A significant AP article describes well both the big picture and the personal reality of the dramatic changes seen in adoptions coming from China over recent years.   Just a few years ago, most adoptions from China were of healthy, infant girls; and the wait time was often between 1-2 years or less.  Today, wait times have skyrocketed to 3-4 years or more.  Equally significant, an increasing percentage of adoptions from China are of children with special needs—from repairable heart defects and cleft palates to much more serious issues.

Some of the factors behind these changes are positive, including apparent increases in domestic adoption rates and a relaxing of China’s infamous “one child” policy, which prompted many boy-seeking parents to abandon newborn girls.  Such developments can be celebrated.  But it is also believed that the Chinese government may be intentionally increasing wait times and limited adoptions of non-special needs children, in part to diminish the impression that China has an “orphan crisis.”   To the extent that such policies essentially relegate healthy children to life in an institution, they are tragic.  Even so, there’s every reason to rejoice that many American families are rising to this new challenge.   Adopting a child with special needs should never be done lightly or without serious deliberation.  But for families prepared to do so, such adoptions mirror God’s love like almost nothing else in the world.

Can you think of moments when your heart has been stabbed by the plight of an orphan?  A short-term mission trip?  A story on CNN?   Something written by Tom Davis?  I’d say “yes” to all three.

In such moments, I experience deep ache, sorrow…as well as gratitude that God has finally pierced my often-calloused heart enough to get me to feel at least a small bit of what so many children live with every day.

But there’s a danger in such moments….

Catch the full guest blog from Jedd Medefind on “The Danger of Caring for Orphans” and also a new contest promoting Summit VI on the blog of Tom Davis, a keynote speaker at Summit VI.

In churches across America, entrepreneurial orphan advocates are creating remarkable local initiatives to engage their churches in caring for orphans.  One very significant such venture is “Hope for 100” at Green Acres Baptist Church in Tyler, TX.

Started by businessman Rocky Gill (yes, a true entrepreneur in both ministry and the corporate world), Hope for 100 launched in January 2009.  Its ultimate goal was clear:  to help one hundred children find permanent, loving homes through families in Green Acres Bible Church.  Today, the goal is within reach, with 93 children having joined families over the past 15 months or soon to be placed.

Hope for 100 includes five primary elements:

• Raising awareness of the plight of the fatherless.
• Issuing a specific challenge to the Church to care for a targeted number of orphans.
• Beginning to match interested families with families who have already answered the call to be foster or adoptive families to give guidance and encouragement.
• Providing an array of opportunities to care for orphans through an Ongoing Orphan Care Ministry.
• Helping provide the necessary funds to families seeking to adopt.

The vision for Hope for 100 doesn’t stop with Green Acres.  Rocky has teamed up with Alliance member organization, the ABBA Fund, to help other churches start their own versions of Hope for 100.  This includes the option of creating ABBA Fund “adoption support funds” that provide financial support from a local church community to adoptive families.  (The ABBA fund charges nothing to churches for this service.)

You can learn a bit more about Hope for 100 at their website, including video of an impactful sermon given by Green Acre’s Pastor, Dr. David Dykes, challenging their church community to reflect God’s heart for the orphan.

Towers magazine’s March 22 edition includes an interview with Alliance President Jedd Medefind on orphan care and adoption ministry and the church.

TOWERS: If you were a pastor in a church wanting to promote an orphan care culture, what things would you do and say?

MEDEFIND: You can always begin with Scripture because God’s heart for orphans is so clear. That should be the wellspring of orphan ministry, and all ministry, as we expose people in the church to the fact that caring for orphans in their distress is a central part of following Christ.

Second, an orphan care culture becomes particularly powerful when pastors are modeling it. When a church sees a pastor that has adopted kids or is somehow involved with the foster system or in other ways is caring for orphans, then it is just natural for people to begin modeling that.

A third thing I would emphasize is the importance of focusing not just on process, but on the journey. The process is the paperwork, the finances and the preparation to adopt. That is very, very important. However, the journey of a life with a child— everything prior to the adoption, in the adoption and for decades afterwards — is part of what adoption means and the church has a role in all of that. The church especially has a role in ministering to adoptive families after they adopt, supporting them through difficult times: everything with help with childcare to counseling if there are very difficult issues. So, I would argue that a full adoption culture includes support not just of process, but of community wrapping around the adoptive family to love them through all the ups, downs, joys and challenges of adoption….

Read More in Towers Magazine (the final page).

Amidst the intense controversy of the health care bill signed into law by President Obama yesterday, there’s at least one provision every orphan advocate can cheer.  The adoption tax credit was preserved for another year…and increased in value!

To encourage and support adoption, the adoption tax credit was expanded by President Bush and Congress in 2001.  This increased the value of the credit from $5,000 to $10,000, and indexed it for inflation (meaning the credit would increase each year to keep up with inflation.)  For 2010, its value had risen to $12,170.  However, the 2001 increase was scheduled to “sunset” at the end of 2010.  This would mean that any adoptions finalized after December 31, 2010 would be eligible for—at most—a credit of only $5,000.

This sunset has now been extended one year.  That means that it will need to be extended again before the end of 2011.  For the present, however, this extension comes as very welcome news for families considering adoption or in the adoption process.

