by Jennifer Smith
The foster care crisis and the Church’s response are often discussed at a distance, framed as systemic The foster care crisis is not distant. It is not theoretical. It is not happening somewhere else. It is unfolding quietly in neighborhoods, schools, courtrooms, and emergency shelters across our city—impacting children and families every single day.
The first episode of Running Toward begins here, not with solutions, but with disruption. In a conversation between host Mike Sharrow and Jennifer Smith, Founder and Executive Director of the South Texas Alliance for Orphans, listeners are invited into the origin story of a movement that did not begin with vision casting or strategic planning. It began with anger, resistance, and an unwillingness to look away once the reality of children and families impacted by the foster care system became impossible to ignore.
This episode lays the groundwork for the entire podcast. It names the crisis honestly, centers lived experience over theory, and invites the Church to reconsider what faithfulness looks like when children and families are caught in systems they did not choose.
A Life That Didn’t Feel Incomplete
Jennifer Smith’s story does not begin with a sense of calling toward foster care. At the time, her life was full in ways many would recognize as stable and good. She was married, raising two young daughters, building a career in physical therapy, and actively involved in her local church. There was no sense that something was missing or broken. Foster care was not part of her vision for her life, nor was it something she had ever planned to pursue.
That detail matters, because it challenges a common narrative surrounding foster care engagement—that the people who step in are somehow uniquely prepared or predisposed. Jennifer makes clear that she was not searching for a cause. She was not restless. She was not looking for disruption. The disruption came to her.
When Awareness Becomes Personal
The turning point arrived unexpectedly through a newspaper article Jennifer read in 2006. It told the story of a young woman who had endured abuse and neglect in her home, been placed into foster care, experienced further harm while in the system, and then aged out at eighteen. At that point, the state simply stopped being her parent, leaving her to navigate adulthood alone.
Jennifer’s response was not gentle compassion. It was anger—directed at a system that had failed and at a reality that felt intolerable in a country with vast resources. She remembers shaking her fist at God and insisting that something should be done about it. What followed was not comfort, but confrontation. The question she could not escape was whether responsibility could continue to belong to “someone else,” or whether she herself was being asked to step closer.
This moment exposes a tension many people experience when confronted with the foster care crisis. Awareness creates discomfort, and discomfort demands a response. The temptation is to create distance by assuming the problem is already being handled—by professionals, by systems, or by other people who are better suited for the work. But Jennifer’s experience dismantles that distance. The crisis became personal not because she had answers, but because she could no longer pretend it was not hers to acknowledge.
Resistance, Wrestling, and an Unwanted Invitation
Even then, Jennifer did not move quickly. She resisted the idea that her family should be involved. She argued internally and spiritually, listing every reasonable objection: young children at home, full-time work, lack of expertise, lack of capacity. She delayed sharing the burden with her husband, certain that the answer would be no.
When she finally did, his initial response matched her own reluctance. Yet as he listened to stories of children and families impacted by the foster care system, his heart began to shift. By the end of that year, they found themselves enrolled in foster parent training—not because they felt ready, but because they felt unable to ignore what they now knew.
The training itself only intensified Jennifer’s unease. It exposed the realities many people quietly fear: constant oversight, loss of control, emotional attachment followed by loss, and the reality that loving a child well does not guarantee a lasting outcome. She admits to hoping she might fail the home inspection, not out of defiance, but out of fear. Saying yes felt costly, invasive, and uncertain.
This episode does not rush past those fears. Instead, it treats them with honesty. Jennifer’s story affirms that wrestling is not a sign of unwillingness, but of counting the cost. The discomfort is not evidence of failure; it is evidence that the decision matters.
A Relationship That Changed Everything
One of the most formative influences in Jennifer’s journey was a foster parent trainer named Linda Hurtubise. Linda had fostered more than 200 teenage girls over the course of her life. She did not share Jennifer’s faith, yet embodied a level of sacrificial presence that deeply challenged her understanding of discipleship.
During training, Jennifer encouraged Linda to speak at churches about the foster care crisis. Linda’s response was simple and devastating. She explained that she had tried, but that people did not show up.
That moment marked a shift. Jennifer realized that despite a lifetime in the Church, she had never heard sustained teaching about children and families impacted by the foster care system in her own city. She had heard about international orphan care and adoption, but not about the children attending local schools, living in emergency shelters, or being separated from siblings due to a lack of families willing to step in.
This was not a failure of compassion so much as a failure of visibility. The crisis was happening nearby, but it remained largely unnamed from the pulpit and unseen in congregational life.
Functional Orphans and a Relational Crisis
A central insight that emerges in this episode is the concept of children in foster care as functional orphans. While many have living biological parents, the system has determined that those homes are currently unsafe due to trauma, instability, addiction, or violence. In practice, these children do not have parents who are able to care for them.
The state can manage cases and enforce regulations, but it cannot provide what children need most: consistent, loving relationships. Emergency shelters, group facilities, and rotating professionals cannot replace the presence of a family willing to stay.
This is why the foster care crisis is not merely a policy problem. It is a relational one. Children and families are caught in a river of relationships that extends upstream into prevention, midstream into foster and kinship care, and downstream into aging out and long-term outcomes. When relationships are missing or fragmented, the consequences compound.
Historically, the Church understood this. In its earliest expressions, Christian communities assumed responsibility for children left vulnerable by death, poverty, or abandonment. Care was not delegated to institutions; it was shared among people committed to staying present. Over time, that responsibility shifted elsewhere, and with it came the assumption that the Church no longer needed to engage directly.
Jennifer’s story calls that assumption into question.
The Cost of Obedience and the Cost of Avoidance
As the conversation unfolds, Mike recounts a moment years later when Jennifer spoke to a room full of Christians about foster care. She named the very reasons people hesitate to get involved: fear of trauma, disruption to family rhythms, uncertainty about outcomes, and the grief that comes with loving children whose stories are marked by loss.
Then she asked a harder question—whether preserving personal comfort is worth the reality that children sleep in offices and shelters because no one made room for them.
This framing does not rely on guilt or pressure. Instead, it clarifies what is already true: every decision carries a cost. Saying yes carries sacrifice, inconvenience, and heartbreak. Saying no transfers those costs to children and families who are already carrying more than their share.
Jennifer does not pretend that obedience is easy. She testifies that it is costly. But she also names what became clear in her own wrestle: there was no longer a neutral position.
Why the Alliance Exists
Out of these experiences grew the South Texas Alliance for Orphans, not as a standalone solution, but as a connector. The Alliance exists to serve and equip the Church to step into the foster care crisis in sustainable, relational ways. Its work is grounded in a simple but demanding truth: every relationship matters.
Rather than focusing solely on foster and adoptive families, the Alliance invites churches, individuals, and businesses to find their place in the river. Prevention, support, mentoring, respite care, and long-term presence are all essential. The crisis is too large for any one role to carry alone, but it is not unsolvable when responsibility is shared.
Jennifer often says her goal is to become unnecessary—to see churches fully engaged, families fully supported, and children surrounded by consistent care. Until then, the work continues.
An Invitation to Stay
The first episode of Running Toward does not end with a call to action checklist. It ends with an invitation to consider proximity. What happens when we get close enough to see clearly? What changes when we stop assuming someone else will step in?
This podcast exists for people who sense that something is wrong in the foster care system, but are unsure where responsibility lies or what faithfulness might require of them. It does not ask listeners to fix the crisis. It asks them to step into the river, find their place, and stay.
Because meaningful change does not come from standing at a distance. It comes from showing up, walking with children and families impacted by the foster care system, and trusting that long-term presence—however ordinary it may feel—is where healing begins.
