Small Town, Big Miracle, by Bishop W.C. Martin

Several years ago, I heard Bishop W. C. Martin speak at a conference, where he talked about his little church adopting dozens of children out of foster care.  His story touched me, and I'm so glad to run across his book, Small Town, Big Miracle: How Love Came to the Least of These.  Bishop Martin is pastor of Bennett Chapel in the tiny community of Possum Trot, in southeast Texas.  He and his wife and his wife's sister became convicted that God was calling them to adopt.  Based on their example, as well as on his preaching regularly on adoption, many families in their church followed their lead.  The inspiration caught on and before long a couple dozen families had adopted over seventy children.

If this weren't inspiring enough, you have to get the full picture of this community.  This is a town with no paved road, one of the poorest areas in the country.  But these folks are full of love, with love to spare.  Martin doesn't sugar coat the process, revealing that they did have plenty of problems.  As a community they had decided to focus on hard-to-adopt kids, older kids that had been in multiple foster homes.  They came to Possum Trot with habits, behaviors, and issues.  In many cases they had suffered abuse, neglect, molestation, beatings, starvation, and torture.  Acclimating them into families of love and trust was a process.  But they never had to send kids back into the system.

Martin and his family and friends and congregation are not superheroes, even though they seem to be.  They are Christians who followed the call of Jesus on their lives and families to love orphans in need.  Martin does not hesitate to call out other Christians.  It doesn't matter if you have little money, have other kids already, have kids with special needs, have no kids or are an empty nester, there is no reason why you can't consider adoption for yourself and your family.  If other churches, who have more people and more material resources, would follow Martin's and Bennett Chapel's example, no child would be stuck in foster care.  What an inspiring and challenging and beautiful story.

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