May 2011 – What does it mean to be a mother? What does it take? Is it the nine month period of carrying a child or going through labor that can take several hours? Can it be that a mother is the woman who blows on a boo-boo to make it feel better and chases away the scary monsters from the dark closet? Or is it perhaps something as simple and fascinating as a woman who loves a child more than her own life?

A mother’s desire
Robin Pennington, mother of six and grandmother of ten, has been blessed to experience both childbirth and adoption. She says that while the experiences are different, the love is the same. Robin and husband Paul always knew they wanted a large family. They were devastated when they discovered their likelihood of having biological children was slim. However, defying medical logic, they quickly had their first daughter.

After Elizabeth was born, the family started seriously considering adoption. Miraculously, Robin got pregnant again, but that pregnancy was an ectopic pregnancy. So at age 23, Robin and Paul were left without the ability to have children except through in vitro fertilization, which they decided was not for them.

At the end of her rope, with the desire for more children but a body that could not produce them, Robin said, “I went to the Lord and said, ‘I know You are a big God and I know You can do anything, but I don’t think You can do this. I don’t think you can give people like us, who don’t have a lot of money, a bunch of babies.’ But He did.”

After only a few weeks of being involved with a domestic adoption agency, the Penningtons brought home a beautiful baby girl named Kit.

About 18 months later, Robin’s desire for another child began to grow unbearable. She felt called by God to be the mother of a large family. However, she said, “I felt guilty for wanting the very thing God called women to. I thought I didn’t have the right to ask Him to do this again because He had already been so gracious to give us two children.”

The Penningtons then called the adoption agency again. Robin told the agency that if they ever had a hard-to-place child, he or she would be welcome in their family, especially a child of a different race. The next day, 10-year-old Seth was brought to the agency and the Penningtons received the call. Seth became their third child.

They took seven years to raise three children already under their roof. During that time, the couple experienced a paradigm shift. Robin recounted, “Initially, our adopting the first two was to have a family. Then we started really having an ache for the orphan and the child that needed a family. So our second three really came out of a desire to give a child a family.”

That desire led the family to Korea where they adopted a little boy named Ethan and then Hope, who was their first special needs child. Lastly came Noah. And as Robin quickly points out to anyone, “They are all our real children. God brought some through adoption and some through biological means, but before the foundations of the earth they were all ours.”

A family’s desire
Keith and Coni Gann, employees at AFA, have also adopted internationally. They already had three sons but felt the call to have more children. Coni wanted to adopt from Russia because her grandfather was from Russia. On April 20, 2001, the couple contacted an adoption agency. After they hung up the phone and while they were sleeping, the Russian adoption program was shut down. Coni said, “That’s when we decided on China. Our interim pastor had adopted a child from China and, in fact, he was the only reason we knew anything about international adoption at all.”

Once the papers were filled out for China, Russia opened again. Keith recounted: “I was told that our papers for China had not been sent off yet and we could easily switch them over for a Russian baby. While I was thinking about it, we went to the flea market in Tupelo, Mississippi. While we were shopping I heard a father behind a trailer say, ‘Come on kids, let’s go.’ Then I heard, with the most Southern drawl you can imagine, two kids say, ‘We’re coming, Daddy.’ When they came around the trailer, I saw they were Asian. That stuck with me and affirmed for me that we could do this.”

In October 2001, the adoption agency in China called the Ganns with news of a toddler in the village of Kunshan. Five weeks later, they went to pick up Jaiden. When they returned home, Coni told her husband she never wanted to do it again; until six months later when she did.

This time they decided they wanted a special needs child from China. Keith wanted a boy, Coni wanted a girl. When Coni asked her husband what it would take for him to accept a girl, his answer was, “She has to come from Kunshan.” The problem was that Kunshan only releases 10-20 children a year for international adoption. The family was told the chances of adopting another child from that town was 1 in 1.2 million.

However, Keith had another concern. He is an accountant and works with numbers all day. He knew how much it would cost to do another adoption and knew the money wasn’t in their wallets. But, in faith, they filled out the paperwork. During that time, Keith also filed their taxes. When he finished, the tax return was within $10 of what they needed. Eleven months later, Jaiden’s little sister Jali was added to the family.

