Adoption: The Christian Alliance for Orphans

SixSeeds recently spoke with Jedd Medefind, the President of the Christian Alliance for Orphans. We spoke about the adoption movement in America, about how it’s changing, and about the challenges of adoption as well as the joys. Jedd, himself an adoptive father of a daughter from Ethiopia, lives in California with his wife and four children.

Tell me about Christian Alliance for Orphans.

The Alliance is a coalition that includes more than 80 organizations and a network of churches nationwide.  Each is doing their own tremendous work on behalf of orphans, but we’re also working together to inspire and equip Americans to care for orphans through adoption, foster care and global orphan initiatives.

So you encourage adoption?

Yes. What every child most needs is a loving family, so there’s no better potential outcome for an orphan.  At the same time, I’d urge caution:  adoption is a beautiful thing, but it’s not for everyone.

That’s true. That’s something we’ve tried to stress at SixSeeds during adoption month. Also, that there’s a hard side to adoption.

Yes. Every child’s journey as an orphan began with tragedy. Often it got worse from there. These kids carry real hurts. Some have bounced from home to home in the foster system for years. Others have lived on the streets or in institutions overseas, which can leave deep wounds that take much time and sacrifice to heal. That said, every adoptive child, like every child, is utterly unique.  Studies show that adoptive children tend to do very well over time, sometimes even better than biological children. It’s important to talk frankly about the great challenges, as well as the great joys, of adoption.

Do you think the adoption community is addressing these challenges?

Yes. I think the Christian adoptive movement has been undergoing an important maturing. It started with a lot of cheerleading for adoption. Today, it increasingly emphasizes both the joys and challenges of adoption.  It’s less about the process of adopting and more about a lifelong journey. After all, adoption really starts when you bring the child home. I compare it to engagement versus marriage. The adoption process, the paperwork, the waiting, and travelling, is just the engagement. Raising the child is the marriage.

I’d also add that churches are more and more realizing that adoption is done best in a context of community.  Not as an isolated family, but as a community of both adoptive families and others that will encourage, support, and aid each other in practical ways.

A while back, some religious leaders were saying that if every church in America adopted a child, we could end orphanhood. Is that doable?

Domestically, yes. There are a half million children in the United States foster care system. Many of those, of course, could be and perhaps should be reunited with parents or other relatives. So there are about 120,000 children in the US who are waiting to be adopted. If even a small percentage of churches took responsibility for these children, we could bring that number close to zero.

Numbers are harder to count internationally, but the UN estimates that there are about 163 million orphans in the world, defined as having lost one or two parents. There are 18.3 double orphans, that is missing both parents.  Yet even among these, many have relatives to go to.  So it’s entirely possible that if the church said, “These children are ours, they’re our responsibility,” we bring that number to zero. I’m talking about the global church, and not just the American church.

And this kind of vision is taking root in some places. In Colorado, the Christian community – and you can look this up in news outlets – has taken the number of children in their area waiting to be adopted from around 800 to less than 400. And they have a goal of all waiting children adopted by 2014. Clearly, there are hundreds of families doing the adopting here, but there are countless more involved in enabling and supporting them.   That’s the vision:  Christians caring for the orphan not in isolation but in community.

Thank you for talking to us today.

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