God’s Plan for Orphan Care - The Church
Superhero Aspirations
Growing up, Batman was my hero of choice. Along with thousands of other boys my age, I grew up watching this dark and brooding superhero use his awesome gadgets, fight with great strength, and put away countless formidable villains. As a boy, I wanted to be just like that; I wanted his strength, speed, intelligence, gadgets, and of course, his money! This didn’t change a whole lot as I grew up. Yes, I stopped watching Batman but I am still drawn to the same characteristics today.
I wanted to be a strong, self-reliant, independent, and successful man. These sound like great aspirations on the surface, but the truth of the matter is these characteristics don’t lead to happiness; in fact, the opposite is true.
We live in a world where self is king. In our culture, the individual is glorified while humility and meekness are scoffed at. As a child I often read these truths in Scripture, seeing myself like David who defeats Goliath and saves the cowering Israelites. It wasn’t until later, when I confessed Jesus as Lord, that I saw I was more like cowering Israel or self-reliant King Saul and the true Hero of the story, every story, is Jesus Christ. Jesus changes everything and His Gospel shatters illusions of grandeur we tend to see ourselves with.
Allowing God to Use Us
After serving in the church for a long time as an adult, my wife and I decided to pursue becoming foster parents. At first, my motives were Gospel-centered. As former spiritual orphans who were adopted into the family of God by the blood of His Son, Jesus Christ, we were compelled to pursue orphan care. But I remember the feeling that came over me the first time someone said, “You guys are very special people to be doing this.” That phrase felt so good and for a moment, it overshadowed the real reason we were pursuing foster care. I started to believe it as I heard it repeatedly throughout the process. It didn’t take long to see how I had become self-deceived. I realized very quickly how “un-special” I actually am. In orphan care, you are not the master of a child’s fate. We found that we were at the mercy of state, parents, relatives, courts, and on and on the list goes. My wife and I realized that we could not do this on our own. We needed Christ and His bride, the Church.
Throughout my years in orphan care, I felt so much pain, confusion, inability, and desperation. As difficult as my feelings were, I could only imagine the pain and heartache of the children we were serving . The church points orphans to the hope of Jesus by the way they love, provide, and care for them and their families. Orphan care is not an individual sport; it is a team sport, and it cannot be done effectively without the local church. Orphans need the church. Parents need the church.
The Church and its Role
I am a member of Ashland Oldham County where we seek to make orphan care part of the culture of our church. We seek to constantly reaffirm that every person can have a role in caring for these children. There is no better tool to care for orphans than the Church of Jesus.
Because we want our congregation to care for orphans in our community, we make every effort to provide opportunities to serve this marginalized group. In November, we have a Sunday where we pray, preach, sing, and remind our congregation of their spiritual adoption and to love the orphan. Because of this emphasis, a number of our members have attended OCA’s training to become foster parents and many of our small groups have started praying for a specific child in the foster care system. We open up our church building for OCA to offer training and information to our community helping them to connect churches to orphan care.
Through our contacts with OCA, our church has connected with youth who were in danger of aging out of the foster system. The church was able to meet both physical needs and spiritual needs. It took several people denying themselves and remembering who they are in Christ to humbly and joyfully serve others in this way.
Orphans and foster/adoptive parents don’t need a world who tells them to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. They need the grace of Jesus Christ shown to them by the ordinary, dependent, and self-sacrificial people who comprise the local church.
Ordinary People Used By God
Paul reminds us of our condition in 1 Corinthians 1:26-30 where we learn that by worldly standards none of us are wise, powerful, or respectable, but God “chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong, God chose what is low and despised in the world, even things that are not, to bring to nothing things that are, so that no human being can boast in the presence of God.” Our weakness and dependence upon Christ displays the glory of God because it is God who is sovereign and mighty. It is this God who sees the orphan in their affliction and compels the Church to rise and care for them.
It’s interesting how many of the superheroes we look up to as kids have an orphan background, including Batman. What is so powerful about their stories is that they have someone outside of themselves caring and providing for them. Without these people providing some kind of guidance, their super powers would be useless or used for evil. In the real world, devoid of comic book super powers, the only true strength and hope is found in Jesus Christ using ordinary people to accomplish His supernatural work for His glory.