Providence Road pastor provides tips on recruiting foster families 

NORMAN – The day Kevin and Josie Jones signed their paperwork to become foster parents, they received a call that a 15-month-old baby boy was in need of a home.  

For the past seven months, they’ve overcome challenges like managing toddler behaviors, establishing bedtime routines and wrestling with the painful reality that they may never see him again.  

“We love and are attached to this boy, and in this whole time, we’ve pretty much known we will say goodbye to him at some point,” Kevin said. “And if we aren’t saying goodbye, then that means something terrible has happened.”    

While it’s going to be painful, the day he leaves it will also be joyful and they are happy to be a part of his story, Kevin said.  

“This is just a cool way for us to participate in God just bringing restoration to families,” he said. 

Becoming foster parents has been on Kevin and Josie’s mind since they got married, but they began to seriously consider and pray about it in October of 2022.  

The Joneses attend Providence Road Church in Norman, where serving children in foster care is a key outreach.  

Providence Road Executive Pastor Jay Frymire and his family are foster parents, along with four other families in the church, and said it’s a priority of the church to talk about foster care often. 

“We talk about it a lot,” he said. “It’s not just on a Sunday once a month, we’re going to either share a story, pray for a family, or talk about CarePortal from the stage, like an announcement. It’s not like just a one-time deal. It’s like a regular ongoing thing.”   

Last year, on Orphan Sunday, Frymire preached about the need for the church to get involved with the child welfare crisis and how individual families can get involved – whether that’s fostering, bringing food to foster families, meeting needs on CarePortal, etc. 

“It’s been really cool to see the amount of people in our church, start asking questions about how they can serve if they’re not bringing a child into their home,” he said. 

Community support is a resource Kevin couldn’t overemphasize its importance for his family.  

“As we’ve been doing this process, my wife and I have just become very aware that this is not possible without support from community,” Kevin said. “We’ve been so blessed from our community from bringing meals to babysitting to just like hanging out with us when we’re kind of losing it.” 

While it requires humility to admit you need help, Kevin said it’s important to not be afraid to lean on people. So many people poured into them and provided help – whether it was through snacks, toys, advice, or company.  

Kevin said when they began their journey into foster care, they were ignorant of the process and started the training under the impression that foster care was all about the child, although that’s a huge part of it, they learned it’s about supporting the family unit.  

“It’s about not just the kids but the whole family,” Kevin said. “I think it kind of gives us more sympathy and helps us to be a little bit more understanding of families and parents who have kids in foster care.” 

Becoming foster parents has transformed their perspective on foster care and widened their view. Over the last seven months, the Jones family has been able to see mom’s growth from supervised visits once a week to overnight visits and are now on track for reunification.  

“We’re so moved that God would allow us to be part of restoring his family,” Kevin said.  

Providence Road has been a partnering church with 111Project for over four years.  

111Project is a not-for-profit 501(c)(3) with the mission to mobilize the local church so every child has family. The organization’s initial goal is to mobilize 1,000 churches across Oklahoma that can serve at least one family a month on CarePortal and recruit and support a foster family every year.  

If 1,000 out of the 6,200 churches in Oklahoma commit to recruit and support one foster family a year, and serve one family a month on CarePortal, the state will move closer to having more than enough help for children and families in crisis. 

CarePortal, a growing connection technology managed by the 111Project, allows agency partners – like Oklahoma Human Services Child Welfare – to submit vetted needs to the community and local churches to serve families in crisis. 

These vetted needs can range from diapers and wipes to bunk beds and blankets, which will help support a foster family, strengthen a biological family, or help a family get one step closer to reunification. 

Since Frymire’s Orphan Sunday sermon last year, three families have stepped up to become foster families. His advice: take baby steps.  

“Start small and do something and then just start talking about it on a regular basis,” he said. 

Frymire said it’s easy for church leaders to feel overwhelmed when there’s so much going on, but serving families impacted by the child welfare crisis is important enough to emphasize.  

 “It’s important enough to say ‘no’ to other things, in order to go after this,” he said. “It’s easy to just deal with the urgent, like I get the urgent all the time, and many people think their stuff is urgent. But do you really believe that this is an issue that we’re called to address, and that we can address?” 

Frymire said focus on supporting one foster family a month, add foster care to the monthly language of the church, reach out to other churches for advice or help and don’t compare yourself to other churches.  

“People are going to respond differently, and let’s just ride the wave of what the Spirit is going to do in our church and just go for that,” he said. 

Any churches or individuals interested in learning more or getting involved can visit 111project.org.