Dear Editor,
I read with interest the article on ‘Families and God’s grace’ in August’s en. I work with Children’s Homes/Orphanages on three continents, as a volunteer I would add. What you call them is really immaterial, and I think our Swiss banker friend’s look at all things is black and white.
What do you do with the child who lives in Colombia who, if he stays with his parents, will likely be kidnapped and indoctrinated into the world of drugs and guerrilla warfare? The boy in Uganda who lost his father and his mother remarries, resulting in the boy being expelled from the house as the new man in the house sees him as a threat as he is not his child, and he becomes a street boy and all that entails. The three-year-old child in the Far East who has been continually sexually assaulted by her father. These are all real cases I have come across. I could go on. They all have a family home which is dangerous for them to continue to be part of.
Children's Homes, and many of them have a Christian background, have an important part to play in safeguarding young children and teenagers to bring them into adulthood.
Yours sincerely Laurie Read By email
Dear Editor,
A little pushback to Krish Kandiah’s article in the August issue. It may be right that orphanages are outdated, but George Muller and Amy Carmichael’s work was great – and putting them alongside the slave trade was not cool – and it may be that in some poor or war-torn countries orphanages still have a vital place. A chat to a social worker will tell you that home isn’t always the best place.
Then Krish writes: ‘… this so-called “normative” model – the nuclear family – is virtually nowhere to be seen in the Bible.’ Really, Adam and Eve, Mary and Joseph, and a host of others, and Jesus’s teaching on divorce, all point to Mum and Dad and the children being the ideal. Of course, much is screwed up and a lot of that is in the Bible, as Krish says. Also, very positively it’s the nuclear family and more, but where possible, Mum and Dad and the children are the core.
I don’t think we should forget this when in our dysfunctional culture a family can be two lesbians, etc.
Yours sincerely, Ian Cooper By email
