God Call

It was a very exciting day at church yesterday. As a part of our Mother’s Day celebration, we launched the Grand Family Adoption Fund. This fund is designed to financially help those of our church membership that would like to adopt domestically or internationally. Our Lead Pastor, Jeff Crawford, along with the testimony of his wife, Julie, preached a message on adoption in which they announced their intention to adopt internationally from the country of Colombia. Jeff just posted on his blog his list of reasons why he chose to adopt. I highly recommend jumping over there to read it.

My prayer through all of this – my wife and I deciding to adopt, our student pastor and wife announcing their decision to adopt, our pastor and his wife deciding to adopt, and the launch of the adoption fund – is that we will encourage and inspire others to adopt as well. Our pastor yesterday asked everyone to stand up that has been directly touched by adoption, and I was blown away by the amount of people. God is doing an incredible thing in our church. It is not happening because it is en vogue to adopt. It is happening because the Spirit of God is doing a gospel-centered, Great Commission work on our congregation right now.

We have also launched this fund, because we want everyone to be apart of the adoption process. Too many times, adoption is done in privacy. I acknowledge the fact that sometimes it should be done in such a manner, but I think the majority of the time it could be done with the full support of the church. When my family and I served on the mission field, the other missionary kids called me Uncle Scott and my wife was Aunt Jennifer. My boys called the other missionaries aunts and uncles, too. This is how it should be in our churches. We need to see that it does not just take a great set of parents to raise a child, but a whole church. This can be a beautiful thing when done with the process of adoption.

There are many members of our church, maybe even you as you read this, that are teetering on the edge of whether to adopt or not. My challenge to you is to quit asking the question, “Why?” and start asking the question, “Why not?” Instead of waiting for some mystical sign or audible voice from God to adopt, seek His Word which is written in black and white and available right now. Come at it from a different angle. Quit starting with, “I’m saying no until God tells me otherwise.” Start with, “I’m saying yes, until God shuts that door.”