Many people have been asking me for an update on our adoption.  While I have sent our personal emails, I realized that I have not really posted much here on the blog.  We have SO appreciated the interest, prayer and support we have received from so many of you in respect to our adopting our first child from Ethiopia.

At this stage, our dossier is in Ethiopia and has (likely) been translated to use within the country.  The good news is that this means it is in the stack of applications from which children will be matched, meaning the next contact we are likely to receive will be a referral of a child.  The bad news- or rather, the tempering news is that this process could take up to a year or more.  So, we are in a waiting game.  Of course, it could happen sooner, so please pray with us that the process goes well.

One advantage of the delay is that it gives us more time to save.  The cost of international adoption from Canada is very expensive with very few (and widely sought after) grants and financial aides.  We have applied for one grant, which could cover up to $10,000 worth of costs (far less than half of the cost).  This is a stretch for most families, made additionally challenging on missionary “wages”.  However, God has always provided and people like you have been very generous.  We are getting there!  (Check out Adopt-A-Pixel for a detailed update on funds raised).

We are really excited about the adoption.  To be a father is something that stirs me on levels I cannot express.  Sure, I am also terrified to become a parent, but that is one blind leap I am more than willing to make!  Thanks again for all your prayer and support.  As you pray for us, also pray for Ethiopia as it faces the beginnings of what looks to be another famine that is already devastating the country.

As a person passionate about learning, change, growth and reform, the conversation and movement toward missionality in the church has been a thrilling and rewarding one.  Also, as a very pragmatic thinker, I am also driven to try and test ideas in real life contexts, which I have been seeing in other communities and doing in our own.  Acknowledging the experimental nature of this process, we intentionally engage in analysis and critique, both internally and externally, for the purpose of being more authentically missional Christians in the world.

This is an essential part of the process of spiritual and missional maturity, both for individuals and communities.  We must be willing to put our ideas and ideals into action and allow the larger Body of Christ (with whom there should be mutual and trusting relationship on some level) to speak frankly, constructively and even correctively into our lives.  After all, how else are we to grow and learn?  How else are we going to resist falling in love with our own ideas and models, allowing us the freedom to change as is needed?

As I read the many conversations only about the different ideas and models, I have begun to become more aware of the posture of analysis different people take.  For the most part, those who are committed to truly become God’s people in the world engage the issues, even the criticisms, appropriately.  However, it is very easy, as theology and ministry become professional practices, to treat these evaluations with overly clinical eyes.  At times, this approach lacks the patient grace and familial love that should characterize our relationship to others, especially within the Church.  How would our engagement of these issues change in tone and  nature if we were committed to consider the heart of the other first?

I am not suggesting that rigorous academic, theological and/or organizational analysis is not important.  However, I am saying that these approaches must come under the temperance of relational grace and consideration.  Whether we are critiquing missional theology and models or mega-church attractional techniques, we must intentionally acknowledge that we are relating to sisters and brothers in Christ.  This does not ignore or even diminish the important role of corrective (even prophetic) challenge, but rather realigns our focus foremost to the heart.

To that end, as you come across ideas, examples, model- even rants and polemics- pause to consider the person or persons behind it.  Let us change our posture of clinical analysis to one of patient consideration.  Even where correction and rebuke is deserved, let us respond with the undeserved grace that we also received from Christ and hope to receive when we put our own ideas and lives out before a watching world.