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6 min read

The thin place family-making creates

Fixing a broken adoption system leads to a 'thin place' – one where family-making transcend traumas. Belle Tindall meets Tarn Bright of Home For Good.

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Three young children run away into the distance down across a field of long grass.
Towards a thin place.
Photo by Jordan Whitt on Unsplash.

‘The thin place’ is one of those wonderfully old terms; fifth century old, to be exact. It’s what Celtic Christians labelled the precise places where it felt as though this world and another would meet. Those places were thin because the atmosphere they provided made it appear as though there was very little separation between humanity and the divine. The seen and the unseen, residing in particularly close proximity.  

Being Welsh, I have a soft spot for anything remotely ‘celtish’. Being a lover of anything enchanting, I swoon at such a beautiful notion. Being a Christian, I happen to believe that thin places are real.  

Here’s the interesting thing though, when the Celts used this phrase, it was pertaining to a geographical area – a Welsh waterfall, an Irish woodland, a Scottish Loch (sorry England, I’m sure your Anglo-Saxons were just as appreciative of you). But when Tarn Bright, the CEO of Home for Good, used this phrase just last week, it was when talking about the UK’s care system. 

Quite the unexpected twist, isn’t it? 

But you need to spend approximately three minutes in Tarn’s presence to agree with her. In fact, whenever I find myself chatting to anyone from Home for Good, an organisation that is intent on ‘finding a home for every child that needs one’, I find myself in a very thin place indeed.  

As a way of explaining myself (and Tarn), allow me to briefly turn my attention to just one of the things that make Christianity ever so slightly odd: the Christian God is a family. I know, I know - it’s intricate, it’s complicated, it’s paradoxical, but it’s absolutely core to the way Christians perceive… well…. everything.  

Father, Son, Holy Spirit – the Holy Trinity. All distinct, all one, all God. If I were NT Wright or Jane Williams, perhaps I would feel confident enough to explain this thoroughly. But I’m not, so I won’t. Instead, I’m hoping that you’ll take my word for it, follow my (or rather, Tarn’s) line of argument, and seek out the details later.  

Deal? Deal.  

So, here we all are acknowledging that Christianity has a family as God, that there has been relationship from the very beginning of time. And so, it follows that Christianity also hinges on a family-making-God, one who ‘sets the lonely in families’, to borrow a phrase. Hence, the thin place. Tarn’s profound thinking is that when we, as humans, put families together, there’s very little separation between us and the God who has always been determined to do the very same thing. If those families are formed biologically – wonderful. If a family is put together through a combination of circumstance and choice – that is just as legitimate and just as thin.  

I struggle to think of a more beautiful thought.  

Blasting through such trauma, is the immense joy of Home for Good finding and supporting a young couple who adopted all five children. 

While I could expend thousands of words waxing-lyrical about such things, I’d be remiss to not tell you anything of Home for Good aside from its somewhat sacred (in my over-emotional opinion) nature. Let’s take it from the beginning.  

Home for Good was thought up nearly ten years ago, at a garden party hosted in a vicarage; one flowing with Pimms and finger sandwiches. While the setting may be charmingly quaint, the content of the meeting was of the utmost seriousness. Desperate shortage of foster carers and adoptive parents in the UK was making headline news, and several Christian leaders, many of whom were foster carers or adoptive parents themselves, committed to work together to raise the profile of fostering and adoption within the UK Church. 

And so, Home for Good was born.  

You see, a child will enter the UK care system every fifteen minutes, there are more children in the care system right now than ever before. Each and every one of those children has intrinsic worth and value, all of them have experienced loss and trauma, many have suffered abuse or neglect. The reality is that there just aren’t enough carers to ensure that these children have somewhere stable to call home. It’s one of those vast and painful realities we find hard to digest. And yet, Home for Good not only acknowledges the tragedy, it tackles it head-on.  

Active in all four UK nations, Home for Good is working to find a home for every single child: through fostering, adopting and supported lodgings.  

You may be asking yourself where on earth they’re finding these homes.   

