Error
Our Affirming Life ministry encompasses multiple partnerships with Christ-based agencies that serve women in crisis pregnancies, families in crisis, under-resourced families and persons suffering from post-abortion stress.
Caring Network. Caring Network is for life, providing help and hope for women facing unexpected pregnancy through a variety of programs. As the number of abortions surge, they are racing to equip life-minded churches to compassionately care for their neighbors, born and unborn.
Evangelical Child and Family Agency (ECFA). ECFA offers compassionate and Christ-centered services to children, families, and individuals through adoption, pregnancy support services, counseling, and intact family services.
Replanted Group. Replanted Group is a supportive community of fellow parents who foster, adopt or provide kinship care. Parents come together to share dinner and “same here” moments while their children enjoy time amongst friends and safe adults who understand their experience.
Safe Families for Children. Safe Families works with the local church to identify host homes ready to provide radical hospitality to a child whose family is going through an extreme challenge.
Serving Opportunities
The Parable of the River
There is a raging river filled with children. A woman, out on a stroll, walks to the river’s edge, discovers the calamity, and without even thinking, jumps in to save the child who just passed by her, caught up in the current. Once in the river, this “rescuer” can now see the number of kids who are headed either for the waterfall -- to be robbed of life just as it was about to begin -- or the rapids -- to live a life fraught with chaos, turmoil, and trauma. She exhausts herself in the effort to scoop each precious child out of the water. Working alone, she quickly realizes the futility of her labor, so before becoming completely overcome, she scrambles out of the river, determined to find out how all of these children ended up there to begin with.
She runs upstream, panting, only to find a whole mess of reasons these kids have ended up in the harrowing rush. Even moms and dad are toppling in. There are under-resourced women facing the insurmountable challenge of an unexpected pregnancy with no support systems; some of them are homeless or have never experienced a stable home life themselves. Some of them are just plain terrified of the complete life disruption of a baby. Others feel alone and ashamed -- not wanting to tell a living soul for fear of condemnation.
As our rescuer makes her way up the river, she discovers the issues go much deeper and are far more complex than she could ever have imagined. There is sin and poor choices and dysfunction that leads to broken families and over-run agencies. She even comes across well-intended foster and adoptive families facing complex issues with kids in their charge. Their hands are either in the air or pulling out their hair, because they don’t have the tools necessary to help these children who have gone through the rapids. Needless to say, our well-intentioned rescuer is once again overwhelmed by the magnitude of the issues and the brokenness in this world. And, if she dares to be honest, she feels utterly helpless and even hopeless.
In that state, our helper falls to her knees, and whispers, “Lord, you have opened my eyes to the hopelessness, despair, and sinful patterns in this world that not only rob us from a life of flourishing but actually lead to great peril. I have seen too much to not do anything ...
Show me … what you would have me do.”
Schedule Flexible
Location Churchwide
Contact affirminglife@thecompass.net