A Response to the 2018 Report on Foster Care in Virginia

In 2017, the Joint Legislative Audit and Review Commission directed its staff to study the foster care and adoption services delivered by Virginia’s local departments of social services and supervised by the Virginia Department of Social Services.  The report, named Improving Virginia’s foster care system, was released on December 10, 2018.   News reports called it “Devastating.”

Key concerns that were listed in the report include and the need for more children to be placed in family settings, the high number of children that age out of the foster care system annually in Virginia. (54% as opposed to a national average of 25%) and the fact that Va children are significantly less likely to be reunified with birth parents than other states which begs the need for prevention.

In reviewing this information, I can’t help but ask questions that begin with , “What if the church…..”   By the church I mean us, you and me, God’s people, not buildings or congregations, but the bride of Christ, the hands and feet of Jesus, God’s plan for making a difference in the world.  With that in mind, I ask myself:

What if the church decided that taking care of children was the job of the church not the government?

As early as 1 BC in the Roman Empire, infanticide was common.  Babies were discarded and left to die in sewers and on the street and it was the norm.  Until the outbreak of Christianity when suddenly someone was speaking out about and suggesting that infanticide was wrong.  But they didn’t stop there.   They took these babies into their own homes to care for them.

Fast forward about 1800 years when orphanages became a popular way to take care of orphaned and abandoned children.  The majority of these orphanages were started by the church… not only as financial contributors, but as caretakers of the children.   Many of the orphanages did not have paid staff, but small groups from local churches would be assigned time that they were to send volunteers to care for the children.

Fast forward again to 1909 when the White House had its first conference on children and determined that children should live in families as opposed to in institutions.   Thus began an ever-changing, ever-developing, increasingly inefficient and ineffective Child Welfare system where the government has taken over the responsibility of caring for children and we, the church, have stood back and watched it happen.  While many amazing Christian parents have been foster parents over the years, they are bound by the restraints of a system that becomes more tightly bound in bureaucracy by the year.

Fast forward one more time to today when the “devastating” report on foster care has shown that the government is failing our children.   It’s time for us to recognize that just as it was our job as the Church to rescue babies thrown into Roman sewers, it is our job to step up and care for children that are being lost to a system that results in over half leaving childhood without a family.   

So, what would it look like if the Church decided that this was our job?  Imagine a world with me if….

local churches provided sufficient and meaningful support to their families so that the number of Christians willing to adopt a child out of foster care exceeded the number of children available for adoption?  In 2015 there were 10,952 churches in the state of Virginia and only 1519 children available for adoption.    This means that if one in every seven churches had one family willing to adopt one child we would meet the need with a few families waiting in line for the next child to be adopted.

there were so many Christian families willing to infuse the state foster care system that our overwhelming presence there was the salt and light needed for the system to change?

families and churches worked together to ensure that a fewer number of children entered foster care in the first place?   There are many ways to assist in this work, including Safe Families for Children, which involves churches in hosting children during crisis periods in their lives in order to develop relationships with their families and attempt to keep the family together.

the government, private agencies, Christian individuals and churches worked together to come up with solutions of how we can take care of our children to ensure that every child is with a thriving community, supported by a faithful community?

So I ask myself, and I ask you, “What if we decided this was our job?  What if we decided that the need was urgent and worthy of our immediate and sacrificial response?  What if we took this issue personally and just like the early Christians, not only spoke out against the evils of the current situation, but stood up and did something about it?

Just because we can’t see babies who have been thrown into the sewer doesn’t mean children who need us don’t exist.   It’s time for the church to wake up, return to our roots and be the visible difference in the world when it comes to vulnerable children and families.