Well, they’re finding them in the fifty thousand churches across the UK. Not ‘churches’ as in the grand (or perhaps not so grand) building next to your favourite coffee shop, but ‘Church’ as in the tens of millions of people who flow in and out of those buildings. We’re talking the people, not the places. Home for Good practically equip, support and train those who want to invite children into their families, while also mobilising churches to be welcoming and understanding places for these families to be. Because, if we are thinking of family as in ‘nuclear family’; that all important two adults to two-point-five children ratio, we are thinking too rigidly. And, contrary to popular belief, we are not thinking along very Christian lines either.  

It struck me, while speaking with Tarn, that the work that Home for Good do is also thin in another way: the space between profound pain and immense joy is, and perhaps always will be, very thin indeed. For example, Tarn told me a story of five siblings who were in very real risk of losing each other. There seemed to be very little hope of finding a stable home for all five of them, as there simply aren’t enough carers who are able to take on siblings. And once separated, even if only intended to be a temporary measure, the chances of those siblings living together again are practically non-existent. It’s hard to fathom looking straight into such huge pain on such little faces. That’s the type of pain that, if we’re honest, we’d like to pretend doesn’t exist. But it does. And it’s in closer proximity than we allow ourselves to realise. But then, blasting through such trauma, is the immense joy of Home for Good finding and supporting a young couple who adopted all five children. This isn’t a story of rescue, Tarn will stand for no such thing, rather it is a story of family-making. The type that Tarn, with her own beloved adopted sons, knows well.  

Unconditional love, deep belonging and unwavering devotion had been ‘professionalised out of the system’. 

As well as working on a local level, Home for Good have built up an immense influence on a national level. Since Tarn’s been the CEO, she has worked with (all seven) Children’s Ministers in Westminster. As she subsequently observes, the system is not of conscious design. Rather, it consists of a conglomeration of reactive policy ‘add-ons’. Although there are people devotedly working within the system who are intent on doing the best for children, it is deeply and undeniably stretched. What’s more, inputting into the ‘once in a lifetime’ independent review, Tarn and her team were able to explain how unconditional love, deep belonging and unwavering devotion had been ‘professionalised out of the system’. Somewhere along the line, we have stopped asking ‘what the child’s heart needs’.  And yet, Tarn notes that how we treat our children now will directly affect how our world works in a generation’s time.  

If this is not a justice issue of the most profound kind, it’s hard to imagine what is.  

And so, there we have it. Home for Good, the thinnest place imaginable. The place where every child is fought for. The place where family is re-imagined. The place where I abandon every ounce of professionalism, as I put all my energy into holding back embarrassing tears. The place that is, thankfully, quite used to such reactions.  

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Nationalism
5 min read

One flag two nations: the view from Leicester

Raising the national flag won’t secure the future for our grandchildren
A suburban English street with St George's Cross flags on lamposts.
Mtaylor848, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

I was in the local pub the other week and overheard a conversation at the bar prompted by Operation Raise the Colours, the campaign group that advocates for the Union flag and the St George’s Cross to be hung in public places.  

Striking was the opinion of one man who repeatedly stated that he was not a fascist or a racist but supported anti-immigration policies and the deportation of migrants and asylum seekers for the sake of his young granddaughter. It was a lack of hope for her future, he kept asserting, that meant politicians needed to take a more aggressive stance against people arriving in this country hoping to live here. He therefore supported the raising of the St George’s Cross as a sign of the national identity he hoped his granddaughter would grow up to experience. 

In the last hundred years the St George’s Cross has been a sign of Empire, military might, hooliganism, English Nationalism, xenophobia, fascism, and other violent and oppressive worldviews. It meant for many who did not want to be associated with these things that they could never raise or recognise the flag at all.  

But there has also been some reclamation of our national symbols. Cool Britannia and Britpop under New Labour saw a new pride in the Union flag; England’s football team under Gareth Southgate and the ‘proper’ English Lionesses were successful, articulate, and diverse under the Cross of St George. It's why even now it’s hard to discern whether someone with a Cross of St George stuck to their house endorses Tommy Robinson, or whether they’re showing their support for the England women’s rugby team, who are swept all opposition before them whilst cavorting in pink cowboy hats and redefining all kinds of feminine stereotypes. 

