I was at a church to represent CIN on Sunday. It was a small church, still new and meeting in a school gym, and they were celebrating their first annual Celebrate Adoption Sunday. I don't recall ever being in a church service devoted entirely to adoption, and this one got me thinking. So I did some research, and this is how the numbers broke down:
510,000 children are in foster care in the USA
129,000 of those children are ready to be adopted
300 billion is the approx. population of the USA
20% is the lowest estimate that I could find for the number of people who attend church on a regular basis. So hopefully it is actually more than that.
60 million then is the approx. number of people in the USA that regularly attend church
4 is the "normal" family size, with 2 parents and 2 kids
15 million would be the number of "normal" sized families that regularly attend church
10 million is a more probable number of families in churches, since many singles also attend church
With 10 million families regularly attending church, why can we not find homes for the 510,000 kids in foster care????
Even more so, why do we still have 129,000 kids just waiting around for someone to decide to love them and permanently invite them into the family????
If we have been Christians longer than 2 days we know that God has COMMANDED us to care for the fatherless. So what are we doing?!?! We are living in sin. Caring for these children is a command to every single Christian just like loving our neighbors and observing the sabbath. Departments of Children and Families should be overrun with calls from Christian families asking for available children. All the group homes should be closed because all the kids are in families. And no child should ever be placed in an institution because there are no families and the group homes are all full (I used to work for an institution and I personally know foster care children who were placed in my program simply because there was no other place to put them.) Neighborhoods, church bulletins, and community posts should be plastered with fliers from Christian singles who have been certified to offer babysitting services for foster care families.
Christians should be clamoring for the chance to care for these children.
If you aren't clamoring, this is your warning. You will be held accountable.
