Review: Home for Good

Did you know that in the UK, 4,000 children are waiting for adoption and 8,600 foster families are desperately needed (according to the charity Home For Good)? Stats like that should make us sit up and pay attention.

Since we’re just coming out of Fostering Fortnight, we decided we would read and review “Home For Good: Making A Difference For Vulnerable Children”*, a book by Krish and Miriam Kandiah. It is a book about the joys and challenges of adoption and fostering.

Some may say that reading a book about adoption and fostering just 3 months before the arrival of our next biological baby is a bit odd. But we reasoned that there’s always an excuse to put off thinking about adoption and fostering and, being realistic, once little Thomson arrives we’ll be sleep-deprived, overwhelmed and pre-occupied for a good length of time. So, we decided to think about it now, completely in the hypothetical, while we still have a bit of mental space (and our brains are still vaguely functioning).

We found the book extremely readable, thought-provoking, well-written and inspiring. We would highly recommend it.

A book for anyone at any stage of life

This book should be read by all Christians. It’s not just for people considering adoption and fostering, but for anyone who belongs to God’s family. The Home for Good book has come out of the Home for God campaign. The vision of this campaign is to see Christian families adopting and fostering not in isolation, but with the encouragement and support of their church families as they care for vulnerable children.

So if you belong to the church, this is a book for you.

It will help you think about how you can support and pray for vulnerable children and the families that care for them. The Kandiah’s message is clear – we all can and should be doing something to help, this isn’t just for the super spiritual amongst us. Christians should be at the forefront of caring for needy children in our country.

A book which is thoroughly biblical

Krish is an excellent Bible teacher, and that shines through as he retells familiar Bible stories in a really engaging and fresh way. He convincingly argues that the central message of the gospel is our adoption into God’s family and that this compels us to show the same compassion to others.

This is something all of us need to keep hearing. JI Packer in ‘Knowing God’* says this:

“What is a Christian? The question can be answered in many ways, but the richest answer I know is that a Christian is one who has God as Father.

If you want to judge how well a person understands Christianity, find out how much he makes of the thought of being God’s child, and having God as his Father. If this is not the thought that prompts and controls his worship and prayers and his whole outlook on life, it means that he does not understand Christianity very well at all…

Adoption… is the highest privilege that the gospel offers: higher even than justification… To be right with God the Judge is a great thing, but to be loved and cared for by God the Father is a greater.”

This book is rammed-full of great theology, but it’s applied theology. You’re never far away from being challenged to act. Krish skilfully applies timeless Biblical principles to the nitty-gritty of real life in the modern day British care-system (although he does talk about international adoption in his book too).

A book which is realistic yet full of hope

As experienced adoptive and foster parents, the Kandiah’s candidly share some of their own experiences of caring for vulnerable children. The book also has lots of personal stories from the perspective of people who have grown up in care as well as from adoptive and foster parents. The book is full of realism, but also of hope. This is a book that doesn’t let you get away with the idea that caring for vulnerable children is a walk in the park, yet it does fill you with courage and inspiration for how lives can be transformed.

The book is profoundly practical and informative, with the Kandiah’s helpfully addressing some of our misconceptions and fears about the system – including social workers and the dreaded and intrusive process of getting approved. At the end of each chapter, discussion questions or prompts are provided to help you consider your own motivations and circumstances in relation to this topic. This is really helpful, as perhaps there are many families out there who are interested in adoption and fostering but are simply intimidated by the system. This book begins to remedy this.

A book which will leave you challenged

Home For Good* should come with a health warning. Don’t read this book if you want to be left unchanged. The Kandiah’s are extremely passionate about the church’s role in caring for vulnerable children (with Krish recently stepping down as the President of the London School of Theology to devote more time to the charity Home for Good, who are at the forefront of championing the cause of unaccompanied refugee children). The aim of this book was never to simply give a biblical defence of adoption and fostering but is a call for Christian families and the church at large to get on and do it.

We readily recommend it – click here to get your copy*.

Have you read this book? Why not comment below with your thoughts to help others who are considering reading it.

*Please note that whenever we recommend a book on this blog and link to it, we use an affiliate link. If you use that link to purchase the book than we will receive a small commission from that purchase, at no extra cost to you – we want to be totally upfront with you that this is the case. We only ever recommend books that we have personally benefited from and think will be useful or beneficial to our readers too. We hope that this will go some way to the cost of maintaining and updating this site, so if you have benefited from this blog then please consider purchasing through this link. Click on the asterix next to any link for more info.