These myriad options for painting identities onto national colours seems particularly clear in Leicester, where I live and work. We live in the outer suburbs, meaning two miles in one direction, humans are outnumbered by sheep, and two miles in the other is the incredibly diverse edge of the city.  

Leicester famously has the most diverse street in the UK, Narborough Road, where people from many nations live and work, generally in relative harmony. Skills are shared: help with government forms for those without good English are informally bartered for meals, haircuts, or produce. Christians, Jews, Muslims, Sikhs, Hindus and many other faiths worship within close proximity. It seems a place symbolic of one kind of England: diverse, tolerant, enriching the lives of one another by the sharing of culture and skills.  

It’s easy to point to recent riots between Hindu and Muslim populations in the north of the city as proof of the opposite. Nevertheless, having worked in a diverse city centre church and visited schools and hospitals where many cultures and faiths study and work together, there are large pockets of the city that do generously manage to embody this vision. Faith leaders are overwhelmingly committed to mutual tolerance and respect. 

I know many people in the county also wish for this version of England, but it has been striking to see how many villages surrounding the city have joined in with Operation Raise the Colours. Its anti-immigration message provides a clear-cut visual contrast. In the city there are no St George’s Crosses but innumerable signs of inter-culturalism brought by immigrants, asylum seekers and refugees. It is the first city in the UK where being white British does not put you in the majority. In the county, these flags seem to state that these signs are not welcome. That to ‘Unite the Nation’ is to expel those different to us. That the only culture available is the one they want to equivocate with the St George: white, British, suspicious of outsiders.  

Both of these contexts seem to be fully fleshed out alternatives for the future of England. Who do we want to be? Tolerant, inter-cultural, diverse? Or exclusive, suspicious, nativist? The guy in the pub was staking his hope for the future on one of these alternatives, and I’m sure he’s not unique. There will be others who are fully devoted to the opposite: a diverse and welcoming state of which Leicester appears an imperfect harbinger. 

It’s important to note that a fair reading of the Bible cannot help to highlight the theme of welcoming foreigners, perhaps particularly those who are not able to contribute financially. The Israelite faith of the Old Testament specifically commands farmers to leave a border of crop unharvested for such struggling migrants.  

One of the most beloved stories of the Jewish scriptures is that of Ruth, an Edomite woman who comes destitute to Israel and finds provision in the righteous life of Boaz, who has left such a border of crop for her to glean. Eventually they marry, and their offspring is blessed by God: including King David and Jesus Christ. I do believe that welcoming foreigners, and particularly those who have been affected by poverty or war is just. Any form of Christianity which puts nation before those different to us or those who suffer is a false one. 

But, just as I believe that man in the pub is wrong for putting his hope in the tightening of borders, anybody who puts their hope in any philosophy or system a flag can represent is mistaken. Liberal policies towards immigration and open hearts towards those who must seek asylum or refuge will always fail and fade. Neither England represented by the city and county of Leicester can or will last a millennia, let alone an eternity. Neither can guarantee a better future for our descendants. 

Jesus spoke of a Kingdom without flags, without an army, and without borders. One in which all tribes and tongues will be welcomed as the foreigners we are to the Holy God. One which is already recreating the Earth to be a place without death, enmity, and suffering and one day will bring this work to fulfilment. This Kingdom of God is the only political entity in which hope can be securely placed because it keeps its promises and never passes away. Our political parties, national identities, and nation states may be more or less like the Kingdom of God but they are never secure foundations for our future.  

If I were braver, I might have broached this reality with the man at the bar. I might have suggested he makes an error in placing hope for the future generations of his family in a particular understanding of the national flag. I could have invited him to see the truer potential for hope in a Kingdom which is not directly seen but nevertheless is more real and secure, and discussed with him about what that means for our temporal reality. And challenged him to see past the flag to a Kingdom which will provide for his granddaughter without measure. 

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