Adopted for Life by Russell Moore

If you are considering adoption or have adopted or are adopted, read this book.

If you have a family member or friend who is adopting and you want to know how to help them, read this book.

If you are a believer who wants to better understand your identity in Christ, read this book.

I’ve read numerous books on adoption over the years, and this is by far the best. Author Russell Moore starts with our adoption as believers into the family of God. His descriptions are beautiful and powerful and life-changing. Though I don’t agree with every single statement he makes, I still highly recommend this book.

Good stuff:

“In this book I want to call us all to consider how encouraging adoption–whether we adopt or whether we help others adopt–can help us peer into the ancient mystery of our faith in Christ and can help us restore the fracturing unity and the atrophied mission of our congregations.”

“Sometimes people will speak of children who’ve been adopted as prone to having an ‘identity crisis’ at some point in their lives….this kind of crisis of identity isn’t limited to children who’ve been adopted. All of us are looking to discover who we really are, whether we were born into loving homes or abandoned at orphanage doors, whether we were born into stable families or born, like our Lord, in a stable.”

“Imagine for a moment that you’re adopting a child. As you meet with the social worker in the last stage of the process, you’re told that this twelve-year-old has been in and out of psychotherapy since he was three. He persists in burning things and attempting repeatedly to skin kittens alive. He ‘acts out sexually,’ the social worker says, although she doesn’t really fill you in on what that means. She continues with a little family history. This boy’s father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather all had histories of violence, ranging from spousal abuse to serial murder….Think for a minute. Would you want this child?

Well, he’s you. And he’s me. That’s what the gospel is telling us. Our birth father has fangs. And left to ourselves, we’ll show ourselves to be as serpentine as he is.”

“Adoption would become a priority in our churches if our churches themselves saw our brotherhood and sisterhood in the church itself rather than in our fleshly identities.”

“The whole universe is now an orphanage.”

“We don’t believe that our new Father will feed us, so we hang on to our scraps and long for the regimented schedules of the orphanage from which we’ve come.”

“The real struggle for me shouldn’t be the occasional rude question about my son’s identity; it should be the ongoing question about my own.”

“Imagine if Christian churches were known as the places where unwanted babies become beloved children.”

“The contemporary Planned Parenthood movement was started by a woman named Margaret Sanger, who defended abortion rights on the basis of eugenics, the search for ‘good genes’ based on the racist and evolutionary notions of ‘social Darwinism’ prevalent in her day. Sanger’s grandson, Alexander, continues her viewpoint, updated with contemporary notions of sociobiology, in virulent opposition to the viability of an adoption culture–on Darwinist grounds. ‘Adoption is counter-intuitive from an evolutionary vantage point of both the biological mother and the adoptive parents,’ Sanger argues. ‘Adoption requires a person to devote time and resources to raising a child that is not genetically related. Adoption puts the future of a child in the control of a stranger.’ It’s easier for a woman to have an abortion, Sanger argues, or for a family to refuse to think about adopting because evolution and biology ‘conspire to thwart adoption. Evolution has programmed women to be nurturers of the children they bear.’ That why, the abortion industry heir contends, adoption ‘as the solution to the abortion problem is a cruel hoax.'”

“What better opportunity for you to model the God who adopts from every tongue, tribe, nation, and language and sets all the children together at the same table with the same inheritance and and the same love?”