This is not ready. Needs to reflect a simple plan and info for Families4Families.
What is the moral obligation of Christian to the children in the foster care system?
God setteth the solitary in families: he bringeth out those who are bound with chains: but the rebellious dwell in a dry land. Psalm 86:6
“It is our care for the helpless, our practice of loving-kindness, that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents.” Tertullian
Introduction
What are the ethical responsibilities of Christians to the children in the foster care system? The task of Christian ethics is to determine what conforms to God’s character and what does not. Which means that the Christian must ask “how do I respond to the current need for these foster children that will properly reflect the character of God?” As we answer this question, we must evaluate the current foster care system in light of our theology. I believe we will see there is a vital role that Christian families must play to be obedient to the Bible and to meet the current needs in the foster care system. Namely, the current need for more certified foster care homes should be met by the Christians in the respective community.
The issue of the Christian’s relationship to government has been vitally important throughout the history of the church. Christians always have been faced with a struggle in this matter because the church has found itself under all kinds of governments and rulers with a different understanding concerning their role toward society. Churches in the United States have had less trouble with its response to the government than the church has in many other countries. We live in a society that has been somewhat influenced by Christianity; we have had the benefit of a government that is more benevolent than most in the world and throughout history.
Was the command to reflect the loving nature of God given to the government? Regardless of the benevolent nature of our government, we must not negate our responsibilities as Christians and a church. Christians must evaluate the current system and ask themselves if there is a greater role for them to play in caring for neglected and orphaned children.
I believe that we can be obedient to our command to care for the neglected while working through the foster care system while at the same time working to see reform. There are opportunities for more Christian organizations to be started that work alongside the foster care system and help place children in loving, Gospel-centered homes. Greater involvement will require a proper understanding of the current system. The foster care system of America recognizes their inability to provide homes for children and has a system in place that requires voluntary participation by the community and in our case the Christian community, namely the church.
How the System Works
What is foster care? When a child’s birth parents are unable to care for them due to abuse or neglect, the child is placed in state custody – in foster care. Foster care was established as a temporary arrangement where children are placed in the care of other families while their birth family gets the help they need. To achieve reunification with their children, birth parents are asked to work through a case plan to correct the reasons that brought the children into foster care.
In no state in America is the child welfare system a singular exclusively state-ran-entity. The Department of Family and Children’s Services (DFACS) work with certified foster families, private organizations, and churches to strengthen families and keep children safe. The Division of Family and Children Services (DFCS) is responsible for welfare and employment support, protecting children, foster care and other services to strengthen families. Their responsibilities include recruiting, certifying, training, providing ongoing training, and supporting foster homes. Foster care is intended to provide a safe temporary home to a child until he can be reunited safely with his parent(s) or adopted.
Any concerned person can report suspicions of child abuse or neglect to their local DFACS office. Most reports are made by “mandatory reporters”—people who are required by State law to report suspicions of child abuse and neglect such as doctors, teachers, and social workers. Depending on the severity of the case, children remain at home or removed into foster care. Children who are believed to be in immediate danger are moved to a shelter, a foster home, or a relative’s home during the investigation and while court proceedings are pending.
Most children in foster care are placed with relatives or foster families, but some may be placed in a group or residential setting. Under the Adoption and Safe Families Act, while reasonable efforts to preserve and reunify families are still required, State agencies are required to seek termination of the parent-child relationship when a child has been in foster care for fifteen of the most recent twenty two months. This requirement does not, at the State’s option, apply if a child is cared for by a relative, if the termination is not in the best interests of the child, or if the State has not provided adequate services for the family.
Federal law requires the court to hold a permanency hearing, which determines the permanent plan for the child, within twelve months after the child enters foster care and every twelve months after that. Many courts review each case more frequently to ensure that the agency is actively pursuing permanency for the child.
Role of Foster Homes
Child welfare systems are complex, and their specific procedures vary widely by State. One element of the process that is true of all states in America is the need for foster homes. Ideally, grandparents of other families would meet the need for temporary placement of the child. The proportion of children being brought up by grandparents, siblings or other more distant relatives, in fact, has risen dramatically over the past decade. In 2005, 2.5 million children nationally were living with grandparents who were responsible for their care. By 2015, that number had risen to 2.9 million. At the 2019 Adoption and Foster Parent Association of Georgia Conference, DFACS State Director Tom Rawlings said that the long term goal is to increase the number of relative foster by 50% homes because the agency realizes that sometimes removing a child from their home means removing them from their friends, schools, extracurricular activities, and their neighborhood.
Through the passing of the Family First act and the attention given to supporting the extended family as they care for the children, great steps are being taken to help keep children in their communities and family. However, unfortunately, there will always be a need for non-relative foster homes.
