I am utterly grateful for the opportunity that God is giving to our church to be involved in the ministry of Orphan Care. The next two days I will be attending the Christian Alliance for Orphans Summit VI with our Outreach Pastor, Kevin Allen. Our goal is to get information and learn from others in establishing this sort of ministry. So far the conference has been wonderful. The General Session was great! We heard from several speakers. Two I’ll mention are Doug Sauder from 4 Kids of South Florida and Tom Davis of HopeChest who gave some excellent talks. We worshipped with Peter Eide who told some touching stories through his music.
We attended our first session, Church-Based Orphan Ministry 101 - very insightful. I’ll be attending a session on church-based global orphan care and Kevin will be doing a session on church-based adoption ministry. There are so many sessions. We are focusing on those specific to church-based ministries.
Some key lessons learned so far:
- Approach our community with patience and urgency.
- Don’t ‘get drunk in “whine”
- Our effort is the Gospel embodied
- If we are motivated by the need alone, we will run out of gas – the need it too great. We must be motivated by the Gospel and God’s purpose to care for individual lives.
- The American church is predominantly a church about personal development. We must change that.
More later, stay tuned.