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1/ Thread: Here are some reasons I think the TGC piece on the US Church and Orphan Crisis misses the mark in significant ways. I’ve been involved in the Christian orphan care, adoption & foster care moments for 20 years. I’ve testified before Congress on the subject, met hundreds
2/ of prospective & adoptive parents & churches in more than 25 states, was at the start of the discussions of the Christian Alliance for Orphans & institutional scholarships for trauma informed training about adoption for Christian counselors and have 4 kids via FC adoption and
3/ I have NEVER heard an advocate say US churches could (or should) solve the global orphan crisis.We’ve understood that to be hubris smacking of colonialism. we understand in country churches are key &must be involved in prevention of family disruption by addressing its drivers
4/the piece does a good job of helping people understand the numbers and definitions around the global orphan stat and pointing out that because of international law, only a percentage of double orphans will ever be eligible to be adopted in the first place.
5/ There seems to be a disconnect, however, on the possibility of the U S churches’ ability to ‘solve’ issues surrounding foster care. Let’s start with the more than 100,000 kids in FC awaiting permanency (adoption is a form of permanency). These are teens, sibling groups & kids
6/with special needs who have experienced abuse, neglect, abandonment & they need adoptive families. The math here is as easy as it looks. Let’s assume a low 300,000 churches in the US. If just one FAMILY in every third church would welcome home a waiting child, the list would
7/ disappear but always slowing grow again unless and until we eliminate child abuse and its drivers. BTW, families not churches adopt kids. We need other non adopting families in churches to support those who do because parenting traumatized kids can be harrowing.
8/ but that’s just one small (but significant) way church families can be involved in foster care. Becoming foster families & helping the whole family get healthy is a crucial need, but one that also could quite easily be solved with just a modest level of involvement
9/ of families in churches. Going even further upstream, there is foster care prevention work (safe families) that needs to be done & church families could play a huge role in that. And the idea that the church can’t really solve the US foster care crisis because the kids keep
10/ coming is nonsense. So do generations of Christian kids who become adults & converts. Further, the piece misdescribes the system goals vs the currently declared permanency plan goals for kids in care. Absent exigency, the goal is for all kids in foster care to be able to
11/ return to safe homes of origin. If they can’t and parental rights are terminated, then that child becomes a legal orphan whose only permanent parent is the government entity that has custody of him. These are the kids who need permanency & often, adoption.
12/ also, the piece seems to be rebutting something else I’ve literally Never heard a Christian orphan advocate say: that every Christian should adopt. No one in adoption for any length of time thinks that true. In some ways, the rigidity and expectations of Christian families
13/ makes them the least suitable for parenting kids with trauma histories. Every orphan advocate I know communicates the truth of James 1:27 and we all say ‘not everyone is called to adopt but everyone can do something for orphans.’
14/ I think what bothered me most was that while the piece called for churches to do something, it also somehow felt like an apologetic trying to minimize the actual role Christian families and churches could really play.I may be the only one it struck this way & I could be wrong
15/ but it read to me like learned helplessness, like it wanted to make sure we all know we can’t *really* do that much for this overwhelming and intractable problem like those pesky orphan advocates want us to think, it’s just not realistic. I think that’s enabling complacency.
16/ out of your whole church, what percentage are adoptive families? There’s some of us for sure, but what if we were the norm not the exception?What if Christian kids grew up expecting to welcome a little stranger into their family? What if most churches and most church families
17/we all involved foster care in some way? Those kind of numbers would indeed be more than enough necessary to solve our nation’s foster care crisis. In fact, with this approach, every child in foster care could be prayed for by name. What if churches in a community knew
18/ the names,faces of the kids in foster care awaiting adoptive families?What if the churches worked together to find them families? Rest assured, if we did these things & others to care for the least of the children in our communities, the US churches could solve the FC crisis.
Can this thread be unrolled?