How to Become a Foster Home
All prospective foster homes must receive a license from the state to open their home to foster children. To receive your license in the state of Georgia, you must complete a 24-hour pre-service training called IMPACT, an acronym for Initial Interest, Mutual Selection, Pre-Service Training, Assessment, Continuing Development, and Teamwork. The process requires prospective foster and adoptive families to assess the effect this decision may have on them. The approval process is one of mutual decision making. Home evaluations are completed for all prospective foster and adoptive families. This evaluation includes documentation that the family meets all of the above requirements. During this process, the case manager will make at least two home visits to gather additional information and to assess the home safety requirements. (This would be a wonderful time to contact Families4Families,)
The state DFACs office, private organizations, churches, and individuals have worked together to recruit additional homes to meet the need of children to come into the foster care system. The need is not being met. There is a great shortage of homes. The State of Georgia has approximately 13,873 children in foster care as of February 2019. According to Faithbridge, a non-profit organization that focuses on the recruitment of new foster care families, Forsyth County, an affluent county in north-metro Atlanta, there are 137 children in the foster care system. They estimate there is a need for an additional seventy-seven homes to meet the current need. These numbers vary from county to county, but no county has a sufficient number of homes to meet their current need.
The Church
Regardless of the benevolent process in place by our government, there is still an essential role to be played by individual Christians. The government alone can never meet the deepest needs of a child. In Psalm 10:14 we learn about God’s character when He is called by the Psalmist the “helper of the fatherless.” Justice is a fundamental part of God’s character. It is a great injustice when children do not know the love of a family. There are currently millions of children in this situation around the world. God is doing the work of setting the solitary in homes (Psalm 86:6), and He is using Christian homes to do this work. As Christians, we have a God who cares for the orphan and for those who cannot help themselves (Ps. 68:5; James 1:27). Foster children are essentially orphans, some only temporarily, but the results can be tragic if they’re left to grow up in the system without a family.
Orphan and foster care in America began as a Christian effort. In the early 1850s, a minister named Charles Loring Bracemade efforts to help thousands of homeless children in New York City. He’s known as the father of the foster care movement and went great lengths to place children in Christian families.
Churches cannot outsource our responsibility to care for the orphan and widows (James 1:27) to the government. Providing loving homes is something governments cannot do. DFACS do not court mandate homes to provide homes for the children in need. Each region in Georgia has Resource Directors who actively seek to recruit new homes.
As Christians, as people God has expressly called to love the orphan and those in foster care, we have an irreplaceable role to fill. As Charles Loring Brace was aware, churches are best equipped to mobilize people for the work of providing for the need of foster children. As a veteran of Colorado’s child welfare system once said to me, “Government makes a terrible parent.” The things that matter most — love, nurture, and belonging — can only be provided person to person as individuals and families care for each precious child.
Based upon the current model in which our government addresses neglected children I believe Christians have the responsibility to provide a sufficient number of foster care homes for the need. No group should be more motivated. It was never God’s intent for children to be without a family. It was also never His intent for the government to be the solution to a problem that only the Church could solve.
As Pastor J.D. Greer has stated “By choosing to be foster parents, Christians are choosing to live a life that demonstrates the love and humility of the Gospel. By choosing to be foster parents, Christians are choosing to live a life of faith. By choosing to be foster parents, Christians are choosing to take a stand against injustice and to care for the poor.”
Issue Addressed throughout History
This is not a new issue nor is it likely one to be resolved. In his book When Children Became People: The Birth of Childhood in Early Christianity, historian O. M. Bakke discovered that in ancient Rome, infants were not even named until eight to ten days after birth. The likelihood that they would be killed or left to die of exposure was so high that there was no point in even naming them until a parent had decided their fate.
The Early Church was opposed to infanticide because they believed each person was made in the image of God. However, as a persecuted minority, Christians were in no position to force political change or even to speak out against infanticide to the greater culture. But with such a moral atrocity common throughout the Roman Empire, they had to do something.
“First, believers began by outlawing the practice of infanticide among themselves. Moral credibility matters. So the Early Church started with its people first—and the principle wasn’t optional. They started inside the church and worked out.
Second, under the dark of night, these apparently “crazy” people who identified themselves with the teachings of Jesus would go out to the city walls, rescue abandoned babies, take them into their families, and raise them as their own. They did it because it’s what Jesus would have done.
Not only would Christians raise these abandoned children in their own families, but the church community would pitch in the funds to help families pay the expenses of additional children. The Romans had no context for that kind of behavior. It could not be explained, and eventually, it made an impact on the culture. Some historians believe that, although infanticide had been a part of the ancient Roman and Greek worlds for hundreds of years, it was how these early Christians responded that began to alter attitudes.”
