Together For Adoption 2010 - Session Two - Dave Gibbons - The Church as the Answer to the Foster Care Challenge

Do we have illusions when it comes to the church? How would Satan paralyze a church? Keep us busy thinking we are doing things when we are really doing nothing?

Do we live in an illusion?

Francis Chan gives the analogy from his family. He says, “What if I asked my daughter to go clean her room and I simply said, ‘Please go clean your room.’” What would you think if she came back and told me that she organized a small group and they talked quite a bit about what it means to clean a room. Or she came back and said that she knows what “cleaning” means in the Greek. Or that she went to a huge conference and got really pumped about cleaning her room yet failed to ever actually clean her room.

Is this the church?

At this point Dave had us all stand up and lift up one foot off the ground. This is a Jesuit practice. It was a symbolic gesture to demonstrate that they were always ready to go. They were always ready to move wherever God wanted them to go.

Why did Christianity rise so quickly in the early few centuries? When there was a pandemic in a city everyone would leave. The Christians stayed. They had one foot raised. They were actually doing it.

Who are we supposed to love?

Luke 10 - Who is my neighbor? It is someone actually not like you. That is your neighbor. Samaritans were not like Jews. That is why Jesus told them that story. They were to draw near to those not like themselves. This is how we should define “neighbor”.

Matt. 28 - We are called to love the nations. The nations are not all like us. We are to reach out to those who are far from us and very different from us.

Isaiah 58:4-7 - God calls us to pursue righteousness and justice. This is the kind of “fasting” that he desires. We can’t go through the religious motions.

James 1:27 - What is genuine religion? Caring for the weak. Orphans and widows. The second half of that verse talks about “the world” and the Greek word implies the value system of the world. If you are focused on the weak, then you will be able to fight the influence of the world in your life. Vice versa will be true as well. If you are influenced by the world you’ll be selfish and won’t care about the weak.

On any give day 1/2 million children move through the foster care system.

We can march for pro-life but what about those kids who do get born? Who is stepping up to care for them? Do we really embody James 1:27?

The new goal for the church should be zero orphans. Zero kids waiting for foster care. Zero widows suffering in isolation. Who cares how many people are in our churches if these number keep growing?!?! This is the metric we should be paying attention to because it shows that we actually understand true faith.