With 160 delegates gathered for the Eastern European Summit on Orphans and the Church March 17-19, Mikhail Kozitsky an NGO of Christian Foster Families in St Petersburg, Russia challenged the church to step out of their comfort zones and respond to crisis of children at risk.

Gennady Mokhnenko founder of Republic Pilgrim a rehabilitation centre for minors talks about God's heart for orphans

In the opening session of the conference taking place at Donetsk Christian University he said: "We are called together to have a great impact. I know this conference will be blessed by God. Today the church is paralyzed socially and spiritually, but God says this is my body and the gates of hell will not prevail against it.

During a workshop on Strategies for Church and Government Cooperation Nikolai Kuleba, a government director for the Department of Child Services in Kiev, Ukraine also gave a challenging message that if every church in Ukraine responded to the orphans' crisis, they would only need to adopt one child per church and every child would be cared for.

"At this summit, we have a wide range of participants, from pastors who desire to mobilize their churches to care for orphans, to those who have already been actively serving children at risk for years," explained Conference director Karmen Friesen director of the CoMission for Children At Risk.

Karmen Friesen, director of the CoMission for Children At Risk

At the end of the first day of the summit Karmen told me how he felt after so much preparation to finally see the summit become a reality: "Well it's an amazing feeling. We started dreaming about this event two years ago after our last event when things started to change and the governments of Russia and Ukraine started to talk about moving kids from orphanages and getting them into families because of the trouble with institutions.

"We dreamed about it at that point. We knew that God was moving and that the church had an opportunity to get involved and over the last year we've worked hard at planning this event. Although even a month ago we had so few registrations we were very concerned that this would maybe not happen at this point. But God in a matter of days and weeks changed that and the programme came together.

"People have come from all over Ukraine, Russia and a number from America and the UK and God's people are here and they've excited about connecting with each other, learning from each other and being better equipped to care for children."

"The CoMission for Children at Risk is a network of Western organizations that work with orphans in Russia and Ukraine," explained Karmen.

"Over the last two years our focus has been much, much more on national organizations and so our partner organization the National Network for Children at Risk in Russia has played a key role in bringing 130 nationals from Ukraine and Russia to this event and we only have about 20 Americans and British here which is a real testament to the fact that national are really leading in this area and that churches and denominations and Christian organizations here in Ukraine and Russia are leading the way in caring for orphans. They are establishing foster care programmes where the government didn't even have them. The church led the way and now the government's following them."

I asked Karmen about the importance of Christian families being better equipped to adopt: "It's been interesting the last two years. We've seen the government begin to motivate and encourage families to adopt and foster kids. The trouble is what's happened is there's some statistics I've seen that 40-50% of the kids get moved into foster care and then back into the orphanages because the families weren't prepared.

Kozitsky talks about the culture of adoption in the church

"So in these countries there's been some great motivation happen but there's not that much training and support to help them especially from the psychological and social perspective. These families just aren't being prepared well. And so a lot of the organizations here are really beginning to focus on that. Again it seems the church is leading the way in this area whereas the government has the motivation to move the kids out of the orphanages it's the church that has the motivation to care for these kids well."

Karmen hopes that not only will the conference delegates be better equipped but will benefit from networking with other organizations: "Even just today I was talking to a number of people and as a networker one of the most encouraging things for me is when somebody comes up to me and says, 'I was looking for this or that and I found it here today.

"One lady came to me and said 'our organization has started to do training for families and for those who are caring for orphans in different ways and we're developing a curriculum and it was going well but it wasn't exactly what we needed. We found a group today that has developed something that's far beyond what we could've imagined was available and so our desire is that groups would connect with each other and find the resources that they need to be encouraged to continue on and to be equipped to do so much more and much more efficiently than they could've without working with others."

Source: ASSIST News Service (ANS)