Welcome to Family Policy Matters, a weekly podcast and radio show produced by the North Carolina Family Policy Council. Hi, I'm John Rust and president of NCE Family, and each week on Family Policy Matters, we welcome experts and policy leaders to discuss topics that impact faith and family here in North Carolina. Our prayer is that this program will help encourage and equip you to be a voice of persuasion for family values in your community, state, and nation. And now here's the host of Family Policy Matters, Tracy DeVett-Griggs. Thanks for joining us this week on Family Policy Matters.
North Carolina's foster care system is in crisis with over 10,000 children in care and a critical shortage of roughly 5,000 licensed foster homes.
Well, one resource that's stepping into the gap is the Baptist Children's Homes of North Carolina. And we're pleased to welcome today Erica Spivey, Senior Director of Training and Church Mobilization, to talk about a new initiative called Every Child, Every Church. Erica Spivey, welcome to Family Policy Matters. Oh, Tracy, thank you so much for having us on. It's a real privilege and honor.
Well, thank you for being here.
So let's start by giving a little history on Baptist Children's Homes because you guys have been around forever, it seems like, and doing a great job, but a lot of people may not know that you exist.
So tell us what's going on over there. I'll just give a quick overview.
So since 1885, Baptist Children's Home of North Carolina has been sharing hope and changing. Lives. We're really rooted in the love of Christ, and we are supported by churches and other compassionate partners. We serve women, children, families, and individuals with care that restores dignity, it strengthens families, and points people to lasting hope. We serve across the state, and at the center of our service, really, is just making sure that the hope of the gospel goes out.
So, we want people to come to know Jesus and we want them to have a deeper walk with Him. And we do that in a handful of different ways.
So, we actually have residential care for children, we license families for foster care, we have adoption services, we have family support programs, we have support for single mothers and families that are in crisis, and then we have partnership with churches to strengthen our communities. All right, so as you mentioned, you do other things besides working with children, but let's talk about what you do with children. Children predominantly come to Baptist Children's Home in two ways.
So, one is through foster care.
So, when DHHS has to take custody of children because a parent is either unable or maybe they just won't take care of their children, children come into custody and they're looking for temporary placement for children. And so, Baptist Children's Home is one of those child placing agencies. And so, we provide loving homes for the children while their biological families are working a reunification plan. The other way children can come into our care is a woman that may be in an unplanned pregnancy and she's considering life-giving options for her child. And so, she's navigating and weighing the heavy decision between parenting or choosing parents by making an adoption plan for her child.
And so, that is another way that we help care for vulnerable children. Wow, now that's interesting.
So do you have people that come to the North Carolina Baptist Children's Homes pregnant and leave their children with you?
So, it doesn't exactly happen that way, Tracy. It was way more relational than that.
So, a woman that may be in an unplanned pregnancy might find a Baptist Children's Home and our Christian Adoption Services through a website, maybe searching, I'm pregnant, I'm scared, what do I do? I'm looking for that support and help in navigating her very unknown and unsettling situation. It could come through a referral through other community partners.
So, it could be a pregnancy resource center that wants to help serve her client well and she wants to talk about adoption as an option. It could come from a woman that has come to a hospital and she's delivered a baby and she wants to make a plan for that child. Maybe she feels like she's just unable to provide the level of care that's needed for that child. And so, instead of that child needing to go into our foster care system, she can actually make an adoption plan and choose parents for her child. Yeah.
So let's talk about this new initiative called Every Child, Every Church. What is that? Why is it necessary for you to begin this new push? I am super excited about this.
So, the Every Child, Every Church initiative really is to come alongside to help equip, support, and engage the local church to care for vulnerable populations. And the church is often a cornerstone in its community. And we also know that the church has been given a God-given mandate, right, to visit the orphan and widow in their distress. And that expression of orphan and widow, we can know that that is describing the most vulnerable populations at that time, those that had no voice. And so, we know that the church is uniquely placed within a community and they're also uniquely resourced.
They're networked. They have a depth of care that they can provide to those that are hurting in their community. That maybe parachurch organizations might have a facet of it, or they may be connected to the church, but they can't kind of do all of the things, I would say.
So, we want to be able to equip and train and resource the church. We also recognize. Baptist Children's Home is a parachurch organization.
So it's really our job to come alongside and support the institution that will stand the test of time, which is the church. And so what we want to do is, first off, we want to create awareness through education. And we do that primarily through our training events that are regional.
So this helps the church to understand what is trauma through both a biblical and a brain-based lens. And then we want to come alongside and we want to equip the church with trauma-informed tools. They're going to help children that are coming into their ministries or in their pews or at their church camp programs to feel seen and heard and loved. And we want to help the church to understand what it means to create a foundation of safety and connection so that discipleship can unfold and children can know that you're safe with me and you matter and you belong. And when we create those two things in place and when the church is able to do that, then we can address sometimes the behaviors that we see, which is often, I think, where we can tend to want to jump in first.
But when we don't have safety and connection in place, we can't really get to that coaching and that correcting and pointing people to Christ, that discipleship, that mentorship process.
