How the Church Can Support Foster and Adoptive Families

November is National Adoption Month, and you may be surprised by the number of children waiting for homes in your own community.

There are over 328,000 children in the U.S. foster care system, 49,994 of whom are legally free for adoption.

Since my sisters and I were all adopted, I have always had a passion for orphaned and vulnerable children.

After volunteering at orphanages in Haiti, Peru, and Nigeria, I became aware of the need to serve vulnerable children who need temporary or permanent care situations right where I live in California.

I joined a Christian organization that serves foster and adoptive families in the San Francisco Bay Area, helping to organize educational events, respite nights, support groups, and a summer camp for foster children and their parents, and started leading a ministry program at our church to raise up foster and adoptive families.

Here are some insights that I’ve gained of how the Church can support those responding to the call to foster or adopt:

How the Church Can Support Foster and Adoptive Families

Walk alongside and meet people where they are

Caring for children who have experienced trauma isn’t easy and it really takes a whole church and community effort.

Research has found that foster care retention can increase from 30-50% to 95%+ when a support network commits to “wrapping up” a foster family for a year or more, pledging Gospel-centered encouragement and tangible acts of service.

Supporting foster families and foster youth can also mean loving like Christ even when you don’t agree with the person’s circumstances or decisions and even when fostering doesn’t work out as planned.

I supported a young woman who was aging out of foster care and had decided to terminate her pregnancy. Even though I was saddened by her decision, I still tried to care by being a sounding board and bringing over meals while she was recovering after a hospital stay.

I also supported a family in our church who took on a foster placement but ultimately decided to move their foster son to a different kinship home for various reasons.

Our support team supplied meals, childcare, and prayer support during their fostering journey and also continued to walk in love and friendship as they considered the best option for the boy in their care.

During their fostering journey, the family encountered frustrations with social workers and a lack of information from the county and struggled with the boy’s behavior toward their biological children.

Every step of the way, they were tested to respond in a Gospel-centered manner.

Fostering is full of brokenness and heartache, and we can offer redemptive hope and sacrificial love to foster children and everyone involved in their story, reflecting Christ’s love for us at our most vulnerable. O

nly God knows fully what each person is struggling and battling with. Standing alongside someone can simply mean listening, even when you don’t have a solution.

Recognize that adoption is not always the end goal, but it can be

The goal with each foster placement is permanency, which either means reunification with the child’s family of origin or adoption into a new forever family.

As the verse “God settles the solitary in a home” (Psalm 68:6 ESV) shows, the best place for a child is to be surrounded by the love and support of a family, so both reunification and adoption can be beautiful outcomes worth celebrating.

Supporting families often means that you will need to walk alongside families in this tension, both biological families who often have strong attachments to their children and desire to regain custody and prospective adoptive families who are growing in love for a child who is not yet their own.

I know firsthand that adoption is a lifelong journey.

We can offer support to adopted children long after the adoption is finalized, understanding that it may take time for them to heal, bond, and process their emotions and the disruptions in their life.

When children are reunified with their biological parents, the Church can also provide long-term tactical and emotional support, ensuring those families are able to meet their children’s material needs and have a caring community to lean on.

Remember that everyone can make a difference

In Everyone Can Do Something: A Field Guide for Strategically Rallying Your Church Around Vulnerable Children and Families, a book by Jason Johnson, I learned there are different roles each person can play in foster care depending on their giftings and callings.

1 Corinthians 12:1 ESV says, “For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ.”

This applies to foster care support as well, as it is undoubtedly physically and emotionally tiring to care for a child who has experienced trauma.

Some people may be called into direct fostering, but others may be called to help in other ways.

It took many years for anyone in our church to step up as a foster family and, in the interim, we explored ways to help people ramp up their commitment level.

It started small like having people cook dishes for a holiday party at a local group home for foster teens and then increased to finding ways for people to provide babysitting and more hands-on help through summer camps and respite nights.

Support for families who are actively fostering or have adopted from foster care can look like everything from car maintenance to raising financial support to house cleaning and grocery shopping.

Fostering is not an easy journey, but by working together we can ensure that each child thrives with the love of a family and that each foster, adoptive, and biological family knows that they are not alone in their struggles.

This November, take a pause and think how God may be calling you to step into the James 1:27 command of caring for orphans in their distress.

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