Adoption in the Wall Street Journal

There is a great essay in this morning’s Wall Street Journal that takes a brief look at the rising interest in adoption among Evangelicals: Adoption Season for Evangelicals. I read it last night and liked it a lot. This is such a natural for God’s people, people who have been adopted into His family and are commanded to care for the widow and the fatherless to open our homes to children who are in need. What was interesting, and something I was unaware of, was that Focus on the Family has been very active in this area especially in foster care. That is something commendable. Something else I found fascinating and hadn’t thought of before was how counter-cultural adoption and fostering is:

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.

I like that. We often lament that Sunday morning is so segregated but I think that is changing. As couples have smaller families, later in life, more and more people want “perfect” kids that look just right in those couple of hours a day that they see them when they are not at school, daycare or some sort of character and resume building activity. Adopting or fostering a child means taking that child, with all of the accompanying quirks and foibles and problems. Isn’t that exactly what was done for us, that in spite of our sins and rebelliousness and dead hearts God adopted us anyway? What a beautiful way to live out the Gospel, bringing an orphan into your family and loving them in spite of their problems. You want to pass a plate to pay for church staff or mortgages or building projects? No thanks. You want to take up a love offering to help couples adopt or foster children? Count me in.