Many adopted children arrive to your family without previous church or religious experience. Because your family embraces Christianity, you would naturally want your newly adopted child to embrace Christianity. Unfortunately, as parents we cannot make our newly adopted child embrace faith. Certainly, we are able to take a young child to our church. We are able to instruct our newly adopted child in Christian principles. We can pray daily for our child’s salvation. Ultimately, the child must make the decision.

In the new testament of the Bible, Jesus used parables to explain Heavenly truths to his followers. In one of those parables, a rich young man wondered how he could get into heaven. He had lived a moral life, but his money was the most important thing to him. Luke 18:22 “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me." (NIV)

This parable is not saying that in order to get into heaven you have to give away all of your possessions. It is saying that a person needs to make Jesus the most important thing in life. In the case of the rich young man, money was the most important thing in his life and he needed to make Jesus number one. Jesus never forced a person to follow him. He offered and let the person decide.

An older child entering your family may already have ideas about religion. The child may be resistant to embracing your faith. Forcing the issue may backfire and chase the child away from the church forever. There may be some alternatives to help your child explore faith. Let’s look at some examples.

One child arrived at our home at 15. She already had a church with a style that was different from our church, which she preferred. She wanted to attend her church. We were able to arrange this for her because her church was in our town. She was still able to create some lasting friendships at our church by attending youth group there every other week.

We provided respite for a teen who attended our church one Sunday. She requesting that we attend her church the following Sunday. We did and we enjoyed it. Our attendance at her church showed her that we respected her as a person and her ideas.

Another teen arranged to spend Saturday night with friends or birth family members probably three weeks out of every month. This went on for nearly a year but we never pointed it out or made a big deal out of it. She slowly developed friendships at our church from her periodic attendance. Once she developed those friendships, she wanted to spend more time there. This eventually led to her regular attendance, which has continued into adulthood.

Photo Credit Julia Fuller 2007