Restoring Christian Care for Orphans

I’ve begun to assemble my post on why those with post-graduate degrees support Obama, but that will have to wait for tomorrow.  I just got off the phone with Jedd Medefind, who briefly headed President Bush’s office of faith-based initiatives.  Jedd is an exceptionally articulate, intelligent, good-hearted man who now heads the Christian Alliance for Orphans.  He addressed all of the questions I posed, including one or two that put him in a tough spot.  The interview will be published soon (I would guess tomorrow).

But when I asked him about his work for the Christian Alliance for Orphans, Jedd became positively lyrical.  He said:

I am tremendously excited about the way I see Christians all across American and beyond waking to the plight of the orphan. This is a concern that defines the Christian church from its ancient days. In ancient Rome, children were often abandoned and exposed as a form of infanticide. Christians were particularly well known for going outside the city walls, finding them, rescuing them, and often raising them on their own.

This reputation for caring for orphans in their distress is something that has defined the church in its finest hours. I really see the church in America recapturing this reputation, from churches in Florida and Colorado and Arkansas that are really taking a primary responsibility for children in the local foster system – to families that are adopting orphans around the world – to American churches that are partnering with churches overseas to care for orphans in their communities across the globe. I see Christians again taking the mantle of caring for the fatherless. It’s beautiful work, and it transforms not only the children who are loved, but everyone involved. It changes the hearts of individual Christians, it draws the broader church community from a religion of self-actualization to a vibrant sacrificial faith, and it really can transform a watching world as well as the world sees the gospel embodied in Christians caring for children that have no one else to stand for them. So I feel tremendously privileged to be a part of this through the Christian Alliance for Orphans, and everything that’s happening in churches and communities all across the country.

Christian opposition to abortion has always carried with it a necessary — but not always realized — correlate: we must be thoroughly willing, deeply and sacrificially willing, to care for those who have lost their parents or whose parents cannot care for them.  We should be a people who are known as the protectors of the fatherless and motherless.  Do you see that happening in your church — even in yourself?

Learn more at www.christianalliancefororphans.org and www.orphansunday.org .