From Saddleback’s Orphan Care Connection ministry:
How to START an Orphan Ministry in Your Church
S – Submit to God’s Word & pray
Gather together with other members of your church to study God’s Word and pray about the ways God wants you to care for orphans.

Study: God’s Heart for the Orphan
Pray: Download a 40 Day Prayerguide

T – [...]

Click on the image below for a PDF version of “The Forgotten Part of James 1:27″:

Together for Adoption’s Orphans Refuge mission team returned home from Ethiopia on June 19th. Below are some photos from the final two days of the trip.
I plan on posting a series of interviews with team members sometime within the next 2-3 weeks. The interviews will focus on the relationship between the gospel and caring for [...]

Join us on October 2-3 in Franklin, Tennessee, as we explore our adoption in Christ—what it means for us and for orphans. The good news of the Gospel is that God adopts those who have “no hope” and are “without God in the world” (Eph. 2:12). By the blood of Jesus, God graciously and amazingly [...]

Late last night the team began making its way back home from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. God provided the team members with the opportunity to visit a number of orphan care works over the past week. Joy McCarnan writes: “It has been a really full time here and it’s difficult to process all the thoughts [...]

Scotty Smith, one of our Conference 2009 speakers, writes these words of gospel-encouragement:
Because we are “in Christ,” all of our sins are forgiven, (past, present and future), not just the 4% we are aware of, but the “whole sin-enchilada”; God has already declared us to be righteous in his sight because he has “credited” to [...]

Sam Storms writes:
The biblical doctrine of adoption makes sense only when we remember that we are not God’s natural children. It is true that God is the Father of all men and women insofar as He is Creator. But many such “children” of God will spend an eternity in hell. One does not become a [...]

One of the Orphans Refuge team members, Joy McCarnan, writes:

Sunday morning, a few of the team members were able to meet with a worker from another orphanage, then visit yet another orphanage, all before the morning worship service. A team from Dallas Theological Seminary is currently ministering here at the international church we visited. The [...]

Adoption always involves suffering. Just ask any birthmother or a child who is one of three hundred orphans in a Chinese orphanage or an adoptive couple who has lived with infertility for years. There is no such thing as adoption without suffering.
The same thing is true of our adoption by God. The adoption to which [...]

Our mission team (pictured above) spent the day at Children’s Home Ethiopia / The Forsaken Children. Thanks to Joy McCarnan for these pictures from day one.

Joy McCarnan reports on our mission team’s activities on day one in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia:
This morning (of our first day in Ethiopia), we ate breakfast together (eggs with tomatoes and peppers, coffee, bread and jam) and then went to visit Children’s Home Ethiopia (CHE, which partners with the Memphis-based The Forsaken Children organization). CHE’s kids [...]