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.

By the end of the agency’s first decade, the country would be in an economic depression. One of the solutions to that depression--the New Deal--would regulate, professionalize, and bring under government control the less formal social services offered by churches. Through the end of the twentieth century, Americans would become used to the idea that government would provide a kind of safety net for kids in danger and the elderly in crisis.

In many ways, religious groups providing social care (now called “faith-based organizations”) adapted to the new reality. Baptist Family began a program called CHOSEN, which is essentially a partnership with the State of Maryland to provide therapeutic foster care. We serve kids from birth through the age of 21. We recruit, train, and certify parents and match them up with appropriate kids in order to achieve the best results. So, when it comes to orphans, we have changed with the times.

When it comes to the widows side of the equation, we are doing much of the same work. We have staff working in a program we call the Good Samaritan Network (or GSN). GSN is a visitation-based service: people in crisis call us for help and we provide counsel, guidance, resources, and compassion. We will serve about 450 people over the phone this year, but around ten percent of that group will qualify for more intense, face-to-face services.

One of these services is Transitional Housing. We have been blessed with three spaces to use to shelter and nurture homeless families. Right now, just as in 1920, we are sheltering a single mother with three kids. She is not technically a widow, but is instead a victim of domestic violence who is learning to be a single parent while having to hide herself and her children from her former husband. We are helping her with childcare and transportation in addition to the safe housing we provide to her family.

We know how to make critically important differences in the lives of families and individuals in crisis, we only need the resources to do it. Those resources are not all monetary, we need volunteers, we need in-kind gifts like backpacks for our back-to-school drive, and we need the thoughts and prayers of our entire community.

The vision for the next ten years of Baptist Family’s life begins with expanding our presence in the poorest of jurisdictions throughout Maryland and Delaware. Our focus will continue to be on children in crisis because of abuse and/or neglect; families and individuals in crisis due to financial, emotional and/or relationship issues; and poverty stricken communities.

Services will include out of home care for children who cannot live with their parents; in home supports like the Helpline, material assistance, counseling and transitional housing; and collaboration with other formal and informal resources in poverty stricken communities to bring about permanent solutions to the issues they face. Partnerships with churches and public and private community groups who support and participate in helping “orphans and windows in their distress” will be established wherever possible.