Guest post by Toni Steere, Director of Legacy 68:5 at Houston’s First Baptist Church
For Houston’s First Baptist Church, the journey to supporting family-based care for orphaned and vulnerable children began with a simple conversation.
Legacy 68:5, the adoptive, foster, kinship and orphan care ministry of Houston’s First Baptist Church is committed to providing a supportive community and financial resources for local families pursuing adoption, foster care, or kinship care as well as entities serving the vulnerable globally. Over the last 15 years Legacy 68:5 has been on a wild learning curve but very early on, the core families involved in launching the ministry felt strongly that children were going to heal and grow best in the context of family. This led the Legacy 68:5 to begin investing in Ukrainian national adoptions which became a trajectory shifting moment for the entire missional strategy of how the church viewed institutional care globally.
The church’s desire to care for vulnerable children had already established a diverse network of global partnerships. However, these partnerships tended to largely support orphanages and children’s homes, including annual short-term mission trips to visit orphanages. There was a deep expression of generosity but an overall lack of understanding of the nuances of orphan care to say nothing of best practices. Over time key members of the Legacy 68:5 team began to ask some pivotal questions.
What would it mean for the church to do something that would be transformative for children and families, globally?
Was the church investing in responses to the plight of the orphan and vulnerable that would promote restoration and redemption, dignity and belonging?
How was the implementation of child protection policies actually expressed in these orphanages or children’s homes?
How were staff and volunteers screened?
“What did it look like to create environments that were conducive for child development, that were healing environments?”
The answers the team received seemed incomplete at best.
Simultaneously, Legacy 68:5 began engaging more in the trauma-informed trainings including Trust Based Relational Interventions and Empowered to Connect’s Connect Course. This training helped to provide a new lenses, new language and context for working with vulnerable children and families both locally and globally.
Initiating the shift
Legacy 68:5 was beginning to realize the level of transformation that would need to take place to reimagine support for the children in the care of their global partners. The vision was finally clear. It was time to shift toward a model that equipped and supported transitions toward family-based care.
To better equip Legacy 68:5 for this change, the team recognized they needed to build their own capacity. With a deep commitment to relationship over transaction, a system was built that would allow the team to more deeply understand each partner and their role in their unique context. A shared willingness to learn, led to conversations between themselves and their partners in how they could walk out best practices for orphaned and vulnerable children together.
One door that opened was to facilitate training in trauma-informed care with their Guatemalan partners. While it might not be the most direct step, it was a way to establish common ground for the changes the team hoped would lay ahead. During a mission trip, Legacy 68:5 trained their own church team alongside Guatemalan leaders from government, orphanages, churches, and health services. Reflecting back on that experience, Toni Steere, Director of Legacy 68:5 says, “It was a moment when we were no longer on different playing fields, we were right there together. That incarnational experience transformed everything we were a part of in Guatemala.”
The momentum and progress from their Guatemala partnership soon led both Legacy 68:5 and the church’s global partners to a commitment to valuing family-based care and coming alongside to provide resources, equipping, and funding to help encourage a shift.
Family-based care includes transitioning children in residential care to return to living with their original families when safe or placing children with relatives or other families in the community if necessary. A family-based care approach also works to prevent separation of children from their families in the first place by strengthening and supporting families who are vulnerable.
This approach aligned Houston‘s First Baptist Church’s local and global mission in a beautiful way.
The Legacy 68:5 team insists that this new approach “… includes a really solid biblical understanding of God’s heart for the Fatherless, and as well is that God’s design is family. His design was not institutions. He put us in family for a reason. (Ps 68:5-6) If we have the ultimate end-goal of those children’s restoration, health, wellbeing and thriving – what is the best case scenario for them to accomplish that?”
Understanding the challenges for their global partners facing this shift, Legacy 68:5 is walking alongside them with funding, training, and equipping for the transition to family-based care. Recently, they’ve launched a pilot program in Latin America for partners to hire social workers and psychologists, enabling professional and multi-disciplinary assistance for the reintegration of children to their biological families. By coordinating with a number of orphanages who are under-resourced, Legacy 68:5 comes alongside them through a local coordinator to enable the transition towards professional family-based care support teams.
What does it look like now?
There are challenges for many churches and nonprofits transitioning to family-based care models. Legacy 68:5 believes that transition is possible through healthy partnerships who share a passion for community transformation and a vision to see children cared for in safe and loving families. It requires a church to invest in the learning and understanding of its congregation. Those who participate in short-term missions trips with Houston’s First Baptist Church and who will encounter vulnerable children are required to undergo a special training to better understand attachment, child protection and other information that highlight the importance of family for children. Additionally, the church has mobilized an ‘Orphans & Vulnerable Children Care Team’ to advocate best practices and family-based care across all their church campuses in Houston.
Reflecting on changes made in the past several years, Legacy 68:5 team member, Jenny Sheets says, “ [It’s about] making a shift in how we actually educate ourselves, our teams, a shift in the narrative within our whole church.”
The vision of persistent and authentic relationships and best practices, began to transform not only a church, but also organizations around the world, and ultimately children who are now supported to thrive in the context of a safe and loving family.