The state can’t raise kids, and they know it. So they hire foster parents to help them.
What should foster parents do about their children at
church? Can they evangelize and disciple
and baptize them and give them communion?
I write with little direct experience in the foster care system
of the state. Some of my assumptions may
be off. The key one is this: a foster
parent is more limited by the state in what they can do with children, before
they legally adopt the child. The
specifics may even vary from state to state, so this gets complicated.
I also write in response to a proposal that foster parents go
ahead and baptize foster children, and give them communion weekly, before they
have opportunity to legally adopt those children. That will shape where I take this.
Finally, I write with admiration for foster parents, and the high and difficult calling they embrace, though I may have some hard words for them to hear.
We can and should evangelize and raise foster kids in the Lord
Jesus, treating them as one of our own as far as discipling and teaching them
God’s ways. But we cannot see ourselves
as saving kids from the state, when we enter the state’s foster system. We may be a sanctifying presence for good in
that system, and bring some to Christ who were in spiritually damaging
situations. But we cannot alter the
off-base principle (that the state has a legitimate and primary role in raising
abandoned children) by participating in that same system in a certain way. This takes on an unnecessarily adversarial
posture toward the state, which is also seeking the child’s best interest as an
advocate, even if their view of their jurisdiction is too broad and unbiblical.
If we don’t want to grant the state more authority than it has,
should we even enter the foster system, which assumes that authority exists? I would argue we may, but our goal should be
the reclamation of kids for Christ, not the transformation of the system or its
principles.
The argument is made that we should go ahead and baptize foster
kids, because we’re getting to the point where the state may take our own kids
away, too. This argument is
invalid. In foster care there is an
explicit agreement that the child is ultimately under the care of the state,
and the parents are agents. The burden
of proof is vastly higher for the state to take your own children away. There is no agreement between the state and
family to raise your own children in a certain way. The unwritten rules that could get your kids
taken away are far fewer than the rules foster parents need to abide by. The comparison doesn’t hold. To go ahead with baptism of foster children,
because all children are in an unstable situation given the tyrannical state,
is to vastly exaggerate the current situation with the state for Christian
homes. I say this fully aware of the
abuses of Child Protective Services against good parents, over the years.
Baptizing foster children in temporary custody may enter the
realm of being a rash vow. If there is a
real chance the state may remove our foster care without our permission (when
the parents re-enter the picture, e.g.), it is rash to promise to raise the
child long-term in the faith. This differs from
just not knowing the future generally. You are in a knowingly unstable situation. Often the foster parent needs objective
counsel to realize how unstable it is.
Getting attached to the child and zealous to reclaim him from the state
or for Christ in covenant families, foster parents may have more experience
with the system, but be least objective of anyone about the situation. They need friends and pastors outside the
family to remind them of the instability when they get attached.
A foster child is not under your legal care in a stable enough
situation to warrant baptism. In baptism
you promise to raise the child in the faith.
How can you do that if you aren’t sure of their situation 12 months from
now? It is similar to a grandparent taking
temporary custody of a child in an unstable home. Your home may be much more stable, but the
child’s situation is not. Foster parents
intent to salvage children can come with too high a view of themselves, thus
assuming the situation is stable once they are involved. No. Just because you want the state to butt out, doesn't mean the child will be much comforted and stabilized by your word, against their wreck of a family and the state. Once
the situation settles out and we see who the long-term guardian will be, then they
can decide things like baptism.
Temporary matters of receiving the Lord’s Supper, though acutely painful in our
circles that practice weekly communion with children, do not warrant the immediate baptism and communing of foster children.
Foster children are not in the position of widows and orphans
partaking of the Old Testament feasts.
Their covenant status from their original home should be the default
setting and not changed. Foster children
have no right to the feasts of God’s people if they do not believe or if they come
from an unbelieving household. Temporary
oversight by a believing foster family is not sufficient warrant to bring them
to the table, applying the “one rule” of Exodus 12. That rule referred to ethnicity, not to varying
degrees of arrangements of custody.