A minister’s desire
For the Penningtons, a vision for ministering to orphans took root on Paul’s first trip to Korea. He said, “When I was in Korea to get Ethan, the agency took me to see the orphanage housing children who were not adoptable internationally. This was actually the first orphanage I had seen. They had several buildings and I was taken on a tour by an Australian family. A little girl of about three or four went on the tour with us. She kept grabbing my pants leg and every few minutes would say something in Korean. At the end of the tour, I asked my guide what she was saying. With tears in her eyes, my guide told me that little girl was calling me Daddy. That is when I realized that as the most affluent Christians to live in the 20th Century, we didn’t understand what James 1:27, that pure religion is looking after orphans and widows, is about at all.”

Through wanting to answer God’s call to minister to orphans, the Penningtons started a ministry called Hope for Orphans. In 2003, the ministry partnered with Family Life and has been growing ever since. The goal of the ministry is to equip and motivate churches to minister to orphans and children waiting for adoption.

At www.hopefororphans.org, the ministry suggests 10 ways every Christian can minister to orphans or waiting children. The first step is to pray for them individually and as a church.

Provide for their needs. Find an orphanage close to your home. A quick phone call can give you all the information you need to make a run to your neighborhood clothing store and pick up clothes, toys, games, books or Bibles.

Support those who support the kids. Many foster families go unnoticed in society and even in churches. The simple act of mowing the yard, bringing dinner or offering to babysit could be just the encouragement the foster parents need.

Protect them from harm. This is a step beyond helping foster families and offering to become one. Whether long-term or on an emergency basis, open your home to children who have no place to lay their head tonight. Show them they are valuable and cared for. Equally important is to raise money and support local children’s homes to help get kids off the streets.

Adopt them into your family. Open your home to a young child who might otherwise never experience a family. Remember that many children simply graduate out of the system. They become 18 and are, for lack of a better way of saying it, pushed out onto the street. Welcome these young adults into your home and offer to disciple them, love them and care for them. Help them get into college or find a job.

God’s desire
James 1:27 says, “Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world.”

As Christians in 21st Century America, by nature, we are consumers. Americans tend to look at the world in terms of goods and services. People make a payment and expect to receive some product or satisfactorily completed job in return. That view must change in terms of adoption.

Paul explains one of the first lessons taught by Hope for Orphans to parents who want to adopt is that, “First of all, this is not a transaction. This is not goods and services. This is about a person. When you think about the money, remember that you were lost, you were dead in your sins. The Bible says that Jesus came to pay a ransom. When he paid that, He was paying our adoption fee.”

An old adage says, “God helps those who help themselves.” Adoption is one way God helps those who cannot help themselves. Throughout the New Testament, Jesus paints all believers as orphans who are adopted into the family of God. And once believers are grafted in, never again will they be orphans. As the contemporary Christian group Avalon points out in the song “Orphans of God,” “There are no strangers, there are no outcasts. There are no orphans of God. So many fallen, but hallelujah, there are no orphans of God.”

Paul finds great motivation in that. He says, “The only real motivation that should override everything for why potential parents should consider adoption, even over infertility, is the desire to give a child a family and meet his needs unconditionally. When Jesus adopted us He didn’t come to us because we were a project for Him. He didn’t come to us because we had anything to offer. It is grace. Today’s adoption is a living picture of the Gospel.”  

Hope for Orphans has the resources you need to learn more about adoption or to launch an adoption ministry in your church.

• Launching an Orphans Ministry in Your Church – a paperback with DVD: $9.99
• If You Were Mine – a DVD-based workshop: $99.99.
• Welcome Home: Eight Steps to Adoption – a guide to the adoption process: $2.99
• Free articles and online videos about adoption

Order resources at www.hopefororphans.org or by calling 972-941-4431.

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BY THE NUMBERS
The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services publishes a yearly study titled “Trends in Foster Care and Adoption.” In it, the DHS documents the number of children in foster care during the federal fiscal year, October 1 to September 30.

In the beginning of FFY 2009, there were 424,000 children were already in the foster care system of the U.S., and 255,000 were added. Only 57,000 children were adopted. By the end of the year, over 800,000 children were served by the foster care system in the U.S. alone. That means seven percent of the children in foster care during 2009 were given a family.

The United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) is the international authority on orphans and adoption. The organization defines an orphan as a child who has lost one or both parents. By that definition, there are currently between 143 and 210 million orphans worldwide.

Approximately 250,000 children are adopted each year with 14,505,000 exiting foster care systems by turning 16 (18 in the U. S.). That means every 2.2 seconds a child graduates from a foster program with no family, according to a recent UNICEF study. Seventeen percent of orphans worldwide were adopted in 2009.