreign countries and this country to stop the "bad" adoption practices of Christians. Leave the kids there so that they can be indotrinated into Islam and learn hate for non-Muslims and for their own kind too who don't agree with them, and in the states, leave the kids for the homosexuals to adopt so they can be indoctrinated into any sex is okay, but morals and ethics and Jesus are not okay. States are already forcing the closing of religious adoption agencies because they refuse to hand over the innocents to the perverts. Never mind that there's so many perverts already after the kiddies underneath the noses of social services or government agencies. Comments on this site seem to indicate the worst thing that could happen to starving, homeless children is adoption by U.S. Christian families who do a much better job of raising children to survive in life than non Christians. I don't see Christian adopted children in the news for bombings, etc.