Reporter Julia Duin suggests that churches somehow conned families into adopting children without warning them about the challenges they might encounter. “Parents,” she writes, “now say that the churches that encouraged them to adopt in the first place aren’t there for them now.” In particular, she says, parents weren’t prepared for the mental-health issues that the children in their care might have.

For some, churches are always the problem. Despite decades of efforts to recruit, train, and support families to foster and adopt children who have been neglected, abused, or abandoned, churches still get the blame when things go wrong. Some of these attacks are drearily predictable. Writers like Kathryn Joyce have made careers out of suggesting that Christians are engaged in child-trafficking, and that the only reason they want to take in orphans is to gain more adherents for the faith. But the most recent attack on churches—in the form of a feature-length article in Newsweek—is perhaps the most absurd yet.
Reporter Julia Duin suggests that churches somehow conned families into adopting children without warning them about the challenges they might encounter. “Parents,” she writes, “now say that the churches that encouraged them to adopt in the first place aren’t there for them now.” In particular, she says, parents weren’t prepared for the mental-health issues that the children in their care might have.
This is a story that might have been written a quarter of a century ago, when Americans faced the aftermath of a rise in international adoptions. Christians had been adopting children from places like Romania, where they had endured neglect in institutions and had developed severe attachment disorders as a result. Just two years ago, in fact, The Atlantic ran a moving piece on the subject, describing a child named Izidor who was adopted from a Romanian institution at the age of 11 in 1991. He was never able to adapt to live in the home of the San Diego family who took him in. Ultimately, his violent outbursts and their inability to afford a psychiatric hospital for him led him to move out at the age of 18. As he told the author, “I’m not a person who can be intimate. It’s hard on a person’s parents, because they show you love and you can’t return it.” In the mid-to-late 1990s, the news was full of stories about such damaged adopted children. Indeed, more than one parent tried to send their child back.
So troubling were these experiences that child-development experts developed a program about 20 years ago to help kids who had experienced this trauma to learn how to function in a family. Foster parents and child-welfare systems around the country now use Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI) to help children adopted internationally and from foster care.
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Written by T. M. Suffield |
Saturday, July 13, 2024
We should be expecting our faith to touch and change every aspect of our lives. We should expect the Bible to provide wisdom for every decision we’re making, even if this is often more about developing wise lives and minds so that we can make godly decisions. Which means that our Christian formation should touch all of life. 

I’ve claimed the UK church is in a discipleship crisis, taking in our lives, our communities, and our minds. What does the first one of those look like?
When you stick ‘-ship’ on the end of something you end up systematising a phenomenon and developing a ‘science’ (in the sense of a body of knowledge). We see this in ‘leadership’ for example. A similar thing has happened with ‘discipleship.’
Is it good and right that some people talk about how we learn to follow Jesus? Yes. That’s what I’m doing after all, I’m sketching the contours of ‘discipleship.’ But, it isn’t a ‘thing’ we do as though we added it onto the rest of our life. It is life.
To use a less familiar term to help us think about these things together, I tend to call discipleship ‘Christian formation.’ The point is to be formed towards Jesus. The means is the question at hand.
Most of us picture discipleship in a very particular way. In a more cerebral conservative evangelical world that might look like the acquisition of knowledge about the Bible. In my charismatic evangelical world(s) it’s less likely to, even in the more conservative corners. Typically, it tends to involve exploring your heart and emotions and finding idols to rebuke and crush.
Both are good and godly, both are not the whole story. In both settings the most likely context people imagine for discipleship is one-on-one, probably in a coffee shop.
These sorts of conversations are great, they’re key to friendship as well as to receiving wisdom and direction. Though we should remember that male friendship tends to be side-by-side rather than face-to-face. It’s good to read the Bible with a friend, it’s good to talk about your heart. They are not the sum of discipleship. They aren’t really discipleship at all, they’re conversations about discipleship most of the time (this is less true if you just read the Bible together). Following Jesus is what you do the rest of the time.
Our crisis of discipleship is not helped by us thinking that following Jesus is a Christian activity that we add to a life of activities. Formation is just becoming more like Jesus as you live your life. Which is both simpler and much more all-encompassing. The faith touches everything and you can do everything Christianly.
Sometimes this sort of suggestion is mocked by accepting that you can do certain high culture jobs, especially academic ones, in explicitly Christian ways, but how can you sweep the road Christianly? A road is swept, or it isn’t.
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Part of the wisdom of the Fifth commandment is ensuring that as the son learns to give praise and honor to his mother, he would absorb sympathetic love from her witness of piety and grace towards her superiors and through that would learn much towards how he is to care and provide for those God might one day grant him to serve in leadership both in the home and in the church. We teach so much by our own example, particularly when we seemingly gain nothing from the transaction. 

Our catechism questions for today are going to start at the bottom and work their way up. As we have noted before the language here may be somewhat uncomfortable for us. This is because we live in an egalitarian age and the WLC was written in a more biblical time. Part of the tenor of the fifth commandment is that there is hierarchy, and that it is good. Everyone can’t be the same, and if society (including the Church) is to be rightly ordered than it is important that all men and women understand and know their role. A well-oiled and fabricated machine will run forever if this cog and that cog stay where they are supposed to. The second a flywheel decides it would be a better fit as a cylinder then your steam engine is going to go kablooie.
God has formed each human with dignity, respect, and purpose. Christians do not base their love and care for individuals upon fleshly categories of large or insignificant, or utilitarian ideas of what can this person do for me. All people great and small are made in His image and deserve the same benevolent passion regardless of where they might fit in His kingdom. That being said one of the sins mentioned below that it would be good for us to consider as we read the questions and answers for today is the transgression of “. . .envying at, contempt of, and rebellion against, [a superior’s] persons and places. . .”. Humility, thanksgiving, and contentment are the marks of a committed believer in Jesus Christ and they more so than in maybe any other context come into play when it is time be gracious in obedience to God’s design for us in this life, so that we might be ready and able to enjoy the plan He has for us in the life to come. We’re to be who God made us.
As we meditate on that let’s go to the Q/A’s:
Q. 127. What is the honor that inferiors owe to their superiors?
A. The honor which inferiors owe to their superiors is, all due reverence in heart, word, and be­haviour; prayer and thanksgiving for them; imitation of their virtues and graces; willing obedi­ence to their lawful commands and counsels; due submission to their corrections; fidelity to, de­fence, and maintenance of their persons and authority, according to their several ranks, and the na­ture of their places; bearing with their infirmities, and covering them in love, that so they may be an honor to them and to their government.
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