By Tony Merida and Rick Morton

How many orphans are currently living on the earth? It seems like a pretty straightforward question, and you may be surprised by the difficulty in answering it. According to the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), there are estimated to be between 143 and 210 million orphans worldwide. This number is huge and uncertain. While this estimate is staggering, it likely fails to give a full picture of the scope of the problem. You see, UNICEF only includes children who have lost one or both parents to death in its calculation of the worldwide orphan population. While this approach to defining who is an orphan isn’t really wrong, it does fail to account for many of the children that are truly fatherless.

To begin, UNICEF does not take into account the scores of orphaned children whose living parents have abandoned them to institutions or life on the street. These children are no less orphans in a practical sense than those who have experienced the death of a parent. In fact, in some cases those children who have been abandoned may be in more peril than a child who fits the technical UN definition of being orphaned.

UNICEF estimates also do not reflect sold or trafficked children who are living in slavery. Nor do these estimates include orphans living in those countries (including many Islamic nations in the Middle East) who fail to report orphan statistics. Truly, we have no way of knowing how many children may be orphaned and unaccounted for in today’s statistics. What we do know is that the numbers of fatherless children are astounding, and we know that God has given Christ followers the mission of caring for them in    their hardship.

And orphan ministry is not just an issue for the rest of the world. There is an orphan crisis in America. It may be easy for us to believe that America has conquered the orphan problem. After all, we have virtually eliminated orphanages. We no longer send orphaned and abandoned children westward on trains to be placed out to frontier families as we did in the 1800s. Today, we have a fully functional foster care system that places children into homes (or institutions) that are at least theoretically well prepared and well suited to care for them and to launch them into adulthood. As we will discuss later, our institutional system of foster care isn’t enough. Today, upwards of a half million children are in the foster care system in America and approximately 130,000 of those children are immediately adoptable. With nearly 225 million professing Christian adults in America, no identifiable reason exists that all of these children cannot be placed immediately in the care of loving Christian families who can nurture them with the love of Christ as they grow to adulthood.

While it may be enlightening or even inspiring to look at the statistics about the world’s orphan problem, the church cannot be satisfied merely to understand the problem. We must recognize that God has placed in us the call to go to the orphan to ease his and her suffering. Yes, to understand is key to building strategies to address the orphan crisis, but we cannot be satisfied just to know about orphans and their struggles or be intimidated into doing nothing because the problem seems too big. We as the church must be ever conscious that we have a responsibility to discover ways to minister to every orphan on the face of the globe. It is our responsibility.

No matter how insurmountable the problem seems, we must be active in sharing the love and compassion of Christ with orphans as a means of showing and spreading His gospel. Day-to-day, it helps to focus more on the small picture than the big. How are we working today to make a difference on Jesus’ behalf in the life of an orphan?

This article was adapted from Orphanology: Awakening to Gospel-Centered Adoption and Orphan Care. The book suggests numerous ways to get involved in orphan care, including but not limited to foster care and adoption. Additional resources, such as articles, podcasts, and videos,  can be found on this site.

Pastor, professor, and father, Tony Merida has quickly become a leading voice in the growing orphan care movement. He and his wife, Kimberly, have 5 adopted children.

Rick Morton and his wife, Denise, played an integral role in the cofounding of Promise 139, an international orphan-hosting ministry. They have 3 adopted children.