That is how the church has always been known at its best. Throughout the Bible, God invites us to love and care for widows and orphans. Around AD 200, the apologist Tertullian wrote, “It is our care for the helpless, our practice of loving-kindness, that brands us in the eyes of many of our opponents.”
The issue we face today is far from the issues faced in Rome. History tells us how Christians addressed the social issues of their day. History will someday tell the story of how we have faced the issues of this generation. The objections toward involvement in the foster care system today can be placed into three categories I would like to address.
Objections
As with all causes that would require sacrifice from us there are a variety of objections to involvement in the foster care system. I believe we can categorize them into four main lines of thought. First, there will always be a large portion of the population that unashamedly do not believe or care; they have a responsibility to other people. Second, there are people who incorrectly believe the work of the government is sufficient. Third, many do not get involved due to their frustration with the current model. Last and what I believe is the largest contributing factor is that there is a lack of awareness about the need.
Apathy
Am I my brother’s keeper? It is a question that has been asked since shortly after the creation of man. Throughout history, Christians have asked the same question and answer with a resounding “yes.” In very clear terms we are told in Philippians 2:4 Look not every man on his things, but every man also on the things of others. No other specifically named group of people is mentioned more frequently in the bible than orphans and widows, in terms of the justice due them and their need for our love, care, and ministry. We see the nature of God reflected in the life of believers both in the Old and New Testament. Ancient landowners were required to set aside land all around the perimeter of their fields, and to allow widows and orphans to glean any crops that grew in that portion of their fields, that eventually became known as “the fields of the fatherless.” It was considered a sin to encroach upon that land, whose crops belonged to the widows and orphans by decree of God. Lev 19:9-10, 23:22; Dt. 24:19-21 ”
Furthermore, in Deuteronomy 14:28-29 God commands us to set aside a special tithe every third year that is specifically reserved for the Levites, aliens, widows, and orphans. It is not to be touched or used for any other purpose. To be sure we didn’t miss it, God repeated the command in Deuteronomy 26:12-13. This tithe is so special and so specifically reserved that it became known as “The Sacred Portion.” The concept of the fields of the fatherless and the sacred portion should drive home the seriousness of God’s desire for us to be His instruments of blessing for orphan children. Fully understanding that Christians today are no longer under the civil laws of the Old Testament we must still recognize that it is God’s nature to care for the vulnerable. We should desire to make proper application in our context and with our resources.
Morality is not arbitrarily handed down by God to create difficulties for us. God does not make up new values according to whim. Rather, God’s innate character is holy and cannot tolerate evil or moral indifference—what the Bible calls sin.
Government is Insufficient
I do not believe that a Christian can outsource his or her responsibilities to neglected children to any government entity. However, for those who have that opinion that must realize that the government is insufficient to meet the need. As stated previously no county in Georgia currently has a sufficient number of foster care homes to meet the growing need.
The problems lie with their inability to recruit additional families. They cannot court mandate families to become foster homes, but they would only provide houses but not homes. One cannot be forced to provide a loving environment for children.
When homes are not available for children, they will often end up in overcrowded group homes. Both Scripture and social science affirm that the very best environment for a child is a caring family. Children who grow up in orphanages without consistent, nurturing adult relationships rarely do well. Millions of children lack families, yet what they most need cannot be purchased and delivered in bulk. Each one requires a a loving, long-term relationship.
Strategically churches through means of discipleship are best suited to recruit additional families for the work. Through the study of God’s Word families can see their responsibility towards neglected children and be moved to be willing to make the necessary sacrifices to make room in their home for a child.
Frustrated with the Current System
Why are so many children being brought into the system? Why isn’t more being done to support the family? Why is the process of reunification so slow? All these are very legitimate questions to be asked. It would be a very reasonable conclusion to believe that the government has over-stepped its responsibilities in assuming their current role.
In times past kids would not have spent hour upon hour in the DFACS office as a social worker would call through a list looking for temporary placement. My wife, Stephanie, and I would never have children dropped off at our house whom no one was certain of their name. The brother and sister we met would have been left on the street corner as their mother chased her next high.
If the government would not intervene would we as Christians step up more readily? If those kids were not picked up in a patrol car would they have been picked up by a Sunday School teacher on her way to visit her Sunday School roster. According to the constant campaigning for the “Sanctity of Life” by Christians on Twitter they would assume the answer would be a resounding “yes!” However, due to the fact that many times the social worker will never find a home for those children and they will be spending the night in a hotel with a social worker must cause us all to wonder if we as Christians readily abdicated our responsibilities to neglected children to the government.
