November-December 2005 – In the small town of Brenham, Texas, it’s not uncommon to see Kazakhstani children in cowboy boots, eating Blue Bell ice cream. Why? A local church began living out God’s Word. How? By establishing an orphan-care ministry, as advocated by FamilyLife’s Hope for Orphans.

“Hope for Orphans is an educating and exhorting ministry dedicated to supporting and helping the fatherless and connecting those children with loving, Bible-believing families,” as stated in His Heart, Our Hands, one of the ministry’s adoption resource publications. 

It is headquartered in Little Rock, Arkansas, and is a three-year-old facet of FamilyLife, a division of Campus Crusade for Christ, that functions as a national marriage and family ministry under the leadership of Dennis and Barbara Rainey.

The Raineys have a passion for adoption as do Paul and Robin Pennington, whose experiences are the foundation of Hope for Orphans. While adopting three children from Korea, the Penningtons recognized the need for Biblical resources on adoption and sought to involve their church by sharing pictures of Korean orphans.

“That led to our belief that there needed to be resources and workshops … to help Christian families understand a Biblical view of adoption … ,” Pennington explained. “Adoption agencies, Christian ones included, host informational meetings but some people always feel a little apprehensive … [as if the agencies] have a vested interest.”

Therefore, Hope for Orphans (not an adoption agency) joined FamilyLife as an objective third party with no vested interest, but with the vision to educate and inform Christians of their responsibility to care for orphans as set forth in Scripture.

Today, Pennington, who is the director of FamilyLife’s Hope for Orphans, and his wife have five adopted children and one biological child and are very passionate about ministering to orphans.

Ministry foundation
“I believe it’s very important to approach ministry from a Biblical perspective,” Pennington said. “So the basis of this ministry is … not about infertility … [and] it’s a lot more than being about adoption.

“It’s about God’s heart and [how] His Word reveals His character … , and if we want to be conformed into His image, we can’t ignore this area.”

According to James 1:27a (NIV), “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress. …”

“FamilyLife’s Hope for Orphans is really about being a connecting resource and an encourager to the church for God’s heart for the orphan,” Pennington explained, “and there are three main ways that we seek to be involved in that.” 

These ways, as described by Pennington, are through:

• Your Heart – “We seek to proclaim and illuminate what the Bible says about God’s heart for the fatherless and how He asks us, the Church, to join Him where He is working.”
• Your Head – “We provide … Biblical and practical information about adoption and how the local church can be involved in sustained adoption or orphan ministries.”
• Your Hands – “We introduce … how God is working to use believers in North America to meet the [physical, emotional, social, developmental and spiritual] needs of the orphans around the world.”

While a variety of resources are available on the ministry’s Web site (www.familylife.com) this tri-fold mission is specifically carried out through “If You Were Mine” adoption workshops, strategic partnerships, and local church orphans ministries.

“We fundamentally believe … that ministry flows through the local church,” Pennington said.

“Almost all churches in America now have a men’s ministry and a women’s ministry. Most have a prison and a singles ministry,” Pennington explained. “I even [know] one church that has a ‘Cooking with Jesus’ ministry, which is great. … But how many churches have an orphan or adoption ministry?”

Local church initiative 
Such spurred Pennington and his staff to establish a church-based adoption initiative in which they are aiming to launch 1,000 orphan-care and/or adoption ministries in local churches across America over the next four years.

Pennington said there are more than 500,000 children in U. S. foster care and somewhere between 50 and 70 million orphans worldwide. Of those millions, Pennington estimated that more than 25,000 orphans will be adopted internationally by Americans in 2005, with no more than 10,000 to 12,000 going to live in Bible-believing homes. By 2010, Pennington explained, the worldwide orphan population is expected to rise to 110 million. 

“We [as the Church] have the opportunity to introduce them [orphans] … to the Father of the fatherless,” Pennington explained. “We really believe that orphan/adoption ministry in the church is a tremendous opportunity to be obedient to God and [to] bring revival to the church and homes to the fatherless.”

