How the church can be a lifeline for families in need
Written by Ele Cushing
After my first son Joshua was born in 2016, I emerged from theatre numb from the waist down and shaken. We spent several days in Kingston hospital and it was like a switch went in my mind. I was in total overdrive – my thoughts racing a thousand miles an hour. I couldn’t sleep for 8 days and, although I’d never heard of it before, I’d developed something called postpartum psychosis, an illness affecting 1 in 1,000 women after childbirth. In my case it caused chaotic mania. I was climbing windowsills; I felt as strong as a horse; and on one occasion, I was on all fours, barking like a dog.
Eventually, I had to be taken to a Mother & Baby Unit (MBU) and after a few days, I was sectioned and separated from Josh. It took two months to be well enough to be reunited with him on another MBU. When Josh was three months, we were discharged into our first post as vicar and vicar’s wife in West Sussex – not quite the start to ministry life or parenthood we’d imagined!
During that time, our church families old and new were a lifeline - like Aaron and Hur holding Moses’ arms up in Exodus 17 when he grew weary, they held our family up in prayer and through loving acts of service, providing meals, words of hope and much more besides.
This experience is what led me to get involved in Safe Families, a charity that offers hope, belonging and support to children, families and care leavers in partnership with local churches. The reality is that our world is broken. There are children in need – almost 400,000 of them in the UK! And there are around 103,000 children in care too, with 38,000 entering the system for the first time this year – that's almost twice the capacity of the London O2 Arena. They were each created in God’s image, knitted together in their mother’s womb. His love for them runs deep and He catches each of their tears.
But there is hope! There are at least 50,000 churches across the UK and around 3,000,000 regular churchgoers, so we believe that the church can be a big part of the solution to the problem these children are facing. You might have heard of the charity Home for Good. Safe Families and Home for Good recently merged together to work in partnership with local churches, training, equipping and supporting volunteers to come alongside children in need, whether in their families of origin (the work of Safe Families) or through creating safe and supported foster families, adoptive families or supportive lodgings (the work of Home for Good).
How you can get involved with Safe Families
Since launching in the UK in 2013, Safe Families has partnered with 1,463 local churches and community groups, and worked with over 5,503 volunteers to offer support to over 10,821 families and over 24,981 children. As charities together, Home for Good and Safe Families have plenty of resources to support churches. Home for Good runs regular courses for those interested in considering fostering, adoption or supported lodgings, such as Foundations. Safe Families has also created the Belonging Course for small groups, which looks at how the church can counteract loneliness and isolation through community. In addition, we run therapeutic parenting courses, as well as training on mental health awareness, autism, understanding teenagers, risks outside the home, to name but a few.
There are three main ways you and your church can get involved in our work.
1. Volunteer
Safe families works with local churches to train up Family Friends – volunteers who can get alongside a family that is struggling. Might you have time to become a Family Friend, meeting up with a single parent once a fortnight to offer friendship and the knowledge that they’re not on their own in the trial that they face? Going out for a cup of coffee with someone wanting to talk about what’s going on or being an older brother or sister, aunt or uncle figure to a young person who needs someone to listen to them and tell them that things can be different?
Another way Safe Families can partner with churches is by raising up Resource Friends - people who provide practical help, using specific skills or expertise to help families that are struggling.
Lastly, we just launched a new scheme which seeks to support care leavers in Southwark, aiming to ensure that children leaving the care system have positive support networks around them to help them as they transition into independent living. Could you be that person’s cheerleader as they navigate huge change in their life?
2. Partner financially and in prayer
Maybe you’re thinking – I’d love to help but I have no time. If you felt able to, you could become a financial supporter. Safe Families has contracts with Local Authorities in Southwark and Hammersmith & Fulham, but there’s a shortfall of around £10 a month to support each family.
Even more importantly than financial support, we need your prayers. We are Christian charities and one of our core values is faith – believing in a God who can do far more than we can ask or imagine. Could you commit to pray regularly for children in need of a home and for the work of Safe Families and Home for Good?
3. Provide a home
Could you open up your home as a Host Family to help host children whose parents need some respite and give them a well-deserved break? Or perhaps you and your churches could consider the life-altering call to provide a home for a child who needs one, by exploring becoming a foster carer, adoptive parent or providing supported lodgings host for a teenager?
In Psalm 68 verses 5-6, we read:
“A father to the fatherless, a defender of widows, is God in his holy dwelling. God sets the lonely in families”.
I believe the church can play a vital role in reducing loneliness through relationship and bringing people into community. Safe Families can equip your church to do this for some of the most vulnerable families in your communities.
Ele Cushing is a ministry wife serving in Peckham. Ele led our seminar at our 2025 conference on mental health and soul care, sharing some of her own experience and ideas for self-care in ministry. If you’d like to discuss any of this further with Ele, you can email her on elecushing@safefamilies.uk.
