T4A Main Session 4: Bryan Loritts

Bryan Loritts opened up day 2 of the Together for Adoption conference with a talk titled “The Church as the Theater for Transracial Adoption.” He is the author of A Cross-Shaped Gospel. He is the pastor of Fellowship Memphis, a truly multi-cultural church in Memphis, TN.

His talk focused the gospel, race and adoption. The reality is that heaven will be diverse and we are to bring heaven to earth, which means we should strive for diversity. His talk came from Matthew 25.

For Katie and I, this was a great and affirming talk as we are in the process of 2 transracial adoptions and are going to, with God’s grace, diverse our family.

Here are some notes:

Matthew 25:31 – 46

• Matthew 25 is the last sermon Jesus preached before he went to the cross.
• Jesus equates himself with the least of these.
• It seems that Jesus is preaching works salvation. That is not what he’s saying, never build a doctrine on one passage.
• Your morality will not give you a pass into the kingdom. Hell will have many virgins in it.
• How do you know if you are saved? Fruit. Changed and changing life.
• If my only evidence of salvation is a prayer at camp and the burning of MC Hammer tapes, that’s not enough.
• This passage does not deal with the root of salvation, but the fruit of salvation.
• I adopt, not because I have to, but because like Matthew 25, I was the least of these and he adopted me.
• Any Christ follower who does not contemplate caring for the orphan or the least of these, it is incompatible with Jesus.
• Materialism is so much a part of our culture, the church never speaks against it.

Matthew 25 in our Culture

• Abortion, fatherlessness, and adoption are our 21st century equivalent of slavery.
• No ethnicity owns the market on sorry dads.
• We still feel the affects of slavery as we look at broken families around our country.
• We pass on our legacies (good and bad) and they are felt for hundreds of years.

Transracial adoption

• Know your culture, know your history.
• God fearfully and wonderfully makes us all.
• I don’t lead with my ethnicity. At the foot of the cross, it’s Christ through Christ alone.
• This does not mean we ignore it, we need to expose our kids to different ethnicities.

I am always challenged by Matthew 25 and in particular the topic that Bryan talked about. It was such a good talk.