Alliance Webinar Series

The Christian Alliance for Orphans Webinar Series is designed to help individuals like you create and grow effective adoption, foster care and global orphan ministry in local churches.

You're Invited...

FAS and NAS: Alcohol and

Drug Related Birth Defects

This webinar will explain FASD and NAS and offer an introductory view of their implications for the life of a family. It will discuss symptoms, assessments, the school system, daily life, and how they effect the brain. This will be a great session for those who have children affected or those that are considering adopting a child with alcohol or drug related effects. It will address many of the fears and give a real life picture of what raising children with FAS and NAS really is like. Join this session to better equip yourself to love and serve these children and families affected by FAS/NAS in your own communities and congregations.

The webinar will be led by Amanda Preston--adoptive and foster mom to 6 (several of whom are affected with FAS) and night student working towards a B.S. in Social Work.

Presenter: Amanda Preston, Speaker and Adoptive/Foster Mom

NOTE NEW DATE & TIME

Date: TUESDAY, October 30, 2012 Time: 1:00 PM Eastern

Each 60-minute webinar in this series will give local advocates access to the knowledge and experience of top Alliance member churches and organizations nationwide, covering key topics on adoption, foster care and/or global orphan care. Every webinar will be hosted by a local church orphan ministry and co-presented by one or more national experts on the subject matter. This pairing will deliver a combination of specialist information and resources alongside a “here’s how it works in a real church” perspective.

        

You Can't Manufacture Orphan Care
Jason Johnson

There are certain things in churches we can create that people will participate in – i.e. worship services, pot-luck dinners, small groups, children’s ministries and basketball leagues. Whether God is in those activities or not is irrelevant to our ability to implement them and expect participation. Of course, the hope is that God is in them, and that lives are changed as a result of them. The sad reality, however, is that some things in churches can function even if He’s not.
There are also things in churches that quite frankly cannot be manufactured. Only God can do them. They are very different than standing on stage and inviting people to sign up for the church basketball team or Wednesday night’s pot-luck dinner. There’s certain things that quite simply cannot function if God is not in them. Only God can stir so mightily in a person’s heart that they would sell everything they have and move overseas to take the Gospel to unreached people groups. You can’t manufacture that. Only God could move among families and communities of people for the sake of rallying around the cause of abused, marginalized and orphaned children, opening their homes and reorienting their lives around foster care and adoption. You don’t just sign up in the bulletin for that one.

When we planted Woodlands Point Community Church 4 years ago, orphan care was not on our radar. Not that we were against it, it’s just that we had no idea God had that in store for us. If you had told us then what God would be doing now we would not have believed it. But God has done something we never imagined He would, and He continues to do something we could have never created or manufactured on our own. Through the context of dozens of families partnering together for the cause of the orphan, and many more joining in along the way, The Orphan Care Network has formed and thrived for the sake of resourcing, supporting and celebrating the calling of God on His people to care for orphans.
The question we are most often asked, and the story we most often hear, is: “We want to get an orphan care ministry started in our church. We share statistics with people about orphans and tell stories of what their lives are like, but nothing seems to be working. How did you start yours?”
Our answer, quite simply is: “We didn’t, but God did.”
While we certainly do not have it all figured out, and are by no means experts, what we have found to be far more powerful and compelling than getting statistics, pictures and stories about orphans into our people’s heads, is first getting the Gospel of their adoption through Jesus into their hearts. The story of our being adopted into the family of God through the person and work of Jesus is the only reliable and sustainable source of motivation towards caring for orphans. The fact that Jesus would so long to rescue us who were orphaned in our sin and go to such great lengths to bring us into the eternally loving home of the Father is what stirs in many and drives them to demonstrate the same. One of the clearest ways to tangibly demonstrate the Gospel is through the care of orphans – unconditionally loving the isolated and fatherless and unwaveringly ensuring for them a forever home they can call their own. This is the Gospel. Only God can do that.

Orphan care doesn’t begin with the orphan “out there” who needs to be adopted, it begins with the orphan in you that already has been adopted in Jesus. Until our peoples’ identities are rooted in the Gospel of their adoption, our petition to them to demonstrate that powerful truth through the care of orphans will feel forced and manufactured at best. The inevitable fact of ministry is that you are going to be busy, but you have a choice over what things you will be busy doing. Our commitment is to be busy stewarding well what God is doing, not busy manufacturing what He’s not doing and trying to figure out ways to spin it as if He is. At the end of the day, the most all-consuming, eternal, Jesus-exalting things worth giving ourselves to are the things God is doing by His power in a way that only He can do. You simply can’t “spin” orphan care.

The call to care for orphans begins with the Gospel, is sustained and carried by the Gospel, and in the end is one of the clearest and most tangible expressions of the Gospel to a world full of isolated, outcast, abused and orphaned sinners.
So, in light of the question “How can we start?”, here are two primary things you can do right now to begin cultivating a heart for orphans within your church community:

First, preach the Gospel of our adoption through Jesus to your people over and over and over and over again. Ask God to stir something in your people and drive them to tangibly demonstrate the power of the Gospel in ways that you could never create or manufacture on your own.
Serve those in your city who are already caring for orphans. Before you expect people to foster and/or adopt children, encourage them to serve those in your area who are already doing so. Orphan care isn’t just about bringing children into your home, it is just as much about serving, supporting and caring for those who do. Get creative. Mow their lawns, or start a resource closet with clothes, food and other supplies, give financially, become CPR certified so you can babysit foster kids, etc. There are a variety of ways to care for orphans by caring for those who are caring for orphans.

