Foster care is becoming a Christian priority – just in time

“Then, from 2009 to 2010, we started seeing it climbing by the hundreds every month.” By 2011, there were 10,883 kids in the system. A year later, 13,461. By 2016, there were almost 19,000.

The same thing was happening nationally. The 397,000 children in foster care in 2012 increased to 415,000 in 2014, then to 437,000 in 2016.

“Foster family shortages stretch existing homes thin,” a Massachusetts news outlet reported. A Florida news station reported: “Foster kids kept in cars at Wawa parking lot in Hillsborough County.” In Kansas, a headline read: “Report of Missing Children Latest Concern.”

The headlines pressed urgency onto a growing movement. In the early 2010s, churches from Colorado to Florida to Arizona to Washington D.C. had begun to band together to recruit and support foster and adoptive families.

The movement would not have been easy to predict. While Christian families had been fostering children for “decades and decades,” the church didn’t have a large or consistent presence in the foster care world, Christian Alliance for Orphans (CAFO) national director of foster care initiatives Jason Weber said.

“We’ve come full circle, from a world in which the church would kind of sit back and sometimes be critical of the state and talk about all the ways they’re falling short to a different approach of humility,” he said. “Churches are saying, ‘Man, we were supposed to be at this party a long time ago. We’re here now. How can we help?’”

“It’s really exciting,” Jedd Medefind, CAFO president,  said. “In a world where there’s so much bad news, this is one place where you really see the church stepping up to be what you hope the church will be.”

That wasn’t dumb luck. Many Christian families and circles had been preparing for decades, long before the first headline. They just didn’t know it.

Read the full story at The Gospel Coalition.