Pennington echoed a Southern Baptist pastor when he said that five days of orphan ministry can be a better lesson in authentic Christianity than five years of preaching.

“So one of the things that I would argue is in a consumer-driven, relativistic, humanistic-growing America Christians need orphans almost as much as orphans need them. …,” Pennington explained. 

Over the last year and a half, nearly 20 churches recognized such needs and established orphan-care and adoption ministries in their churches. 

“And the wonderful thing is that … God has led them to do very different things,” Pennington said. 

From Romania …
For example, Scott Dewey, cross-cultural training director for Mile High Ministries, organized an orphan-care missions team in Anchor of Hope Church in Denver, Colorado. 

He and his family attend this approximately 200-member inner-city church which is usually thought to be on the receiving end when it comes to missions, but such is not the case due to the prompting of the Holy Spirit in Dewey’s life.

His life was changed after walking into a Romanian orphanage where 20 children were tied down to chain-link cribs that resembled cages in a small attic-like room deafened by silence. 

“That was one of the most sobering experiences I’ve ever had,” Dewey admitted. “Afterwards, I had nightmares for months.”

Although Dewey and others were allowed to untie, hold, sing to, and feed the children, that wasn’t enough for Dewey or the children.

“I had such a helpless feeling … ,” he said. “All that I could do was pray. … [After all] helping those in need is not a social work, it is a spiritual work.”

The Lord began to work through Dewey, and in 1999, he formed the Loving Arms Team, now made up of representatives from various churches in the community. Each year, the team travels to Romanian and hosts two seven-day camps for orphan boys who are abused and exploited. And every year, the Lord supernaturally provides the approximate $60,000 needed to cover the cost of the trip.

“We are allowed to take them for seven days … and love them,” Dewey said. 

Various team members also helped start a local orphan-care foundation in Romania.

“We provide both finances and volunteers, and [we] work in partnership with local Romanians,” Dewey added. “People who have been involved in the orphan-care ministries in our church, [it’s] totally changed their lives” – as it has the lives of Jay and Suzanne Faske and their fellow church members in Brenham, Texas – home to the famous Blue Bell ice cream.

To Texas … and beyond
The Faskes are parents to 14 children, 12 of whom are adopted. 

“God placed a desire in our hearts to adopt before we were even married,” Suzanne Faske explained. “The Holy Spirit has convicted us each time we have traveled to adopt our children that we are to continue to seek families for orphans, pray for them daily and do whatever we can to meet their spiritual, physical and emotional needs.” 

Their convictions led to action, and they began taking small steps within First Baptist Church of Brenham to raise awareness about adoption, and in the summer of 2003, a miracle took place.

“Our goal was to find families for six children,” Faske explained. “Within 48 hours, God had provided families for 30 and the funds to bring them to the U.S. [from Kazakhstan] for a summer camp program.”

Several families hosted the children with no intentions of adopting them, but before it was over, 35 young Kazakhstanis became Texans.

The couple has also founded Here I Am Orphan Ministries, designed to provide resources “for families to pray, be involved in mission work, and be advocates for orphans,” as well as Forever Families, an adoption support group within the ministry that hosts regularly scheduled events and fellowships for adoptive families. 

“We first worried that we could not have enough families participating, but now the challenge has changed to finding facilities that will accommodate so many children and their families,” Faske explained – a prime reason churches should not see small size, limited resources or other obstacles as a discouragement to orphan ministry. 

“Every church should become involved in orphan ministry, whether it is an entire church or a few individuals,” Faske advocated. “We have found that it only takes one or two passionate people, who have a heart for orphans, to motivate a church body.”

Couple this passion and motivation with the educational resources provided by Family Life’s Hope for Orphans, and Kazakhstanis in cowboys boots are only the beginning to a future of forever families.  

More resources
•  www.familylife.com or 1-800-FL-TODAY
•  www.orphanministries.com