Wednesday, October 14, 2009

Starting A Church Adoption/Orphan Care Ministry

In the last few months I have received a fair bit of emails asking me for help in establishing a local church adoption/orphan care ministry. I would love to serve toward this end as much as I possibility can. If you are reading this and wondering what you can do to get the ball rolling at your church, you might want to consider downloading my proposal for the elders of our church. It might be a good jumping off point for you as you think through how you might enable orphan care at your church in an official sense. Feel free to copy and paste, add, subtract, whatever... as you see fit.

The next thing I would do would be to buy a copy of Adopted For Life by Russell Moore for every one of your pastors. There is a specific chapter in that book that deals with the local church and adoption/orphan care. Dr. Moore's book is one of the most winsome and articulately written books I have ever read. You won't be sorry on this one.

Lastly, partner with a ministry to help you manage the enabling of your people to pay for adoption via interest free loans that you would provide for them. Most people will get a huge tax refund for their adoption and can easily use that money to pay back their interest free loan. Your church would simply establish a fund (whatever amount you can) that would have a constant flow of people drawing from it and people paying back into it. At a certain point, based on the size of your church, the fund could be self sustaining. There are two organizations that I would recommend for this:
- The ABBA Fund
- Lifesong
Both links will give you info on how to get all this set up. Our church is working with ABBA Fund and have had a very positive experience.

Doing these three things should get you off and running. Any other questions? Feel free to email me at zachnielsen7ATgmailDOTcom

2 comments:

JessicainFlorida said...

Thank you so much, Zach, for sharing your proposal. I am in the early stages of introducing this at my church and this is a huge help!

You did a great job of blogging T4A, but the way. I really appreciate it.

- Jessica in Florida (a friend of Molly & Abraham's)

naturalnicky said...

Thank you, thank you, thank you. This proposal is a God send. I am in the very preliminary stages of developing an Orphan Ministry at my local church but I wasn't sure of how to arrange and present my thoughts on it. I prayed earlier today for God to show me how I could organize my proposal and I found your document. I feel so much better prepared to discuss this issue with the pastoral staff. Thanks again and I know that God will continue to bless your ministry.