An open letter to pastors & adoptive parents

I found this blog post on Mrs. Curmudgeon’s Facebook wall, and I appreciated how the author spoke frankly of the challenges peculiar to parenting adoptive children and gladly put those in the context of God’s grace to sinful parents and children. As I read, it seemed to me there are some fairly obvious similarities between pastoral ministry and parenting adoptive children.

Pastors and adoptive parents both bear absolutely no responsibility for the development of the people under their care until they come under their care, and in neither case does that make any difference for their responsibility thenceforth. If the previous pastor turned a blind eye to drunkenness and fornication, the new pastor still has to deal with those sins graciously and forthrightly, just as he can take no credit for the elders his predecessor so carefully trained. An adoptive parent can’t boast in his child’s winning smile, but still has to comfort her through screaming fits night after night. You don’t dance with those who brought you: you dance with those the Lord has brought to you.

Hence, both must operate entirely on the basis of God’s grace through the Cross of Christ. You can’t make a sinner be a good person, whether said sinner is your child or your congregant. You can only pray and try your best to forgive, be generous and open-hearted, and then confess your failure to minister to your child or congregant to a Savior whom you know to be merciful to both pastors and parents. Otherwise, not only will you break, you will break many bent reeds.

Parenting and pastoring, then, are both extremely long-term propositions. I’ve been in my call for fifteen years now, and in all honesty, some of the spiritual progress I’ve been privileged to see can only be measured in decades. (If any in my congregation are reading this, rest assured I’m not talking about you personally. You’ve been growing like a spiritual weed. Okay, maybe that’s not the most flattering metaphor.) Likewise parenting. I like to tell people, and need to tell myself more often, that we’re not raising children, but adults. Whether our children are a constant challenge or joy at this very moment, we won’t know how they’ve turned out until we need them to take care of us in our old age. Parenting and pastoring alike: not a race, not even a marathon; instead, a garden which must be cultivated, pruned, watered and covered year after year, season after season until the Lord calls us to lay all our labors down.

And so two twinned challenges. Parents, but especially adoptive parents, should most understand the challenges and joys of pastoral ministry; pray for and encourage your pastor accordingly. Pastors, more than any other in the average congregation, should most understand the challenges and joys of adoptive parenting, and should consider adopting children.