So we want to help churches to understand big behaviors are communication, they're not character flaws. And we want to also help just position the church with having a little bit more of a sense of curiosity of instead of thinking, what's wrong with this child, to pivot and reframe that question of wow, I wonder what might have happened. Happened to this child. And when we do that, we have that posture of humility. And ultimately, we're really modeling, Tracy, what Christ did, right?
He stepped into the brokenness, he left heaven, he did not shy away from it, he was not afraid of it. And he came in and he made people feel safe and he built connection with them. You can think of Zacchaeus, you can think of the woman at the well. And when he did those two things, then he was able to come alongside and to tell them the good news and the hope and disciple them towards something more and towards flourishing for them. All right.
Well, that sounds exciting.
So in addition to the training, which sounds wonderful, are there other practical things that you would hope that churches would do to come alongside the work that you do there? Yeah, I love this question, Tracy, because, you know, it's unique really to every church, which I think is important and also freeing for a church.
So when we come alongside a church, every church cares about the vulnerable. They care about those that are hurting. We know that that's a given. But sometimes they get stuck with, well, what can I do? Or what are the needs?
Or what's my next step? And so when we walk alongside a church, we want to see where is God already at work? What are the natural flows and things that they already have going on? And then we want to help mobilize them kind of according to how God has uniquely gifted their church and called their church.
So it can look different for every church.
Some churches may be stepping in and providing a much needed parent's night out for families that are fostering. And adopting.
Some churches are bolstering their children's ministry programs so that the families that are already in their community that are serving the hurting and vulnerable, and quite frankly, Tracy, right? All of our families we live in this world and it's broken and fallen. And so everybody has their thing.
So the more equipped church is just to care well for families, you know, that could be a great step.
Some churches have ministries that are like freezer meal types of things.
So there's all these different things that can be leveraged and done in a way that is just supporting those that are really serving on the front lines.
Some churches have a real heart for our health and human services. And so they want to come alongside and care well for the caregivers that are supporting the biological families and the children and helping to find placements.
So the possibilities in a lot of ways are really endless. And I would also just add that a thing that every church can do is every church can pray. And honestly, Tracy, That is the most important step. That is the foundational step because this is a battle. It's a spiritual battle of what we're engaging in and what the church is engaging in and the families are engaging in.
So every individual, every church can definitely join as a prayer partner. Prayer is often the way God moves our hearts, too, to know what the action is that we need to take.
So that's a good suggestion.
So do we have to be in a Baptist church to partner with your organization? Absolutely not. We want to come alongside and support any church that wants to see lives changed through the hope of the gospel. And, you know, we know that you can change a child's circumstance and you could throw money at situations or, you know, clothes, food, all of that. And those things are really important.
Please don't misunderstand me. But the most important thing that we believe at Baptist Children's Home and that gospel-centered churches believe is that it's the hope of Christ. The only one that can transform lives, right? And we're just merely the conduit to his grace-filled power, pouring out and helping people feel seen and known and loved, and pointing them back to the one that. Can radically have that life transformation for that hope in that future that every human soul longs for.
All right.
Okay, good, good.
So we just have a couple minutes left, but I'd love for you to talk just a little bit more about the scope of the work that you do because it's pretty amazing. You guys work with older people and all kinds of different populations.
So just take a minute, if you would, and explain some of the other things that you do. And this is one of the things I love about Baptist Children's Homes.
So we are pro-life, and that is really looking at womb to tomb. I know people have heard that expression a lot, but right, every life has God-given purpose and value. And so we want to be a voice for those that maybe have lost their voice.
So we have a ministry to our intellectually, developmentally disabled population. It's called our IDDM ministry. And challenges that families face that have special needs can create distance and disconnect in a church. It can ultimately lead to isolation.
So we want to, again, help the church to understand that. But when a Older adult comes into care with us. We have nine homes across our state. We care for them for life.
So that's one of our populations that we serve. Another one, as you mentioned, is our aging population.
So that's our NC BAM ministry. And new seasons bring new challenges, right? And families are farther flung and spread across. And so we want our older adults to know that they have meaning and value and purpose. They can still be on mission with God and serve Him into their aging years.
And then we have another ministry called Greater Vision, which is really serving practical needs with food and clothing, but also coming alongside our vulnerable families and helping them develop life skills, you know, maybe filling out a job application or preparing for an interview.
So there's a lot of different things that we do. And then we have our family care programs where we are helping families again to have some of those life skills, developing those things, but also Having a landing place and a support system around them as they're kind of transitioning through a difficult time.
So it is amazing, isn't it, Tracy? All the things that Baptist Children's Home does, but what a privilege to work for an organization that's standing on the truth of God that really has this whole life perspective in mind from womb to tomb. All right, and if people want more information, where would they go to find that? They can go to our website, every-child.org, and find out lots of information, particularly with foster care adoption and those trainings. And then our bchfamily.org website also highlights some of these other ministries that I was just mentioning.
All right, Erica Spivey with the North Carolina Baptist Children's Homes. Thank you so much for being with us today on family policy matters. Thank you, Tracy. Thank you for listening to Family Policy Matters. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to the show and leave us a review.
To learn more about NC Family and the work we do to promote and preserve faith and family in North Carolina, visit our website at ncfamily.org. That's ncfamily.org. And check us out on social media at NC Family Policy. Thanks and may God bless you and your family.
