Monday, October 4, 2010

Together for Adoption: My takeaways #1

I'm home. Together for Adoption Conference was amazing. I am so grateful that I had the opportunity to attend. Not only was I challenged, I was encouraged, and I had fun, and left feeling as if I had a bit more direction in life, a bit of light was shone for the next step. And that is exactly what I told Jody I wanted to have on the ride home from the airport, after our time in Austin. And although we were much to tired to discuss this on the way home, I think we both left with what we came for.

As I suggested in my last post, I think the overarching theme I came away with was this, we cannot continue to look at the orphan crisis as an organizational responsibility. We have to unite as a church, across the globe, to empower believers, to care. Did you know that there are over 2.1 billion believers in the word, that is 1/3 of the world. And the latest orphan numbers are around 164 million orphans world wide. We are the largest nation on earth. Let's unite to fix this.

One way that Robert Gelinas who started Project 1.27 in Colorado put it...
Psalm 68:5 talks about how God is the father to the fatherless, a defender of widows. We like to throw this verse out there a lot. But he asked this question, that really just broke my heart.
I wanted to start weeping, but had already done that a few minutes prior, so I held it in.
If God is their father, who is he married to? Who is the fatherless child's mother?
The church.
How are we doing as the mother to the fatherless? How are we doing?

Another verse that is thrown out there is James 1:27,
"Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this: to care for orphans and widows in their affliction and to keep oneself unstained by the world."
The word religion in our society has caused a lot of reverb. It is something that we push away from in the modern Christian church. The word in the greek used in most of the new testament that was translated as religion is the Greek word threskeia, which is translated as "worship" or "worshiping".

True and undefiled worship is to care for orphans and widows.
Does that hit you differently?
We cannot truly worship without caring for orphans and widows.

And I think there needs to be clarification, to care for the orphan does not mean an American has to go over and adopt them, and bring them back to America. That is not the answer. But we are called to care. I want to work at mobilizing the church body I am apart of and providing steps for all believers to care. Not necessarily adoption, because not everyone is called to adopt, but there are millions of other ways, which I will be talking about here.

There are more nuggets, I will be downloading them here as the next few days unfold.

3 comments:

  1. oh right. we were totally supposed to have that conversation on the way home. :-)
    I LOVED my time with you. Thanks for hanging with me.

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  3. I love what you noted about religion and worship. and all of it. so glad you got to go!

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