The church has struggled with this situation historically. Christian orphanages may have baptized
abandoned babies in the past or present, but parents acting as agents of the state
providing temporary care ought not. I
would even advocate against Christian orphanages baptizing its children,
though, until the child is placed in a godly home. This is the role of legal parents, not
surrogate parents, and the difference is important. To an older child, a foster parent saying he
is “really” your parent, just like our other children, is an obvious fiction,
until legal adoption takes place. It’s
okay and right to try to give your foster child the sense of belonging in your
family, but that comes fully with adoption.
Just as the state has a legitimate role to register marriages, so it does
to recognize adoptions.
Charles Hodge summarized the Presbyterian Church Assembly’s view
of orphanage baptisms in 1863. After
affirming the usual pattern of baptizing them if their parents (were they alive
or present) were believers, he adds: “Let those children only be baptized, in
every case, who are so committed to the mission, or other Christian tuition, as
to secure effectually their entire religious education." This shows the principle. A child of believing parents can be
baptized. But if they aren’t believers,
don’t baptize them, even if they are in an orphanage’s or foster parent’s
temporary custody. When a child is in
any unstable situation where they have a temporary guardian (orphanage or
foster parent), we should wait to baptize them until their own commitment, or a
more stable family situation, make a Christian upbringing expected.
To go ahead with baptism and communion for foster children would
be a pointed lack of submission to the state, rejecting the authority they have
and that we accept by signing up for foster care. It is NOT like the early Christians who
searched the city gate for infants still alive who had been abandoned. It is more like entering the temple of Apollo
to foster abandoned children left there, signing an agreement to raise a child
a certain way, and then going home and ignoring some parts of that
agreement. This is not submission to
authority. Two wrongs (the state’s
over-reach, then our rejection of following the foster system while entering
it) do not make a right.
Qualifications to only baptize foster children under certain
conditions go a long way to alleviating my concerns above. The long term situation is for them to be
with you. Parental rights with the birth
family are terminated by the state. The
state says it’s fine to baptize them.
But before the termination of parental rights, the state really tells
foster parents to act as if
the child is their own, not to solemnize covenantal unions to that effect. (The state can hardly be expected to
understand the meaning of baptism.)
And why not then just wait until the adoption goes through? It makes that adoption much more
meaningful. It recognizes the legitimate
voice of the state to say, “This child who was not born in your house is yours.” We cannot at the same time enjoy the benefits
of receiving children (and funds) through the state’s system, while we also
decry that system’s very existence and jurisdiction. Our nation must be re-discipled for Christ
before that system will change, and we can’t force it through small acts such
as this.
If baptismal vows or confessions need to be adjusted to
accommodate foster children, it should give us pause. Are we getting out of sync with the historic
church? Are we trying to alleviate an
immediate and acute point of tension more than we are following biblical
principle and historic practice?
Though it is a moral and not a more ritual concern, we make the
same argument to young people regarding sex before marriage. Why wait? they ask, since we intend to marry
very soon, anyway? Why should we wait
for foster children to enjoy the benefits of covenant with Christ? Because it is God’s design in Scripture
(Exodus 12; 1 Corinthians 7:14). It
makes the covenant bond all the more meaningful once the official ceremony of
adoption is complete.
“Remember
that you were at that time separated from Christ, alienated from the commonwealth
of Israel and strangers to the covenants of promise, having no hope and without
God in the world. 13 But
now in Christ Jesus you who once were far off have been brought near by the
blood of Christ” (Ephesians 2:12-13).
We ought not jump the gun and baptize children not yet adopted, out
of an understandable but exaggerated hostility to the over-reaching state. We ought not enter into vows we have some reasonable
doubt whether we can keep.
Last chapter of Part 5: Doctrine of the Knowledge of God
You and Your Household by Gregg Strawbridge
North! or Be Eaten by Andrew Peterson
