{"id":7031,"date":"2024-05-02T15:10:28","date_gmt":"2024-05-02T15:10:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/strongermarriages\/?p=7031"},"modified":"2024-05-02T15:10:28","modified_gmt":"2024-05-02T15:10:28","slug":"dallas-area-church-highlights-importance-of-foster-care-and-adoption-at-chosen-conference","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/strongermarriages\/2024\/05\/dallas-area-church-highlights-importance-of-foster-care-and-adoption-at-chosen-conference.html","title":{"rendered":"Dallas-Area Church Highlights Importance of Foster Care and Adoption at &#8216;Chosen&#8217; Conference"},"content":{"rendered":"<figure id=\"attachment_7043\" aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-7043\" style=\"width: 1200px\" class=\"wp-caption alignnone\"><img decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-full wp-image-7043\" src=\"https:\/\/wp-media.beliefnet.com\/sites\/413\/2024\/05\/adoption-foster-care-credit-shutterstock.jpg\" alt=\"adoption\" width=\"1200\" height=\"900\" \/><figcaption id=\"caption-attachment-7043\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">Shutterstock.com<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<p>A Dallas-area megachurch recently hosted a conference with the goal of enabling Christians and their congregations to help address the foster care crisis in the US. The \u201cChosen\u201d conference, held at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, aimed to \u201cempower, engage, and equip\u201d attendees to establish foster care ministries at their churches and to serve as foster parents effectively. The conference welcomed about 2,000 attendees, including several hundred who streamed online.<\/p>\n<p>Rev. Jeremiah Johnston, pastor of apologetics at Prestonwood Baptist Church and founder of the Christian Thinkers Society, said, \u201cWe feel that we need to marshal as many resources as humanly possible to bring awareness to foster care. The biggest and most important of those things is to raise awareness that the most unreached people group in the world right now are children, and specifically what society calls unwanted children.\u201d Johnston, however, rejects that way of thinking.<\/p>\n<p>He said, \u201cWe believe that every child is indeed a \u2018wanted child.\u2019&#8221; \u201cChosen,\u201d whose name was inspired by\u00a0Deuteronomy 7:6\u00a0\u2014 \u201cThe Lord has chosen you out of all the people on the face of the earth to be his treasured possession\u201d \u2014 is also the name of Prestonwood Baptist\u2019s foster care and adoption ministry. \u201cIt can be heart-wrenching. The rug can be pulled out from under you,\u201d he said.\u00a0Foster parents, he said, \u201cneed to be encouraged. They need to be resourced. They need to be celebrated.\u201d\u00a0If churches in the United States were able to mobilize on this topic effectively, Johnston said he believes they could solve the foster care crisis in the United States.<\/p>\n<p><iframe title=\"YouTube video player\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/0ShwzUfJRJw?si=2MvQ4XzP3G9UuwtG\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" frameborder=\"0\" allowfullscreen=\"allowfullscreen\"><\/iframe><\/p>\n<p>He said, \u201cThere are 400,000 children right now in foster care in the United States.\u201d Of those, \u201c100,000 of those right now are available for adoption and just need a family. [Some] 20,000 age out annually.&#8221;\u00a0\u201cThis is a stark problem, especially one that is so easily addressed,\u201d he said, noting there are more than 350,000 religious congregations in the United States.\u00a0At Chosen, Johnston said many of the hurdles associated with establishing an adoption or foster care ministry were taken care of.\u00a0Pastors who attended the Chosen conference \u201cessentially leave with a \u2018ministry in a box,\u2019 as it were,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>They have \u201call the tools they need to go home and start an adoption\/foster care ministry outreach through their local church.\u201d\u00a0Johnston said he believes that right now, there is \u201csimply a lack of awareness\u201d about fostering and\u00a0adoption in many\u00a0church communities rather than ambivalence or indifference.\u00a0\u201cI think that so many pastors are just doing their own thing,\u201d he said. \u201cAnd so we want to help build awareness.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He continued, \u201cNo one church has to feel like they have to do everything. But every church can do something.\u201d\u00a0He also said that talking about the problem is less effective than \u201cfocusing on solutions.\u201d Additionally, Johnston is hoping to \u201cpush back on this narrative\u201d that Christians only\u00a0care about babies\u00a0until they are born.\u00a0\u201cThat is simply false,\u201d he said. \u201cWe want to lead the way and be a pacesetter.\u201d\u00a0He said he hopes \u201cfor a vanguard of a new movement in the church through the rest of this.\u201d\u00a0The church, he said, referring to Christianity in general, is \u201cthe greatest force for good on planet Earth.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He added, \u201cWe believe the church should be the solution no matter what. And we\u2019re willing to stand on that, and come what may, we\u2019re going to take care of children and not apologize about it.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A Dallas-area megachurch recently hosted a conference with the goal of enabling Christians and their congregations to help address the foster care crisis in the US. The \u201cChosen\u201d conference, held at Prestonwood Baptist Church in Plano, Texas, aimed to \u201cempower, engage, and equip\u201d attendees to establish foster care ministries at their churches and to serve&hellip;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":657,"featured_media":7043,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fbia_status":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[48],"tags":[752,755,90],"class_list":["post-7031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-parenting","tag-adoption","tag-foster-care","tag-parenting"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v23.9 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>Dallas-Area Church Highlights Importance of Foster Care and Adoption at &#039;Chosen&#039; Conference<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"A Dallas-area megachurch recently hosted a conference with the goal of 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