Focusing on helping people could bring people back into the church.
Churches have a long history of both uniting and dividing communities. In today’s political climate, it’s important for churches to focus on their positive impact on communities, especially among young people.
The Data
If every Church in the United States decided to provide resources to help every child in foster care reconnect with their family or find a home, how many children would each church have to help? What about homeless people? How many homes would each church have to find?
One way to start is by looking up how many foster care children and homeless people there are in each state and dividing that by the number of nationally recognized religious congregations.
In Nevada, for instance, if every congregation in Nevada provided resources to help 2.3 children find a new home or help their families reunite with their children, there would be no children left in the foster care system. This includes children who are waiting to be adopted and children who will ideally be reunited with their parents.
Helping Children In America
There are other things churches can help with other than getting children adopted. This includes providing rehab resources for parents, therapy for parents, and providing resources to help people adopt kids.
In 38 states, there are more congregations than there are children in the foster care system. What would it take to help every single kid in America? All it would take is for 75% of churches to help one child. If 75% of our religious institutions helped one child each, there wouldn’t be enough children to help. The problem isn’t that we need more churches.
What About Homelessness?
In 28 states, there are more religious congregations than there are homeless people. If every single religious institution provided the resources for one homeless person, that would eliminate two-thirds of the homelessness in the United States. That means that if over half of those religious institutions helped two people, there wouldn’t be enough people left to help.
The most recent state-by-state data about religious institutions was back in 2010. In 2010, the total number of religious institutions was about 344,000. Today, we have 380,000 Christian churches alone. That number is not ALL religions, just Christian churches only. So there are plenty of churches to do this.
Even religious institutions can do more than thoughts and prayers. If churches wanted to find and provide help for every child and every homeless person, they could.
Data provided by That Nick Powers Guy.