We’re approaching the end of Foster Care Fortnight. Foster Care Fortnight is the UK’s biggest foster care awareness raising campaign, delivered by The Fostering Network; the aim is to raise the profile of fostering and show how foster care transforms lives. This year’s theme is #FosteringCommunities, celebrating all who make a difference in the lives of children and young people. We’re delighted to join in the celebrations.

Inspired by the campaign, I wanted to write a piece about theology and foster care. But here’s the trouble: there isn’t a theology of foster care.

A few years ago, I was curious to find resources on theology and fostering so I did some looking around – and I struggled to find much. To see what I mean, I’d like you to pause reading for a moment and head over to your search engine of choice. Enter the phrases “theology of adoption” and click search, and then do the same for “theology of foster care”.

I’ve just done this again myself and the results are pretty stark. The phrase, “theology of adoption” yielded 110,000 results, which is perhaps not surprising: the internet’s a big place and there are plenty of books and articles exploring the language of adoption, though many of which are not to do with contemporary adoption practices. But it’s still a big number.

How many hits did you have for “theology of foster care”? I got ten. Not 10,000, but ten.

Just let that sink in for a moment. This seems strange, if not alarming to me. Here are some questions that have been bothering me about this:

• Why is so little theological attention paid to something that so many Christians are doing?
• Why is there such a disparity between the attention paid to a theology of adoption and a theology of foster care?
• What do those who have been fostered or those who foster experience when they don’t see the foster care being reflected on theologically?
• What would a theology of foster care look like anyway? How would it be similar to and different from a theology of adoption?

We could dwell on those questions forever. Today I want to focus on the first two questions, but I’ll leave a note at the end for how you might be able to help with the last two. Before I begin to unpack these questions, I want to make it clear that in focusing on a theology of foster care, I am by no means wanting to undermine a commitment to thinking theologically about adoption; quite the opposite! This conversation is about ensuring that there is theology for everyone – and I think that an enriched theology of foster care will fuel more enriched theology on adoption and supported lodgings as well.

In a way, it makes sense that there would be a lot more theological studies on adoption. It’s a term that we find in the New Testament. It is also a named ‘doctrine’ used to explore an understanding of relationship with God. A lot of those 110,000 hits we found in our internet search will be focused on historical understandings of ‘adoption’ without any connection to the practice of adoption in contemporary society.

Because it’s mentioned in the Bible and understood more, often the writing we can find around the Church’s responsibility to care for children and teenagers who can’t live with their birth families focusses on adoption as a starting point. Sometimes fostering gets grouped in - but it often feels like a bit of an afterthought. We know that while adoption is deemed the best option for some, only a small number of children leaving care are adopted. There are many children and young people for whom fostering is a better fit, perhaps because it offers them the support they require in a different way or allows contact with birth family. Fostering and adoption, while connected, are different things – fostering deserves and requires more than a theological afterthought.

Now, I want to tread carefully here as I know that Paul’s use of adoption language and imagery is, for some, a very precious part of their journey, and it deserves more space than I have in this article to explore this. For many of us, the truth that God has adopted us into His family is a powerful and transformative truth. For many, it will be what has inspired them to consider opening their own homes to children or young people in care, and for others these words will have offered a sense of family, home and belonging. We can also acknowledge that there are some significant questions raised, importantly by adoptees themselves, about the extent to which the New Testament’s use of adoption can be paralleled with contemporary adoption, and how helpful that is.

But here’s my main point: you can’t build a theology of fostering on this form of adoption theology. They are different things – and here are some of the differences:

• Adoption theology places emphasis on joining a family permanently, whereas foster care is, by definition, temporary. How do we reflect theologically on the experience of child, carer and community in that temporary space?
• Adoption theology places emphasis on a change of legal identity, whereas a young person in foster care does not take on the legal identity of the foster family. How do we reflect theologically on these questions of identity and belonging?
• Adoption theology places emphasis on the ‘before’ and the ‘after’ of the adoption decision, whereas foster children may move back to their birth family (or onto another foster family, or back and forth between birth family and care). How do we reflect theologically on the possibility of family reunification, or the movement between different family and care situations?

It almost seems like the way the theological conversation around children in care has been framed is incompatible with foster care, because the core themes and issues in that conversation are, at best, less relevant to foster care, or at worst, marginalising of foster care. To use existing adoption theology to speak about fostering feels a little like being given hand-me-down clothes that don’t look right and don’t fit.

I hope you didn’t start this question expecting it to end with a helpful answer; instead, what I’m posing are some helpful further questions as we dwell on this topic together – and we would LOVE to hear your reflections to help us learn:

• Has the marginalising of foster care in the theology conversation led to a marginalising of foster care?
• What are the distinctive things about foster care (perhaps compared to adoption) and how do these affect the theology conversation?
• How do Christians who have been fostered experience the conversations around theology at the moment, and how might they be involved in shaping them in the future?
• How do foster carers experience the conversations around theology at the moment, and how might they be involved in shaping them in the future?
• What could some different/additional starting points for our theology look like?

Perhaps our marking of Foster Care Fortnight this year looks like beginning a new conversation. Really, I see it as an invitation here to do deeper and more specific theological reflection on foster care. And my belief and hope is that as this develops, everyone will benefit.

If you have thoughts or reflections around what a theology of foster care could look like, we’d love to hear from you. Get in touch with us at [email protected]