Specifically, the provisions contained in the health care bill include:

• The current adoption tax credit has been extended until the end of 2011;
• The value of the adoption tax credit has been increased from $12,170 to $13,170.
• The increase is “retroactive,” meaning that any adoption occurring after January 1, 2010 is eligible for this higher credit.
• The credit is now refundable.   This means that even families that owe zero taxes can receive the full tax credit in the form of a tax refund to help with their adoption-related expenses.

To read the legalese in the bill itself, see page 903 of 906 here.

Russell Moore and the first-rate team at Southern have released the audio and video from their Adopting for Life Conference.  You can hear or see a keynote address from Alliance President Jedd Medefind, as well as tremendous content from a host of other presenters.  These include Dan Cruver, Maridel Sandberg, Andy Lehman, Jason Kovacs, Tera Melber, Russell Moore, and much more, including an excellent plenary Q & A.

CBS News providing a compelling window into the needs of foster youth in Montgomery, AL.   Some may read into the coverage an unnecessarily attempt to pit inter-country adoption against domestic adoption.   Even so, it raises a critical point:  families that find themselves freshly stirred by Haiti to the possibility of taking in an orphan may ultimately discover that the need they are called to fill is closer to home.

The article relates that no children from the Brantwood Children’s Home in Montgomery, AL have been adopted in the past 4 years.  This is a tragedy.  But alongside this tragedy is hope that the CBS news crew may know nothing about.  In communities across the country, from Florida to Kentucky to Texas to Arkansas to Colorado, Christians are opening their homes as never before to welcome in foster children—via both foster care and adoption.   All of these church-centered efforts, led by members of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, will be highlighted at Summit VI…and the vision will continue to spread.

The needs—both across the sea and close to home—are tremendous.  The good news is that the Church is rising to respond!

Although a lengthy read, the following blog post paints a stark portrait of realities on the ground in Haiti, mingling anguish at the pain with reminders that we can act in meaningful ways on behalf of Haiti’s people.  It  was written by Dieula Previlon, the  International Initiatives Pastor at Irving Bible Church (IBC) and a native of Haiti.   IBC is a member of the Christian Alliance for Orphans, and Dieula recently returned from time in Port au Prince with the Haiti Orphan Relief Team.

For Christians committed to loving kids in the U.S. foster system, a story in today’s Denver Post may be one of the best news reports of the year.  The story recounts information conveyed on a prior Alliance blog post, describing how the number of children awaiting adoption in the Colorado foster system has been cut from nearly 800 in 2008 to only 365 today.

In what may be a surprise to some, the article is explicit about the driving force behind this amazing success:  Christians across the state who’ve opened their homes to kids who’d been growing up in the foster system.  The article highlights the tremendous work of Focus on the Family’s “Wait No More” campaign, which has worked with hundreds of churches to rally thousands of Christians to consider adoption from the foster system.  Other Alliance members, from  Project 1.27 to Bethany Christian Services, have played a key role in this success as well.  (Each of these groups will be sharing about their work, and how to replicate it, at Summit VI.)

Imagine if the Church in America could be known as the people who help find a permanent home for every last child in the U.S. foster system.  Colorado proves this is not as impossible as some might think…

Two news items—one via blog and the other a newspaper report—came on the same day recently.  It would seem that their jarring contents must be coming from different parts of the world.  But both come from Haiti.

From Paul Myhill’s blog:

“I need to tell you something,” the teary-eyed girl said to Campus Crusade’s country director for Haiti, Esperandieu Pierre, during his recent visit to one of the tented camps near a hospital in Port-au-Prince.

The nine year-old orphan had been raped by multiple men.

After taking her to the hospital, Esperandieu was told by the nurse that the rape of a child, especially an orphan, is now a “common event” that she sees daily…

On the same day as this post, an article in the Wall Street Journal began:

PORT-AU-PRINCE, Haiti—In the aftermath of the earthquake, scores of unaccompanied Haitian children are living in fetid tent camps here. A few miles away, Dixie Bickel, an American nurse, is having trouble filling dozens of empty beds at her tidy orphanage.

Haiti’s welfare agency stopped sending kids there on the advice of the United Nations Children’s Fund, or UNICEF, Ms. Bickel says. The UN agency worries that many children have been temporarily displaced by the quake. Putting them in orphanages like Ms. Bickel’s could lead to adoptions overseas that separate them from family here …

What Can We Conclude?

The simple truth is that commitment to family reunification and other in-country efforts to care for orphans should not be viewed as contradictory to viewing inter-country adoption as the very best option for some children.  The tension between the two needs to be shown for what it is:  a false dichotomy.

Certainly, if there is a reasonable chance that a child could be reunited to with living parents, that option should be the first priority.   No child should be taken out of a country in the immediate aftermath of disaster, unless he or she was known to be an orphan before the disaster struck.  I have little doubt that Dixie Bickel shares this perspective as well.

In reality, however, the pretext of protecting children from human trafficking or other evils is actually locking them into situations that are tremendously unsafe.   It is time for the U.N. to stop presenting inter-country adoption and reunification as mutually exclusive activities.

Reunification efforts should be aggressive and thorough.  Meanwhile, efforts can also be initiated that will identify those children that truly have no options for being raised in a family locally.  Such children should not be relegated to life on the streets or in an orphanage simply because many—including myself—hope that someday there will be much better options for in-country care than now exist.  We should pursue that future doggedly.  But until every child can be part of a family in Haiti, we cannot allow pursuit of this dream to force a generation to grow up without one.