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Woburn

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35 Olympia Avenue
Woburn, MA 01801

Service Times

Sunday 8:30 AM

Sunday 10:00 AM

Sunday 11:30 AM

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North Shore

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North Beverly Elementary School | 48 Putnam St.
Beverly, MA 01915

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Sunday 10:00 AM

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Fostering Hope

by on May 14, 2019

Hi GENESIS,

My name is Cory Valk. My husband Andy and I are foster/soon-to-be adoptive parents of a beautiful little girl. We are incredibly passionate about foster care and adoption, and we think you should be too. I hope you’ll stick around for the next few paragraphs and, by the end, I hope you’ll be begging to know how YOU can get involved!

WHY should you care about foster care/adoption?
In short, because God does. If you are a Christian, you are on the hook for caring for vulnerable children. Although not technically orphans, children in foster care don’t have a parent who is able to care for them (for a time or perhaps forever) leaving them circumstantially orphaned. The Bible has a lot to say about adoption and caring for orphans. In the Old Testament, the laws given to the Jewish people have many provisions for the orphan and widow. God expected this of his people. In the New Testament, James sums it up like this: "Religion that God our Father accepts as pure and faultless is this: to look after orphans and widows in their distress and to keep oneself from being polluted by the world" (James 1:27). Ultimately, our identity as Christians is those who have been adopted into God’s family (See Romans 8:14-17). If adoption is God’s heart towards us, it should be our heart towards vulnerable children.

There is a shortage of foster homes and an increasing number of children coming into foster care in Massachusetts. I recently read an article in the Boston Globe describing how a social worker had to remove a child from his home in Worcester in the early evening. They spent most of the night driving up and down Route 9 waiting for a placement to be found. Finally, at 4am, a placement was found in Lynn. The child was dropped off at the home and then picked up two hours later to be brought back to school in Worcester. This is a tragedy. No traumatized child (or social worker) should ever have to experience this. Bottom line: we need more foster homes, desperately!

WHO should care for vulnerable children?
Every Christian. The Bible makes it clear that this is not optional. I’m not saying that every person has the ability to be a foster/adoptive parent, but EVERY person can do SOMETHING to support a foster parent or child in foster care. Can you cook (or buy!) a meal, buy some clothes/diapers/toys, babysit, pray, send an email, buy groceries? YES! You can do at least one of those things for a foster family and those tasks can make a huge difference in whether a foster family can keep doing what they’re doing for the long term.

HOW can you care for children in foster care?
GENESIS is partnering with Fostering Hope, a non-profit with the goal of mobilizing churches to create sustainable cultures of foster and adoptive care. Simply put, we want to raise up more foster/adoptive families within our church and surround them with the support that will allow them to continue caring for children from hard places for years to come. We are praying for a time when no child will be without a safe home to go to.

Please join us on June 1st (9:30-11:30AM) to learn more about how you can get involved with this new ministry!

Go to http://bit.ly/FHGENESIS to sign up.

Contact Cory Valk: for more information. If you are not able to attend the event, but would still like to be involved, please let me know.

For further reading:
1. Fostering Hope
https://fosteringhope.org/

2. Counting the Cost of Fostering or Adopting
http://jasonjohnsonblog.com/blog/counting-the-costs-of-fostering-or-adopting

3. When We Know Their Names They Are Harder to Ignore
http://www.fosterthefamilyblog.com/foster-the-family-blog-1/when-we-know-their-names-theyre-harder-to-ignore

4. 5 Myths About Foster Care and Adoption
https://adopttogether.org/5-myths-about-foster-care-adoption/