Evangelical Adoption Agency to Provide Services to LGBTQ Households
Michigan-based adoption agency Bethany Christian Services made an exciting, new announcement Monday in a story first reported by the Times. At the risk of losing government contracts, the 77-year-old evangelical agency finally changed its tune announcing that it will now be accepting applications and providing services to LGBTQ households across its operations in 32 states.
Bethany Christian Services has remained one of the country’s largest adoption and foster care agencies facilitating 3,406 foster care placements and 1,123 adoptions in 2019.
“We will now offer services with the love and compassion of Jesus to the many types of families who exist in our world today … We’re taking an ‘all hands on deck’ approach where all are welcome.” writes the organizations president and chief, Chris Palusky, in a letter to over 1,500 staff members.
The decision comes two years after a lengthy legal battle in Bethany’s home state of Michigan where the state’s attorney general announced that foster agencies contracting with the government could no longer decline to work with LGBTQ families.
Faith-based agencies are integral in placing children in new families’ while reports from the Williams Institute at U.C.L.A School of Law shows that same-sex couples are seven times more likely to adopt or foster compared to their heterosexual and cisgender counterparts.
This decision comes as a shock to many faith-based agencies that remain unsupportive. Russel Moore, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, stated Monday, “I am disappointed in this decision, as are many. This move will harm already existing efforts to enable faith-based orphan care ministries to serve the vulnerable without capitulating on core Christian convictions,”
While Bethany doesn’t go out of their way to include the term LGBTQ in their position statement or on their website, they have removed their previous line about “upholding God’s design for marriage as between one man and one woman.”
Bethany will begin offering training to staff on LGBTQ competency in the coming months while continuing to open the door for more families and churches.
“For too long, the public witness of Christianity has been anti-this or anti-that,” states Guthrie Graves-Fitzsimmons, a faith and progressive policy fellow at the Center for American Progress. “Today the focus is on serving children in need.”
