Together For Adoption - Session Six - Russell Moore

Russell Moore is a unique man. He is exceptionally articulate and winsome and his influence in the evangelical world is surely to increase. I fully welcome it. He is a voice that needs to be heard. If you don’t have his book, Adopted For Life, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

The title of Russell Moore’s message was “Adoption and The Renewal of Creation”.

Dr. Moore began his message by telling the story of being struck with the silence of the Russian orphanage where he picked up his two adopted boys. Think of it, a building full of babies and it’s silent. The reason for the silence is that babies will eventually learn that if they cry and no one comes, crying doesn’t accomplish anything and they will be quiet.

He recounted that his boys remained silent with them for most of the time during the days that he and his wife were there with them at the orphanage until the day they had to leave and go home without them waiting for the Russian government to process all the paperwork. They would come back to get them a few weeks to months later.

On that day when they had to leave, he heard his boys scream for the first time. He said it was the most “horrifyingly beautiful thing he had ever heard” because he knew that his boys knew that the Moores were their parents. This showed him what the ABBA cry of the Christian is all about.

Dr. Moore claims that we need to teach our churches what this primal scream of horror is all about if we are ever to grow ministries that care for orphans.

If the orphan care movement is going to be successful, it cannot be a movement. It has to bubble up out of real churches. It’s can’t be a special interest group competing with other groups. If it becomes a group movement like Homeschoolers, then it is not calling us to what the doctrine of adoption is about in the first place. We are not adopted because of what we have done based on deeds, how cool we are for adopting, or for what we have accomplished. We cannot get prideful and frustrated by those who don’t “get it” or share our vision of adoption care but rather we know that we are saved by grace and so we can extend grace to those who “don’t get it”.

Mission of adoption has to start with a unity of the church. If you don’t recognize the reality of the church as family, then how will they understand the adoptive family? The orphan care movement will explode when we no longer have to talk about white and black churches, or rich and poor churches. As a church, we have to understand ourselves as family not defined by blood lines or accomplishments. If we can start here then we’ll get physical adoption.

This is our identity that is crucified and resurrected. We have to understand this identity. As a Church, we need to scream as we ache for a fully made new identity that we begin to now model. Those who have been brought into the family of God start to look around at all the squaller we are in and we along with the creation say, "I know this is not all there is and oh God please bring it more fully revealed and actualized".

Adoption and orphan care is not about finding babies for infertile people. Adoption and orphan care is about saying to the powers of this age, "you can’t have them", because Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Based on Darwinian theory we shouldn’t love them, but we love them because of the Spirit of Christ.

We have to repent of not being broken over spiritual orphans, all people who are far from Christ. Many are marching towards a fatherless eternity and God wants us to scream for the Spirit for them.