The Story of the Gospel in Orphan Care
by Jason Johnson


Several months ago a newborn baby girl entered our lives and changed us forever. She was born the victim of heinous abuse, the defenseless recipient of an agregious crime. On what would have normally been just another Wednesday night, we now sat at the kitchen table signing papers with child protective services while she slept peacefully nearby in the living room, wholly unaware of the events unfolding around her.
Who we are and who we will forever be changed the night she arrived at our home. Not merely because our family dynamic was changing or our lifestyle would require shifting by bringing an additional child into our home. Our story changed because her story interjected itself into it. Up until that moment, our ideas about caring for orphans were less aware of the story of the orphan and more aware of our own. We would pull a child out of a bad situation and bring them into our good one. We would rescue them from their broken story and offer them a better, healthier one…ours. The end goal was always to leave the darkness of their story behind and move on to a brighter one, with us.

Months later, we have found orphan care to be something entirely different and unexpected. Her story runs deep, beyond her short life and tiny, now healthy frame. She’s happy and healthy, so much so that the brutality of where she came from is often lost behind the beauty of her vibrant smile now. But her story, no matter how broken its inception may have been, will always be an integral part of who she is, so it must become a part of who we are as well. To truly love her, to truly offer hope and life and opportunity that transcends the chaos of where she came from, we must be willing to embrace where she came from and step foot into it as our own. We can’t just love where she is now, we must also love where she came from with a hope for redemption and a desperate longing for restoration. This is what real love does. This is what Jesus did for us.
Scripture says that Jesus is God with us (Matthew 1:23), that He took on flesh to dwell among us (John 1:14), that He took on our sin in our place (2 Corinthians 5:21) by embracing the poverty of our depravity and replacing it with the riches of His glory (2 Corinthians 8:9). Jesus loved us by first engaging with us in our sin. He rescued us by taking our story upon Himself and making it His own. He pulled us out of the story of our brokenness by first willingly and humbly being pulled into it. This is the Gospel…the Gospel of our adoption. Jesus came to save us into a fuller and more glorious reality with Himself by first submitting Himself to the oppression and weight of our broken reality. He carried that brokenness to the Cross, or perhaps, in some sense, that brokenness carried Him.
Orphan care is just as much about pulling a child out of a broken story as it is about you being pulled into one. That’s what Jesus did for us, so that’s what we must do for these children.

It’s about embracing the stories of unexpected pregnancies, failed abortions, drug addicted babies, heinously beaten and abused children. It’s about engaging and loving an unfamiliar world that’s outside of your own but still very much a part the human experience. For us, it’s about loving the absent father and beaten down mother of our baby girl who can’t seem to shake the demons that are continually destroying them. It’s about sitting across a deliberation table from mom when the court informs her that her parental rights will be terminated. It’s about watching her weep in that moment over her own brokenness and battles that are causing her to lose her baby. It’s about wanting to wipe away her tears of disappoint and pain and loneliness, and whisper quietly to her, “Everything’s going to be ok.”
In those moments you are thrust into a story that is much deeper than the fairy tale that orphan care and adoption are often made out to be. You find yourself pulled out of your own story and into the awful reality of another. You find yourself broken over the brokenness of another mom and another dad, who just like you wrestle with their own demons and sin. You find yourself loving them in a way you never knew possible. You find yourself realizing this is the way Jesus loves you.
The Gospel is not a fairy tale. It’s the messy, dirty, chaotic story of Jesus interjecting Himself into our brokenness and sitting at the table as the reality of our sin unloads its inevitable consequences upon us. This is where the care of orphans truly begins – in the depths of a story that can only be redeemed by the power of Jesus in the Gospel.
To truly love the orphan we must love as Jesus does. He goes beneath our sin and behind our brokenness and walks with us in the darkness of our story in order to set us free into a brighter and more beautiful one. Caring for orphans begins long before an orphan comes into your home. It starts with a fractured and convoluted story in which an innocent child plays the unwilling participant. It begins with our willingness to step foot into the darkness, not just to rescue a child out of it but to bring light into it.
Orphan care is not a fairy tale because the Gospel is not a fairy tale. It’s a messy but beautiful demonstration of the love of Jesus in action. This is the hard reality of where orphan care begins, where it takes you, what it requires of you and how it will break you.

In the end, the story of the Gospel in orphan care is as much about rescuing a child as it is about being rescued by one. It’s as much about adopting an orphan as it is about being adopted by one. It’s about writing a new story of hope and opportunity between the lines of an old story of brokenness and despair. It’s about seeing the love of Jesus towards you in your love towards a helpless child, and being rescued all over again by the beautiful story of your redemption out of darkness and into His marvelous light.