What Your Church Can Do

The call to involvement in adoption might look different in every church. Including adoption in the work of the church is limited only by our creativity and resolve. Churches can enlist the unique mix of gifts of their members to enhance and bring adoption awareness to their already existing ministries. Here are some practical steps your church might consider to support adoption.

• Encourage and support families who adopt waiting children, or consider adopting a child into your own family.
• Become a meeting place for a birth parent mentoring program.
• One church started an "Abraham and Sarah Fund" specifically for helping families with adoption costs.
• Find out about adoption procedures in countries where you already support missionaries.
• Invite an agency specializing in international adoption or waiting children to speak to your congregation.
• Study adoption in your women's circle or adult education program.
• Consider the financial needs of children in foster care or orphanages who need surgery or other medical care before being adopted.
• Invite a young woman who made an adoption plan for her baby to share her story.
• Enlist your youth group in short-term missions projects to help families with special needs children. One youth group built a wheelchair ramp for a family who adopted a child with physical challenges.

For more ideas on how your church can consider its call to involvement in adoption, see our resource:
"Seven Areas for Church Adoption Involvement"

About Presbyterians Pro-Life

This bulletin insert series has been made available to churches by Presbyterians Pro-Life. As an integral part of its ministry, Presbyterians Pro-Life seeks to equip and encourage the local church to support adoption. It is our belief that integrating adoption into our ministry and mission will do much to enhance a "return to the Biblical teaching concerning the sacred value of the family" and reaffirm PPL's commitment to "strengthening the bonds of family love and nurture." We firmly believe that the Church's strong involvement in adoption will do much to enhance its witness for the sanctity of life.

Churches can play a role in adoption by encouraging young women in crisis pregnancies to consider adoption, providing resources to couples who desire to build or grow their family through adoption, and helping children here and abroad who wait for permanent families. We publish written materials on adoption and network with pastors and lay people interested in adoption issues. Our hope is that churches on both a national and local level can discover ways to promote and support the institution of adoption.

We have created and compiled materials that are of assistance to lay persons, pastors, and congregations regarding adoption. It is vital to approach adoption from a distinctly biblical framework, as a God-ordained institution and not just as an aspect of social services. We want to encourage individual congregations and PPL chapters with concrete suggestions for active involvement in adoption.

Write to us for more information on adoption, to receive our newsletter, or for general information on the work of Presbyterians Pro-Life.

Presbyterians Pro-Life
Research, Education, and Care, Inc.
P.O.Box 11130
Burke, VA 22009-1130
(703) 569-9474
email: ppl@ppl.org
http://www.ppl.org/