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9 October 2023

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 Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

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.

Article

Culture

Film & TV

Politics

13 March 2025

6 min read

Fear of the news means it needs to change

Here's how to rethink reporting.

Steve Dew-Jones

Steve is news director of Article 18, a human rights organisation documenting Christian persecution in Iran.

A news cameraman holding a camera, stands back to back to a police officer.

Waldemar on Unsplash.

Several non-journalist friends have told me over the past few years that they have started to disconnect themselves from the news - in some cases entirely - so wearied have they become by the incessant gloom of our reporting.

Meanwhile, new research from the Reuters Institute has found that people have been “turning away from the news” consistently across 17 countries tracked over the past decade - from the US to the UK, Japan to Brazil.

And one of the primary reasons, the researchers discovered, is the “fatigue and overload” of negative news.

Another factor was the declining trust in the media, which has again been something I have heard consistently from friends in recent years, with many telling me they are constantly reassessing who they turn to for news.

Perhaps that is only healthy, but both trends suggest to me that there may be a problem with the way news currently is, and the effect it is having on us.

One of the most regular examples of the “bad news” we journalists tell is the reporting of terror attacks, but whenever I hear news of an attack - whether here or elsewhere - I think not only of the immediate victims and their loved ones, but also those who may soon become victims by association.

Perhaps the most obvious recent example here in the UK was the case of the Southport stabbings, a shocking incident that led to understandable - albeit misguided - outrage.

As soon as it emerged that a “foreigner” - or at least someone who sounded like they might be a foreigner - was responsible, many jumped to the conclusion not only that he was an Islamist but also probably an asylum-seeker, and an illegal one at that.

It later transpired, of course, that the 17-year-old who carried out the terrible attack had been born and raised in Wales - to “Christian” parents, no less. So not an asylum-seeker, after all, nor even a foreigner; and even though it later became clear that he had downloaded disturbing content including from Al-Qaeda, his inspiration seemed to come from a wide range of sources.

Here was another example, our prime minister told us, that showed “terrorism had changed” and was no longer the work only of Islamists or the far-right but of “loners” and “misfits” of all backgrounds, common only in their sadism and “desperat[ion] for notoriety”.

And yet, in the Southport case and no doubt many others, by the time the killer’s background and likely motive finally became clear, the horse had already bolted.

In that particular case, the reaction was especially extreme, with mosques and refugee hotels attacked as part of widespread rioting. But even when there are no riots after such an attack, there can surely be little doubt that the minds of the wider British public will have been impacted in some way by the news.

For some, perhaps the primary response will be increased fear - in general but also perhaps especially of those different from themselves. For others, on top of fear, might they also feel increased hatred, or at least mistrust?

And such feelings will surely only increase with every new reported attack, especially when the perpetrator appears to be someone new to these shores, and even more so, it would seem, if it is an asylum-seeker.

To ignore the reality that many attacks have been carried out by asylum-seekers in recent years is to ignore reality. But for those of us desperate not only to prevent the further polarisation of our society but also to protect the many legitimate refugees who wouldn’t dream of committing such attacks, what can be done?

Perhaps it’s only because I’m a journalist, but in my opinion one major thing I think could help arrest the current trend would be for us to rethink the way in which we do news in general.

Not in order to mislead the public or pull the wool over their eyes - if bad things keep happening, they must be reported, as must the identities of the perpetrators, as well as any trends in this regard - but by way of providing the necessary balance and context.

For example, by looking into what percentage of attacks - here or elsewhere - have been committed by Islamists, foreigners, or asylum-seekers; or considering what percentage of the total population of such groups the attackers represent, and how this compares to statistics regarding other groups.

The question we journalists - and those who read our words - need most to ask is whether we are doing a good job of informing the public about the world they live in.

Might it also be helpful to undertake a general reconsideration of what constitutes news? Does, for example, bad news always have to reign supreme in the minds of those who curate our news cycle?

A decade ago, I had it in mind to create a new app or perhaps even news service dedicated to rebalancing the news, such that bad news stories wouldn’t outnumber the good. Many others have had similar ideas in recent years, and several platforms have been launched, dedicated to the promotion of “good news” stories. And yet one could argue that such platforms risk being as unrepresentative of reality as those that tell only bad-news tales. Can’t a compromise be found?

One of the first things you learn as a journalist, other than that sex sells, is that greater numbers of deaths, and especially those of children, always constitutes headline material. And one needs only to flick through today’s major news outlets to see that this practice remains almost universally upheld. But does it have to be so?

And why is it that some conflicts and injustices will make our headlines, while others won’t?

Take, for example, the Sudanese civil war or the recent beheading of 70 Christians in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Why is it that these horrors don’t make our headlines, while tragedies in Ukraine or Gaza do? Who makes the call, and for what reasons?

Another long-established principle in journalism is to consider first and foremost who your audience is. So, for example, when writing for a British audience, to consider what might be of most interest to Brits. Are Ukraine and Gaza, for example, simply more relevant to British interests - in both senses of the word - than what is happening in the Global South? And even were that to be true, just because such principles of journalism are long-established, must they remain unchallenged?

At its core, journalism is about informing, so in my opinion the question we journalists - and those who read our words - need most to ask is whether we are doing a good job of informing the public about the world they live in.

And in my view, while a lot of good journalism is of course being done, the question of whether the public are receiving a representative picture of their environment is less clear.

Whether or not the best approach to redress the balance is to dedicate whole news services to telling good-news stories, there’s surely little doubt that such stories are chronically underreported.

And if our duty is not only to inform but also, by virtue of that, not to mislead, mightn’t it be argued that in failing to sufficiently well inform society about the real state of our world, we are in fact misleading them?

No-one wants to end up in a Soviet-style “paradise” in which murders are simply denied in order to maintain the status quo, but nor, surely, do we want to live in a world in which people become unnecessarily fearful and hateful towards others, in part because of the news we feed them.

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