Until Every Child Is Home - A 6-Day Devotional On Adoption And Foster CareSýnishorn

In the summer of 2011, Emily Johnson sensed God’s call to be involved in caring for kids in the foster system. One evening, after a series of conversations about the pros and cons of foster care in which her husband, Jason, continued to share his reluctance, Emily said, “There will never be a right time to do this; there will always be a reason not to. There are kids out there who need us. The time is now.”

Jason had excuses—good ones. He and Emily had recently welcomed their third daughter. Plus Jason was two years into a church plant that God was blessing with substantial growth. But Jason finally agreed to Emily’s prompting. On the first night of the foster-care license class, the social worker leading the class shared the story of a little girl who had just been brought into the protection of the state. The story moved Jason, who was the proud dad of three daughters. “That was it,” Jason told me. “I would give my life for my daughters, and this girl had no one.”

God began to show Jason that the script of excuses Jason had penned in his mind could be flipped and read as a story of potential for helping kids in crisis. He realized that being a foster parent would give Emily and him the opportunity to teach their daughters about God’s generous love for them—and the need to share that love. He also recognized that the church he’d planted and was leading could play a significant role. “We wanted to impact the city of Houston,” Jason told me. “After the first foster license class, I realized that we couldn’t effectively be a church for the city and ignore this issue.” God re-scripted Jason’s thinking about the needs of kids in foster care and the supply of the local church. Jason knew that caring for kids in crisis is a natural outflow of the discipleship and fellowship emphases of the local church.

Orphan care could be one means of following Christ and impacting Houston.

The growth of Jason’s church from the time that he and Emily began to foster confirms that their burden for kids in crisis was not a hindrance to local church ministry. By the time the church celebrated its fourth anniversary, the staff had expanded to the point that Jason was free to pastor more and more within his niche gifting. What fueled him in those days? Equipping his church—and others—to think about the ways they could work together to impact Houston through fostering and adopting kids without a family.

God began to “flip the script,” as Jason calls it, for Jason’s ministry. God was refining the strategic planning and leadership giftings of a church planter to help churches see how the natural processes of discipleship and fellowship can be harnessed to help vulnerable kids.

Since then, Jason has developed curriculum to help church leaders identify various levels at which they might participate in orphan care within the broader discipleship and fellowship ministries of their churches. He now works for the Christian Alliance for Orphans, helping church leaders build systems of discipleship and support for helping kids and families in crisis.

Jason and Emily now have four daughters. They adopted the first foster child placed in their home. They have also fostered several other children, enduring the ups and downs of loving kids in crisis. Recently their circle of love has expanded beyond just children. Some of the most vulnerable kids in the foster-care system are teen moms. Twice in recent years the Johnson's have taken in teen moms in desperate need of love, structure, and support—a new script. The structure and safety of our churches and homes are not just for our structure and safety. Orphan care is a ministry full of irony: what seems like a challenge or obstacle may be an asset if we allow ourselves to view the situation through the lens of God’s providence.

What Do You Have That You Did Not Receive?

If there was a church that Paul wanted to flip the script on, it might have been the church at Corinth. The church was rich in spiritual blessings—so wealthy, that in 1 Corinthians 1, Paul’s first phrases catalogued the spiritual wealth residing in these believers. He recognized that the Corinthians had been sanctified in Christ and called saints, holy ones (v. 2). He went on to recount that God had given the Corinthians grace and made them rich in all spiritual gifts (vv. 4–5). When it came to the communication arts, the Corinthian church was second to none. And Paul was confident that God would carry these believers on to the day when Christ returns, and they would be found blameless in Him (vv. 7–9).

So what needed to be flipped? With this pristine pedigree, what could be wrong? The divisions he heard had arisen in the church. Turns out, though the Corinthians were rich in spiritual blessings in Christ, they thought they needed more. They began to line up behind various human church leaders to the degree that identifying with ‘x’ leader and his subgroup became more prominent than identifying with the head of all churches, Christ. Paul spent the first four chapters correcting this church’s spiritual greed. Rather than rejoicing in God’s grace and loving one another and the world around them, they had begun to brag about the gifting of their particular leader. “You are God’s. . . building!” Paul implored them (3:9), saying that their leaders—even Apollos and Paul—were just builders. The architectural metaphor Paul applied to the Corinthians reminds us that churches in the first century gathered in households and took on the characteristics of a family. How might Paul have described the church family of Corinth? Self-centered, full of reputation and status, and empty of generous love for one another and the world. Communication arts they had; a spirit of edification and care they lacked. This makes sense. Someone climbing the ladder of status behind this leader or that one has little time for the needy around them.

How would Paul have the Corinthians flip the script? He was direct. The Corinthians needed to return to Scripture and the message of Christ, “so that no one of you will become arrogant in behalf of one against the other” (4:6). Paul wanted the Corinthians to see their richness from another angle: “What do you have that you did not receive?” he asked in 1 Corinthians 4:7. Paul’s question was intended to invert the Corinthians’ thinking about their affluence. Their richness was a gift from God, not a basis for bragging. And if a gift from God, a stewardship to be used.

This explains why Paul wrote the love chapter—1 Corinthians 13—as the centerpiece of chapters 12 through 14. In these three chapters Paul corrected the Corinthians’ self-centered spiritual service and admonished the church to use its gifts from the foundation of love. Love is the better way to use gifts (12:31), as opposed to selfishness and bragging.  Paul wanted the Corinthians to launch their gifts from concern for those around them. Preaching, teaching, leadership, administration, and all gifts were to be employed patiently, kindly, with contentment and endurance (13:4–7).

Though out of direct context, it is not difficult to see why so many couples would want Scripture from 1 Corinthians 13 on their wedding invitations or programs. Paul described the basis of a great family! And the same can be said for a great church—one that has flipped the script from self-centeredness to giving itself away as Christ did.  Full of themselves and clawing for status, some churches have yet to realize that the spiritual riches they have received can only be enjoyed when given freely to those in need, like orphans.