Book Review: Adopted for Life

Click on this photo to buy Adopted for Life at Monergism Books.The Priority of Adoption for Christian Families and Churches by Russell Moore.

I had a reason from real life for wanting to read this book. My sister adopted three children recently, so adoption is a subject we’ve been talking and thinking about lately. I had a copy of Adopted for Life sent to her and then requested a copy for me to review.

Russell Moore wants Christians to be known “once again, as the people who take in orphans and make of them beloved sons and daughters,” because, for one, we are called to be like our Father, doing what he does, and our Father “is fighting for orphans, making them sons and daughters.”

What’s more, adoption is evangelistic:

What better way is there to bring the good news of Christ than to see his unwanted little brothers and sisters placed in families where they’ll be raised in the nurture and admonition of the Lord?

It’s this last point that my sister mentioned when she gave me thoughts on this book. She has, as you might imagine, read lots of books on adoption, some by Christian authors, but this one was unique in setting adoption in the context of the gospel. My sister struggled when deciding whether to adopt. She is not young and doesn’t have a big income, but, she says, she kept coming back to one thought: These children “might not otherwise know Jesus.” She found Moore’s book to be encouraging, like “a big pat on the back.”

Russell D. Moore serves as Dean of the School of Theology and Senior Vice President for Academic Administration of The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He and his wife Maria have four sons, including two who joined the family through adoption.

Adopted for Life starts with what I’m calling the theology of adoption. The first section discusses what it means that God has adopted us and how understanding of our adoption as sons of God should influence believers—and the church—to make adoption of children a priority. The last section deals with things of more practical nature, like paperwork, finances, issues of race and health, how churches can encourage adoption and how we all—parents, children and friends—should think about growing up adopted. But always, the theological and the practical are intertwined, for it’s understanding the theology of adoption that guides Moore as he works out the practice of adoption. The practical questions are answered using God’s adoption of his sons as a model. (I’ve purposefully used the word sons when speaking of our adoption rather than sons and daughters. In Christ, women and girls receive sonship, for we are true heirs of all of the promises. This is a point I’ve made previously, but Moore makes it, too.)

Reading Adopted for Life made me reconsider some of the ideas I’ve had about the right way to raise adopted children. For example, Moore and his wife don’t see their adopted sons’ Russian heritage as their true heritage any longer.

[W]e hardly want to signal to them that they are strangers and aliens, even welcome ones, in our home. We teach them about their heritage, yes, but their heritage as Mississippians. They hear, then, about their great-grandfather, a faithful Baptist pastor from Tippah County. … They learn about their people before them in the Confederate army and the civil rights movement.

…They share our lives, and our story. They belong here. They are Moores now, with all that entails.

This view is based on the theological truth that when we are adopted by God, our heritage changes.

Whether our background is Norwegian or Haitian or Indonesian, if we are united to Christ, our family genealogy is found not primarily in the front pages of our dusty old family Bible but inside its pages, in the first chapter of the Gospel of Matthew. Our identity is in Christ; so his people are our people, his God our God.

This goes against the usual advice given to parents adopting children of a different race or nationality, but there is theological warrant, it seems, for raising adopted children without focusing on their original culture. I’m still unsure exactly what to make of this, but I’m glad Russell Moore raised this issue.

Learn More
The first chapter (pdf) of Adopted for Life.

Short videos by Russell Moore on each of the chapters in Adopted for Life.

Though his book is strong on theology, Moore’s style is conversational. The text is laced with illustrations from stories of his own experience as an adoptive father and the experiences of his friends and acquaintances who have adopted. Theology and stories—it’s an engaging package.

How can I not recommend a book as unique as Adopted for Life? There is no other book like it—a book to help you understand your own adoption by your heavenly Father, and to encourage you to be like him by making adoption a priority in your family and in your church.Who will benefit from reading it? Anyone who has adopted, anyone who has been adopted, anyone who is considering adoption, anyone who knows someone in the previous categories, and anyone who has experienced the adoption that comes through Christ Jesus. 

I’ll be donating my own copy—marks and all—to my church library because I think every church library should have one. It would also, I’d suggest, be useful to read Adopted for Life and discuss it in a church study group, since the ideas beg to be implemented in the community of the church.