Foster Care: Adoption and Reconciliation

Last night, Michelle and I received the Decrees of Adoption for Tate and Jazzy. Needless to say, we are overjoyed.

• We praise God for giving two wretched, self-centered sinners the desire to love children in the foster care system.
• We praise God for the initial encouragement to pursue foster care from our good friends, Shean and Angie.
• We praise God for the continual support and love from family and friends.
• We praise God for the joyful examples set for us by members of our church.
• We praise God for the diligent training from and work by the Forsyth County DSS.

We involved ourselves in foster care with the main motivation of demonstrating the beauty of the Gospel to the children placed with us, to their families, to social workers, and to people watching us. We deeply desired to portray the Gospel by loving children who did not necessarily “deserve” our love as God loved and adopted us, sinners definitely undeserving of His love. I always viewed adoption, the final result in our case, as a picture of the Gospel, but never thought about the Gospel ramifications when foster care does not end in adoption (in our training, the DSS workers emphasized that the main purpose of foster care was reunification with the biological family).

Rob Tims wrote an excellent article on foster care from a Gospel-centered perspective. His family’s experience with foster care did not end as ours did. As he points out, foster care pictures the Gospel even when adoption is not the final result:

Reconciliation and adoption are equally powerful pictures of the Gospel.  One of the main reasons we were motivated to enter into the foster care system was because our efforts to adopt internationally were failing.  We were seeking to adopt internationally for a lot of reasons, but one of those is because of the way adoption communicates the Gospel. As Paul says in Ephesians 1:5, “In love, he predestined us for adoption as sons through Jesus Christ, according to the purpose of his will.”  Therefore, when the two girls we received had no parental contact for nearly 6 months, and the foster care review board twice recommended termination of parental rights, we were gearing up for a family-based proclamation of the Gospel through adoption.

Now, as the girls head home, our family is still proclaiming the Gospel, only through reconciliation instead of adoption.  In 2 Corinthians 5:11-21, Paul says that the good news of Jesus is a message of reconciliation.  Verses 18-19 are especially relevant. “(God) through Christ reconciled us to himself and gave us the ministry of reconciliation; that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.”  The girls we have had for the last 15 months have had a fractured relationship with their mother.  Rather than giving our family the ministry of adoption, God gave us the ministry of reconciliation.  We’ve been blessed to play a Christ-like role in reconciling these girls back to their mom and other extended family members, and that is an equally powerful proclamation of who Jesus is and what He’s done.  That’s why this next point is also true.

Please consider portraying the Gospel through foster care; whether it be through reconciliation or adoption. Tims continues:

The foster-care system in the United States is in real need of Gospel-centered families to infiltrate the system and take in hurting kids who need unconditional love.  Adoption is hugely popular is evangelical circles, but foster care less so.  Because the ministry of reconciliation is just as powerful as the ministry of adoption at communicating and living the Gospel, I would urge as many as I could to take the plunge into foster care.

I have a much better understanding of the risks and rewards of partnering with a pagan government to achieve Gospel-centered results, and my final analysis is this: get involved! Yes, it can and will be frustrating to work with an under-funded agency for something that matters so much.  It will break your heart to see the emotional and mental anguish in children as they are tugged between parents in rehabilitation and foster parents willing to adopt them.  It will shatter your concept of “ministry” to turn your home … your entire life … into the place where you “do it,” as opposed to an hour or so on Sunday or Wednesday.

HT: Z

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