When Baptist Family was founded in 1920, nearly 90 years ago, child welfare in America was beginning a real period of transition. Most child welfare needs were handled on the local level, by individual churches and those acting together under a denominational flag. Abandoned children were placed in orphanages. Widows and elderly in need were cared for as part of a thriving extended family, often living in the same home with their children and grandchildren.

These solutions had their pluses and minuses, but they were both reactions to a very basic part of human nature: people naturally want to help the helpless. It is hard-wired into our brains, written on our hearts, and woven by God into our souls--we are our brother’s keeper. And our sister’s. And our parents’. The list is as long as the number of lives we touch in this world.

The writer of the Letter of James in the New Testament taps into this current very succinctly: “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.”

These words guided Willoughby McCormick and his colleagues as they shaped Baptist Family’s mission in its early days. They began with a fairly innovative idea: to keep kids out of orphanages. They declared that children are best raised and nurtured in a loving home. So they worked to keep families together wherever possible, to prevent child abandonment, and to use what would today be called private foster care methods to give new families to children without homes.

One of the very first acts of the new agency was to buy a house for a young widow raising three young children. That is certainly visiting a widow AND orphans in distress.