Kids desperately need healthy, committed adults who can help them thrive in their faith and become active participants in the life of the church. This requires the efforts of the whole faith community. Chap Clark, one of the leading voices in youth ministry today, brings together twenty-four experts from a variety of denominations and traditions to offer a comprehensive introduction to adoptive youth ministry, a theologically driven, academically grounded, and practical youth ministry model. The book shows readers how to integrate emerging generations into the family of faith, helping young adults become active participants in God's redemptive community.

Outreach 2019 Recommended Resource of the Year (Youth and Children) Teens and emerging adults don't feel at home in the church because they are not fully included in the church body. How can congregations nurture young adults, welcome them as siblings into God's household, and empower them to become fully embedded contributors within and to their faith community? Integrating the latest research on adolescent faith and young adult ministry for the local church, this book presents a new way of thinking about youth ministry. Chap Clark offers today's youth leaders highly practical principles based on his extensive experience, showing how they can implement a sustainable youth ministry program in their local church. He presents the adoptive youth ministry model as a way to help congregations see youth ministry as a bridge to inclusion, participation, and contribution in the body of Christ. Clark's comprehensive plan for designing and implementing youth ministry shows churches how to intentionally welcome young people and create an environment where they belong.

In this practical book, Moore highlights the importance of adoption for all Christians, encouraging readers to lead the way in adoption and orphan advocacy out of our identity as adopted children of God.

Explores the role played by missionaries in the twentieth-century transnational adoption movement Between 1953 and 2018, approximately 170,000 Korean children were adopted by families in dozens of different countries, with Americans providing homes to more than two-thirds of them. In an iconic photo taken in 1955, Harry and Bertha Holt can be seen descending from a Pan American World Airways airplane with twelve Asian babies—eight for their family and four for other families. As adoptive parents and evangelical Christians who identified themselves as missionaries, the Holts unwittingly became both the metaphorical and literal parental figures in the growing movement to adopt transnationally. Missionaries pioneered the transnational adoption movement in America. Though their role is known, there has not yet been a full historical look at their theological motivations—which varied depending on whether they were evangelically or ecumenically focused—and what the effects were for American society, relations with Asia, and thinking about race more broadly. Adopting for God shows that, somewhat surprisingly, both evangelical and ecumenical Christians challenged Americans to redefine traditional familial values and rethink race matters. By questioning the perspective that equates missionary humanitarianism with unmitigated cultural imperialism, this book offers a more nuanced picture of the rise of an important twentieth-century movement: the evangelization of adoption and the awakening of a new type of Christian mission.

Teens and emerging adults don't feel at home in the church because they are not fully included in the church body. How can congregations nurture young adults, welcome them as siblings into God's household, and empower them to become fully embedded contributors within and to their faith community? Integrating the latest research on adolescent faith and young adult ministry for the local church, this book presents a new way of thinking about youth ministry. Chap Clark offers today's youth leaders highly practical principles based on his extensive experience, showing how they can implement a sustainable youth ministry program in their local church. He presents the adoptive youth ministry model as a way to help congregations see youth ministry as a bridge to inclusion, participation, and contribution in the body of Christ. Clark's comprehensive plan for designing and implementing youth ministry shows churches how to intentionally welcome young people and create an environment where they belong.

Tying in to a nationwide joint campaign by the Evangelical Alliance and Care for the Family, Krish Kandiah wants us all to take seriously Jesus's call to 'suffer the little children' by engaging with the needs of the many thousands of children up and down the country who are in care and whom the church could and should be helping. Krish and his wife Miriam have adopted and fostered children themselves and their experience - and that of the many others in this book - is very different from the popular myth which suggests social services seek to prevent Christians from getting involved. Krish argues that whatever the state's stance may be, it is a part of our calling as God's church to get involved where it's hardest, and to help these children out of the tough realities they find themselves in. Filled with stories from people who have adopted or were adopted themselves, alongside practical advice on how it all works and the challenges that will come, this book makes a compelling case that the church can and must make a difference in these children's lives, and asks us all to consider our response.

Adoption has long been enmeshed in the politics of abortion. But as award-winning journalist Joyce makes clear, adoption has lately become entangled in the conservative Christian agenda.