A recent trip to Ethiopia has forced me to think again about a Christ follower’s responsibility in promoting a positive culture regarding adoption.
Between 1999 and 2017, more than 15,600 Ethiopian children found new homes with American families. But the Ethiopian government recently ordered a stop to international adoptions.
It’s not that the need was no longer there. Rather, according to local ministry leaders, Ethiopia decided it needed to fix its problem itself. No more does it want its children to be one of its major exports.
Yes, there is much work to be done, local church leaders tell me. It’s hard work helping people understand—especially believers—why this is each Ethiopian’s responsibility. But church leaders say they support the change and are seeing positive steps and efforts already.
My family and I are no strangers to international adoption. We’ve been involved for years. But the Ethiopian directive, and the desire of local church officials to make this problem their own, got me thinking about our own adoption problem: the U.S. foster-care system.
In the United States, nearly 440,000 children were in foster care as of Sept. 30, 2016 (the most recent statistics I could find), and as many as 26 percent were on track to be available for adoption. Yet, only 4 percent were in pre-adoptive homes.
It’s true that churches have been adding orphan-care ministries, but too often the people involved lose sight of the fact that adoption isn’t about building a ministry, it’s about growing families. And often those church ministries are focused on international adoptions, not local foster care.
I know there are many reasons for this, and I don’t doubt God’s call upon many families to adopt from a foreign country, but I often wonder if these same families even considered or prayed about adopting locally—a child probably living a few miles away in need of a permanent home, a loving mom and dad, siblings.
Yes, foster-care adoption can be frustrating and scary. Dealing with state offices can be trying compared to working with what usually is a more organized nonprofit or private adoption organization.
It’s also true, children in the foster-care system are broken, but don’t imagine that an internationally adopted child is free of such issues. They, too, have suffered loss that must be dealt with at some point in their life.
And not that it’s so, but what if somehow foster-care children are more broken than their international counterparts? Do they deserve less consideration? We each were broken once—perhaps only in spirit, but also in body—and yet that didn’t stop God from reaching down and offering a solution so that we, too, could be adopted sons and daughters of the Father.
Being made in His image should be enough to spur us to do the same, regardless of circumstances, and yet, today, too many children in need in America are still being overlooked.
As the parent of adopted children and the head of a foster family for years, I can only encourage each of you to ask the Lord what your responsibility is to these children looking for and wanting a safe, loving home. I suspect if you ask, He will call more of you than you can imagine. Let’s be bold and courageous.
If you’d like more information on how to become a foster parent or to adopt from the foster-care system, here’s a few resources to get you started: AdoptUSKids; AdoptiveFamilies; and specifically in the Pacific Northwest Olive Crest, whom we love and cherish.