Justin Forbes and his wife, Bethany, did not know how they would ever take their 4-year-old foster son Tom (not his real name) to church. He had been kicked out of three preschools for his behavior, including knocking down a teacher and breaking her nose.
Tom’s behavior was the result of childhood trauma. Tom had been living with his mother and older brother in the woods. When their mother left to find food, she tied Tom to a tree, thinking it would keep him safe. Instead, it left him prey to ants and other bugs and to the torment of his older brother.
Their church had encouraged Bethany and Justin – who teaches at Flagler College, directs the college’s Center for Religion and Culture, and is also the youth ministry program’s faculty director – to become foster parents. But the church was ill-equipped to support them. Even attending worship was difficult to impossible. The couple could not easily leave Tom in the nursery because he would act out in a dysregulated state by stealing toys, hitting other children and dropping F-bombs. The only person who could give the Forbes family any support was a staff member from the local YMCA who had a background in emotional behavioral therapy and who took care of Tom one hour a week.
“I’ll never forget how angry I felt towards Tom, it felt as if he was destroying my life,” Forbes said.
That year during Holy Week, Forbes had planned to go to his church’s Maundy Thursday service to meet his desperate need for worship. In fact, his wife Bethany insisted he go, even though his absence would make her Tom’s sole caregiver for a period. But everything fell apart that day, and Forbes had to stay home. Instead of washing the feet of other congregants, Justin found himself giving Tom a bath.
“I remember leaning over the bathtub bathing Tom, and it was just a battle. I was washing his feet, doing exactly what I was supposed to be doing, and where I was supposed to be,” Forbes said, noting the parallels to the worship service he was missing. “But it was exhausting. We were so utterly alone.”
“I was supposed to be doing, and where I was supposed to be … But it was exhausting. We were so utterly alone.” — Justin Forbes
Forbes’s personal experience, as well as his professional expertise in working with youth from hard places, led to the creation of the Fostering Congregations Initiative (FCI) to equip and empower churches to include children who have experienced developmental trauma. FCI exists to support churches so they can provide the tools and community that foster families need. Through a grant from the Lilly Endowment, Inc., the FCI will make it possible for children’s ministry staff and volunteers to be trained in Trust-Based Relational Intervention (TBRI).
TBRI is an attachment-based, developmental trauma-informed paradigm of care that gives parents, social workers and teachers a child development relational model for helping kids coming from difficult situations. Many sectors across the globe including schools, counseling centers, churches, prisons and juvenile detention centers use TBRI.
TBRI is an attachment-based, developmental trauma-informed paradigm of care that gives parents, social workers and teachers a child development relational model for helping kids coming from difficult situations.
“The idea for Justin was, ‘What if we got a grant that enabled us to bring TBRI into children’s ministries in churches so that these families could have the support of their local church?’” says Celina Baldwin, who became associate director of the FCI in December 2023. Through FCI, six organizations that utilize TBRI in their work will partner with approximately 50 congregations across North America. “Churches will be better equipped to love and serve kids who have endured trauma. … We want families to have the full support of their churches,” says Baldwin.
Caring for the whole child
Dr. Karyn Purvis of Texas Christian University developed TBRI over 20 years ago to help children who were being adopted internationally by well-meaning families who were not equipped to deal with their high levels of trauma. TBRI uses three core principles – empowering, connecting and correcting – to work with the whole child.
The developmental lesson of the first year of a child’s life is learning to trust. But for many children who have experienced trauma, loss, abuse or other toxic stress, their ability to trust has been damaged, and their brain chemistry has been altered. Many children who have experienced trauma continue to live in a constant state of heightened anxiety, a permanent fight, flight or freeze mode.
By intentionally establishing trust and connection, TBRI empowers children to articulate what they need and gain tools for self-regulation. TBRI does make space for correction — but in the context of a loving relationship, without fear or shame. The caring adult shows the child the right behavior and provides opportunities to build on success, rather than creating a spiraling sense of failure. TBRI’s primary components therefore include caring and attentive adults, environments where the child feels safe, nutritious food and opportunities for appropriate exercise. Together these components help heal the child’s brain chemistry and build the child’s capacity for self-regulation.
TBRI empowers children to articulate what they need and gain tools for self-regulation.
Rev. Tyler Fuller knows TBRI as both a parent and a professional. Fuller is the missions pastor at Crosspoint Church, a six-campus megachurch in northwest Florida. He coordinates the church’s international and local missions. In addition, he has coordinated anything the congregation does in the realms of orphan or foster care for 15 years. Fuller and his wife, Leslie, learned about TBRI when they adopted four siblings. Their experience with TBRI was so powerful that Leslie became a TBRI practitioner and then helped start the Pearl Project, an organization that provides training and support to foster families in Florida. Fuller now also coordinates the Pearl Project’s involvement with the FCI.
Fuller says that if he had 30 minutes to teach a Sunday school teacher how to implement TBRI in a church’s ministry, he would focus on the importance of felt safety and of prioritizing connection over compliance. “Kids who are safe don’t necessarily feel safe,” Fuller says. “And if kids don’t feel safe, they cannot take in lessons about God’s love or the love of the church.” It is important to incorporate empathy and understanding and help children have a voice in their environment.
To illustrate, Fuller tells a story about the actor Sidney Poitier. In an interview, Poitier told Oprah Winfrey about growing up in poverty, and then he showed Winfrey a candy bar that he always carried with him. He told Winfrey that even as a successful actor, he still lived with the fear of not having enough to eat.
Fuller says he has observed that adults who work with children think they must teach children about how the world works by enforcing the rules and dealing with consequences for bad behavior. TBRI shifts the emphasis from correction to connection. Instead of punishing bad behavior, TBRI encourages caregivers to discover what the need is behind the behavior and to provide a meaningful connection that helps the child feel seen, safe and empowered.
TBRI shifts the emphasis from correction to connection.
The website of Texas Christian University quotes Purvis: “The message of hope for our families is that we can help our children to dramatic levels of healing, we simply have to be devoted to it and invest what it’s going to take.”
For example, a church might offer a bin of free snacks for the Sunday school class. Children can be told that they will always have access to snacks, but the one stipulation is that the children must ask first. They are assured that the teacher will always say yes. This builds a system that fosters trust and connection. A child learns that their basic needs will be met in that Sunday school classroom. Further, if a child takes a snack without asking, instead of a punishment or time-out, they are given a “redo.” The teacher says something like, “I saw that you took a snack without asking. Let’s do a redo. Put it back and ask, and I’ll say yes.” The child learns that they are safe and that their voice matters, which builds trust and connection. This is but one example of many ways this paradigm of care could be implemented, and that is the work of FCI — to explore the possibilities that exist for a more robust welcome and embrace of these children.
Children’s ministry staff and volunteers want to follow Jesus’ mandate to “Let the children come to me” (Matthew 19:14) but struggle to fully include children who have experienced trauma, loss and other toxic stress. Though TBRI makes no religious or theological claims, borrowing from what they have learned can help churches offer and embody the extravagant welcome Christ extended to even the most harmed young people.
