Lately this verse keeps popping out at me from sermons, books, and now, websites. Today it appeared on the very top of the Care for Children page on the Church at Brook Hills’ website:

“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

After studying the book of James as a congregation this fall, the Church at Brook Hills began to put this centuries-old sentence into practice with their recent emphasis on foster care and adoption. When they read this verse on Sunday, September 6, the leaders and members of the church started asking what it would look like to take care of the orphans of Shelby County. Pastor of Brook Hills Dr. David Platt met with workers from Alabama’s Department of Human Resources to find out more, and challenged the members of his congregation to consider being foster parents or adopting.

To find homes for all of the children in Shelby County’s foster care program, DHR representatives told Dr. Platt it would take 150 families. On Sunday, September 20, Brook Hills held an informational meeting for families who wanted to begin the process of being foster parents. At the end of the meeting, 160 families had signed up. Brook Hills is now partnering with several adoption and foster care agencies in Alabama to provide the necessary classes and training so that potential foster parents can welcome a foster child into their home very soon.

Some of these children have been abused, ignored, and rejected. All of them have a story about how they ended up in foster care. And now, because of an ancient letter from one of Jesus Christ’s disciples and a church family willing to put those words into action, hundreds of the orphaned, forgotten, and abandoned children in Shelby County will have a story about finding a home.

To find out more about the Church at Brook Hill’s Care for the Children program, visit their webpage or send an email to careforchildren@brookhills.org. For more information on foster care in Alabama from DHR’s website, click here.

Each week Bedouins International posts a story. Maybe it’s one we’ve helped to tell, or a story we hope to tell, or it maybe it’s just a story we think deserves to be told. In any case, we hope you find them inspiring and motivating. Read more stories here.