A friend wrote me this week and encouraged me to write up one additional and important addendum to the article I shared last week on “Four Gospel-Centered & Non-Political Things Every Pastor Can Do to Decrease the Impact of Abortion“. Here it is– a fifth thing every pastor can do:
Encourage healthy families to consider adoption and foster care. Further, cultivate a congregation that welcomes, encourages, and strengthens foster and adoptive families and children, including special needs children. Not only is this a holistic way to be “pro-life,” but it’s been a priority since the earliest days of the church. For example, the Didascalia[1], encourages the church in general and elders in particular to include those without parents in the life of the congregation:
If any child among the Christians is an orphan, it is well that if any brother has no children, he should adopt the orphan in place of children . . . And you who are overseers: Watch carefully over the orphan’s upbringing that they lack nothing! When a virgin girl is of age, give her in marriage to a brother. As a boy is brought up, let him learn a craft so that, when he becomes a man, he will earn a worthy wage.[2]
Note the practical focus on child well-being and connecting fatherless children with those who have no children in the church. Further, note the real-world emphasis on providing well for their needs by marriage or by helping them learn a skill that would bring them a family-supporting wage. This counsel is reminiscent of the summary given in Ecclesiastes of where joy and meaning in life is found: “Enjoy life with the wife whom you love [“give her in marriage,” as above], all the days of your vain life that he has given you under the sun. Whatever your hand finds to do [“learn a craft,” as above], do it with all your might” (Eccl 9:9–10a).
One of the encouraging trends in this area, although it’s sadly also connected with a rising opioid crisis, is that “in fiscal 2018, the latest year for which data is available, more than 63,000 kids were adopted from foster care, up nearly a quarter from fiscal 2014. That number was an all-time high, according to the U.S. Adoption and Foster Care Analysis and Reporting System.”[3]
And lest we forget just how close to God’s heart adoption and foster care are, the apostle James spelled out God’s priorities for us with striking clarity:
Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you.
James 1:27, NLT
[1] The Didascalia, is a Christian treatise that presents itself as having been written by the Twelve Apostles at the time of the Council of Jerusalem; scholars, however, agree that it was actually a composition of the third century, perhaps around 230 AD. The Didascalia was clearly modeled on the earlier Didache. (See Paul F. Bradshaw, The Search for the Origins of Christian Worship (Oxford, United Kingdom: Oxford UP, 2002), 78–80.)
[2] Didascalia Apostolorum, 17, quoted in Timothy Paul Jones, Perspectives on Family Ministry (Nashville, TN: Broadman & Holman, 2009) 21.
[3] https://www.pewtrusts.org/en/research-and-analysis/blogs/stateline/2020/01/07/foster-care-adoptions-reach-record-high?utm_medium=email&utm_source=govdelivery&fbclid=IwAR03sLnxzmM41fzW79CBoMCqYEEgWnReyDK2lhn9YRk3CggUd90IdIBljko