Above: The Griffith Family
“It’s all your fault” with a smiley face was the message scrawled at the bottom of a Christmas card from Stephen and Kristine Yates to longtime friends and mentors Andrew and Lisa VanderMaas. Included with the card was a photo of the couple surrounded by a brood of five very young children — three of whom arrived via the state of Georgia.
Several years ago, around the time Stephen landed a job as assistant pastor at Intown Community Church in Atlanta, the Yateses welcomed their first foster care placement. But the decision to welcome nonbiological children into their home was made years earlier, while the couple was attending Crossroads Presbyterian Fellowship in St. Louis, where Andrew VanderMaas was then serving as senior pastor.
The VanderMaases had begun fostering and adopting children in the late 1990s, after losing two of four biological infants to a rare genetic disease. They say it was a natural outworking of their convictions: “If we’re going to be pro-life, we’re going to be pro-life for all of life, not only just anti-abortion,” says Andrew, who now pastors Christ Church PCA in Grand Rapids, Michigan. “We don’t just adopt for ourselves to fill our own needs, but to show a great picture of the gospel.”
“We were all spiritual orphans who had no father, but God adopted us into His family and now we have a spiritual father.”
By the time the Yateses, then in their 20s, met with them in 2010, the VanderMaases were parents to a troop of kids and teenagers: two biological children and five they had adopted out of foster care.
“We got to see the VanderMaases live it out,” says Kristine. “They gave us spaces to help them in different seasons and in different ways. Getting that realistic exposure to it helped us try it on.”
For Kristine, dinner at the VanderMaas’ modest home, and seeing as many as three children to a bedroom, was the turning point. That, coupled with sound teaching at Covenant Seminary and at Crossroads, moved them and several other seminary couples from being intrigued to actually fostering and adopting children who needed homes.
“I realize just how much theology and practice work together,” says Stephen. “We could preach a million sermons on justice, but walking through life with the VanderMaases was what brought us to this.”
“Awesome truths about God” had been illustrated by the VanderMaas’ “awesome” story, Stephen said. It all “clicked.”
Therefore, We Adopt
According to Barna Group research, there are 150 million orphans worldwide. That number consists of those who have at least one deceased parent. In response, 2% of American adults have adopted at least one child, either via an international adoption, a domestic U.S. adoption, or out of the U.S. foster care system. But among those who identify as Christians, that number is more than double, at 5%. And 3% of practicing Christians have served as foster parents.
Evidence suggests that PCA members and pastors are part of the trend.
“We have been adopted, therefore, we adopt,” says Mitch McGinnis, pastor of Westminster Presbyterian Church in Columbus, Georgia. “We were all spiritual orphans who had no father, but God adopted us into His family and now we have a spiritual father, and He calls us to care for widows and orphans and others who are disenfranchised.”
About three years after Mitch and his wife, Jawan, came to Westminster in 2005, a family showed up at the church who was adopting children from an orphanage in India. Mitch remembers that the wife’s passion for adoption inspired other church and community families and led to what has become a trend of orphan care in Columbus.
In 2012, Mitch and Jawan, who had three biological children, decided to open their home to foster kids. Of the nine children they have fostered, one — a little girl named Heavenly — came to them at 3 days old. They adopted her when she turned 4.
“If I as a pastor was going to be vocal on that [pro-life] issue in the church and the community, then I needed to be willing to say, ‘If you’ll have your kid and can’t take care of them, we’ll take them or help see that they’re taken care of,’” says McGinnis.
In the middle of this, McGinnis brought Brad Griffith on staff at Westminster as the worship director. He later became a ruling elder. It wasn’t coincidental that Griffith and his wife, Katie, were also foster and adoptive parents and had started a nonprofit called Clement Arts that had a mission to “encourage gospel-centered orphan care through the arts.” Through concerts, art galleries, and dance classes, money was raised to support families in the midst of adoptions, and provide low-cost classes to the adoptive or foster children of these families. Previously, Westminster had run an elementary school, which had since closed down, and the church gave the space to Clement Arts.
The focus given to orphan care at Westminster has recently paved the way for a new emphasis on caring for families who have children with special needs. In a church of about 80 members or regular attendees, seven of them are children with special needs, including some who have been adopted.
McGinnis explains: “Being open to adoption has also meant we are called into helping special needs kids. … I think it just goes hand in hand with loving your neighbor well, caring for orphans and widows and those who are hurting.”
Safe Haven
The call to care for the orphan has not only captivated smaller churches such as Westminster, but also larger congregations in the PCA as well.
Zack Owens, assistant pastor of children and families at Redeemer Church Jackson, Mississippi, and his wife, Kristen, might have chosen to adopt their third child anyway, but they can’t escape the reality that their church had normalized orphan care for them. Redeemer, a church of more than 1,000, was founded in 2004 by people who were living it out. People such as now assistant-to-the-pastor Steve Lanier and his wife, Sherry, who fostered 18 children, or another founding elder and his wife who adopted three children. To Owens, orphan care is just a part of Redeemer’s DNA.
To date, 17 families at Redeemer have adopted, and eight more have either fostered through the state or provided temporary homes for children through Safe Families. For the Owenses, who first experienced a failed adoption when their would-be son’s biological mother decided to parent, orphan care means willfully engaging with the world’s brokenness.
Other churches are doing the work of orphan care by caring well for the few foster or adoptive families in their communities.
“One thing that is very encouraging about the church culture of adoption/fostering of Redeemer,” Owens says, “is the acknowledgement of the grief and loss experienced in the adoption process: It is either an unwanted reality for a birth family or something that they chose out of love for their child. Advocacy for birth families affected by addiction, cultural loss and difficulty (particularly in transracial adoption), and non-demonization of birth families are very important to many of our adoptive families.”
Having a culture that is sensitive to orphan care has also led various members of the Redeemer community to engage with social problems that are tangentially related. For instance, one woman in the congregation — a foster mother — decided to start an advocacy group for fairer drug policies after she witnessed the ways that drug laws negatively impacted the families of some of the children she has fostered.
Not Without the Village
While there are churches such as Redeemer where numerous families are personally adopting or fostering, other churches are doing the work of orphan care by caring well for the few foster or adoptive families in their communities. So far, the Yateses are the only family at Intown who have taken in foster children, but they say that they couldn’t do it without the support of their church family.
“I wish there was more recognition of how essential support people are in our lives,” Kristine says. These support people include her sister and roommates who have set up a playset outside their apartment so the kids can come over whenever Stephen and Kristine need a break. Or friends who have emigrated from Kenya who bring over a week’s worth of food at a time. Or others who provide unofficial respite care so the couple can get away for a few days.
“There was one Sunday where a couple of church members walked around a corner and saw me (the children’s pastor) on the ground with our foster son who was absolutely having a rip-the-church-apart tantrum,” he says.
Kristine adds, “And they came alongside you and walked around with him.”