After hearing the Focus on the Family program, Maureen called her husband, Christian. At the time, they had two sons and two daughters, but Christian had always wanted a huge family (he liked the idea of 12 kids). “It was like a light bulb,” she said. “We knew God was calling us to do this. It felt exclusive not to share what we have with other children.” In Maureen’s fantasy, they would fly to China to bring home a baby girl.

At that time, countries were increasingly closing or limiting international adoption because of corruption that included forged paperwork, lying to biological parents and illegal payments. Last year, only 8,668 children were adopted into the United States from overseas, down from a peak of 22,991 in 2004. Meanwhile about 100,000 foster children in the United States are waiting for families. And Christian was drawn to those kids. “I thought, I can’t do that,” Maureen told me. “I had seen foster kids in church, and I could see how defiant and difficult they could be. It wouldn’t be that way in my mind if I went to China,” she told me, smiling at her naïveté.

The month she heard the radio ad, she and Christian attended an adoption fair, including a presentation by Project 1.27. “Lord, don’t make me do this,” Maureen remembers saying in silent prayer before the talk. “I don’t want to do this.” But then she saw photos of the children and learned that hundreds were waiting in the Colorado foster-care system. By the end, she and Christian were in tears. They signed up for Project 1.27’s next orientation.

It’s not that Maureen had shaken her fears about foster care. “But I turned from a really scared place to feeling passionate about it. . . . And trusting God would walk me through this.”

Maureen is self-deprecating and warm, with a quick laugh, jeans neatly rolled at the ankle and a tendency to get down to kids’ eye level when she talks to them, like the elementary-school teacher she once was. When we first met on a Friday morning at her house, two of her teenage kids had already left for their 5:45 a.m. Bible study at McDonald’s. A couple of hours later, she gave a kiss on the forehead and a quick prayer to her 12-year-old as he headed to school. Then there was an oatmeal breakfast for the youngest boys before Christian coaxed them out of their pajamas and Maureen walked them to the nearby elementary school, dispensing last-minute hugs.

Back in her tidy kitchen, she put away extra-large jars of peanut butter and jelly. A ceramic plate sat near the stove with the words of Psalm 34:13: “Keep your tongue from evil and your lips from telling lies.” The walls were lined with more than a dozen family portraits of her six children — the four she gave birth to, now ages 12 to 20, and the two she adopted, Ernesto, 7, and David, 8. Years ago, Maureen pulled all the family photos from the walls that didn’t include David and Ernesto. She wanted the boys to feel the family wasn’t complete until they arrived. (Maureen asked me to use middle names for her family to protect her children’s privacy.)

Of the dozens of evangelical and conservative Christian parents I spoke to, many said that church sermons, Christian radio shows or other Christian campaigns, including Focus on the Family’s national foster-to-adopt program, pushed them to adopt. Some Christian leaders and other critics, however, worry that all this promotion overshadows the hardest and most important part of adoption: parenting these kids. Michael Monroe, along with his wife, Amy, runs Tapestry Adoption and Foster Care Ministry in Irving, Tex., one of the country’s largest Christian adoption ministries. “It’s a disservice when we overromanticize adoption,” he told me. Though many evangelical leaders claim there is a “biblical mandate” to adopt, Monroe disagrees. “Just because my preacher preached a great sermon doesn’t mean my response should be to adopt,” he said. “We are called by the Bible to care for the people of the world, but we don’t all pack up and become missionaries.”