Just like the Christians in Rome we should do all that we can while properly seeking to influence change in the government policy. There is very little debate to the fact that changes need to be made to the current foster care system. We must ask ourselves if we do not have a responsibility to these neglected children until those changes are made?
Lack of Awareness
What if the answer is not as complicated as the question? Could it simply be that Christians are unaware of the need in their community and the necessary steps needed to get involved? According to LifeWay Research’s survey.
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- Fourteen percent of churchgoers say church leaders have encouraged families to consider adoption.
- Twelve percent say church leaders encouraged them to become involved in foster care.
- Eight percent say church leaders raised funds for families that are adopting.
- Six percent say church leaders provided training for foster parents.
Overall, about half (45 percent) of churchgoers say their church has had no involvement with or conversation about foster care and adoption. Leaders at smaller congregations are less likely to encourage families to consider adoption (8 percent) or foster care (8 percent), to raise funds for adoptive families (5 percent) or to provide training for foster parents (2 percent).
Personal Story
I will never forget the first call we receive from the DFACs for the overnight placement of three children. My wife, Stephanie, and I had been in over twenty hours of training and in spent countless hours preparing our home and children for this call. Now just 48 hour after receiving our license from the state to be foster parents we were receiving our first phone call. It was around eleven-o-clock at night when I answered the call. “Hello, Mr. Cornwell. I will get straight to the matter at hand. We have three boys ages two, five, and seven here at the Hall County Office who need emergency placement. Would you be able to provide a place for them to stay for the night?” I looked at my wife and relayed the information. I did not need to hear her answer to know her heart in this matter. As we waited for those boys to arrive at our doorstep, I thought about the alternative scenario for them that night.
In training, we have been provided with resources that gave us an overview of how “the system works.” I knew that the lady who called me would have continued calling people that night looking for a bed for each of those boys. At some point in the night, if she did not find a home for them, she would place them in a hotel with a social worker for the night. The social worker would follow a detailed protocol. The kids would be safe, warm, and protect. They would receive all of the care an institution, such as the government, could provide but without any of the benefits of a home, especially those of a Christian home.
Conclusion
Until a person or couple become a certified, placement for children in foster care they do not even have the opportunity to say “yes” or “no” to the request referenced above. I am fully aware there are times it is in the best interest of everyone involved to say “not tonight, but we will pray for you as you continue looking for a home.” That was my answer to two sixteen year teenagers this weekend. Even though it was difficult to say “no” I am thankful to live in a country that provides me with the opportunity to say “yes” when God directs my heart to do so. I encourage all Christians who can seek out the next IMPACT training provided by your counties DFACS office or with a private organization and put yourself in a position to help.
Outside of becoming foster parents, there are many other ways people can participate in helping meet the need for neglected children. There are CASA (court-appointed special advocate) volunteers who help advocate for the best interest of the children. There are RESPITE homes that provide help to foster care parents. Some Christians need to look to their fellow brothers and sisters in Christ and let them know they will partner with them through prayer and assistance if God is leading them to foster. If more Christians knew they would receive support and encouragement from their current network of families and friends, I believe they would step out in faith to help meet the current need for more foster homes.
As Christians we have been given a sacred calling to reflect the nature of our Holy God. We should do so in our care for children in the foster care system. As it currently, stands today the need is not being met and Christians must reassume our responsibility for this cause.
Works Cited
Rae, Scott B. Moral Choices: An Introduction To Ethics. Third Edition. Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2009.
MacArthur, John. Romans 9-16. Chicago: Moody Press, 1991.
Badeau, S., & Gesiriech, S. (2003). A child’s journey through the child welfare system. Washington, DC: The Pew Commission on Children in Foster Care.
Goldman, J., & Salus, M. (2003). A coordinated response to child abuse and neglect: The foundation for practice (The User Manual Series). Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services.
Barna Group and Jedd Medefind, Becoming Home (frames Series), Ebook: Adoption, Foster Care, and Mentoring–Living out God’s Heart for Orphans (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2014).
J.D. Greer, May 2014, J.D. Greer Ministries, 3 Reasons Christians Should Consider Foster Care, https://jdgreear.com/blog/3-reasons-christians-should-consider-fostering/
Phil Cooke and Jonathan Bock, The Way Back: How Christians Blew Our Credibility and How We Get It Back (New York City, NY: Worthy Books, 2018).
Barna Group and Jedd Medefind, Becoming Home (frames Series), Ebook: Adoption, Foster Care, and Mentoring–Living out God’s Heart for Orphans (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 2014).
Smith, James E. The Pentateuch. 2nd ed. Old Testament Survey Series. Joplin, MO: College
Press Pub. Co., 1993.
Appendix: The Child Welfare System