MOVING THE BARN chapter one
Transforming foster care in your community requires a shared vision of the end goal.
"It always seems impossible until it’s done."
NELSON MANDELA
In 1981 Herman and Donna Ostry moved to a farm nestled in the picturesque rolling hills just outside Bruno, Nebraska. Their farmhouse was lovely and situated on a piece of land, leaving plenty of room for animals to roam. However, over the years the Ostrys faced one persistent problem: they had a barn that flooded nearly every time it rained. In fact, at one point they measured 29 inches of standing water. Barns can be used for many things, including sheltering animals, housing machinery, and storing food supplies. But if your barn is holding 29 inches of standing water, it can’t be used for anything.
Over the years the Ostrys considered several options, but all of them were too expensive. One night at the dinner table, Herman joked to his family, “If we just had enough people, we could pick it up and move it.” Everyone laughed and kept eating.
However, the next day Herman’s adult son, Mike, went out and counted the boards in the barn. Using the approximate weight of each one, he calculated that the barn weighed over 16,000 pounds. He knew that if they were going to pick it up and move it, they would need some handles and more structural support. He concluded that a welded steel grid could accomplish both and would probably add another 3,000 pounds. He figured that, if the average person could lift 55 pounds, 344 people could move this thing to dry ground. Probably.
In 1988 the town of Bruno, population 143, had a centennial celebration coming up. Now, a town down the road named Prague had just celebrated its centennial the year prior by creating the world’s largest fruit kolache. In case you’re wondering, it was 2,605 pounds and was 15 feet in diameter. Herman and Mike Ostry thought that, if Prague could make a giant fruit kolache for their centennial, then maybe Bruno could pick up a barn and move it for theirs. They made a proposal to the Bruno centennial committee and got the green light.
When it comes to our nation’s foster care system, the barn is flooding.
So, on July 30, 1988, 344 people showed up at the Ostry farm to move a barn, and—get this—an estimated 4,000 people from 11 states showed up to watch.
The crew of 344 folks ranged from 11 to over 90 years old. Each one took their position inside the barn’s grid and around the outside edges. Herman Ostry used a microphone and gave careful instructions to his attentive barn movers. He explained what they were going to do and then counted: one . . . two . . . three.
Everyone lifted in unison, and the barn rose from the ground.
The crowd went wild. After 344 mortals had carried an entire barn 115 feet up six feet of elevation, they turned it 90 degrees and set it back down in its new, dry location. The barn had stood in its original spot, regularly flooding, for sixty years. These 344 people moved it to dry ground in twenty minutes.
When it comes to our nation’s foster care system, the barn is flooding.
In your state and every state, children are entering the system each day. For every one of those children, there are biological parents who need help, social workers who wearily but persistently call through a list of potential foster parents as the minutes of the day tick away, and foster parents on the other end of those calls having to decide whether they can reasonably say yes to adding another child to their family today.
The rains are torrential, and the barn is flooded.
Now, the normal and natural reaction to flooding is the bucket approach. We grab a bucket and start scooping water. We tell ourselves that we just need a few more buckets—a few more families, a little more funding, and some extra workers.
Yes, using buckets will make the barn less wet, but it will never make it dry. We don’t need fewer kids waiting for families. We need zero kids waiting for families. At some point we must acknowledge that all the buckets we can find will not solve the problem because it will rain again tomorrow.
The only way to solve the problem is to move the barn to dry ground. And dry ground in foster care can be summed up with three words: More Than Enough.
There are enough resources, enough support, and enough families to solve the foster care crisis in your community. In fact, there are more than enough.
Problems rarely persist due to a lack of the resources needed to solve them. The necessary resources are almost
always available. It is usually a matter of figuring out a way to route the resources that exist to the needs that persist. The resources, support, and families in your community need a little help getting from where they are to where they are needed most.
Problems rarely persist due to a lack of the resources needed to solve them. The necessary resources are almost always available. It is usually a matter of figuring out a way to route the resources that exist to the needs that persist.
Getting to more than enough for children and families in your community may sound out of reach, but the truth is that we do have some small glimpses into what that looks like. In the world of adoption, it is common knowledge that there are extensive lists of families waiting for healthy infants. While this reality is difficult and frustrating for the prospective parents who wait, it is precisely what we should want for children who need families. Better an anxiously waiting adult than a child left to feel unwanted. Better to have a giant pool of parents to choose from for a perfect match than to settle for the next person who answers the phone.
I pray for a day very soon when our country will be full of adults eagerly waiting for the privilege of loving a nineyear-old girl for a few months while her mom finishes up rehab or the chance to adopt and delight in a fourteen-yearold boy with autism who loves playing with straws or the
opportunity to mentor a seventeen-year-old who has good reason to believe that all adults are liars but is still willing to let one take him out for ice cream once a week.
When those in the church are willing to love hurting people, we become the embodiment of a Savior who leaped out of heaven into a dirty feeding trough to willingly expose Himself to leprosy, be ridiculed by the powerful, and to endure abuse at the hands of those He came to love.
So, What Does More Than Enough Look Like?
In Exodus 35, Moses delivered the message to the Israelites that God had commanded them to bring the supplies needed to build the tabernacle. This included gifts of gold, silver, and bronze, yarn and fine linen, goat hair and ram skins, acacia wood, olive oil, spices, incense, onyx stones, and other gems. Not only that, but He then commanded everyone with skill to chip in and create everything: the tent and its covering, the ark with its poles and the atonement cover, the curtain that shielded it, the table, the lampstand and lamps, the altar, the curtain for the doorway at the entrance to the tabernacle, the altar of burnt offering, the bronze basin, the curtains of the courtyard, the tent pegs for the tabernacle and
When those in the church are willing to love hurting people, we become the embodiment of a Savior who leaped out of heaven into a dirty feeding trough to willingly expose Himself to leprosy, be ridiculed by the powerful, and to endure abuse at the hands of those He came to love.
their ropes, and the woven garments to be worn by those ministering in the sanctuary. It was a big list, making for a complex and expensive undertaking, and it required all hands on deck. The passage describes the people’s response to this command in beautiful detail, but it can be summed up by Exodus 35:21: “Everyone who was willing and whose heart moved them came and brought an offering to the LORD for the work on the tent of meeting, for all its service, and for the sacred garments.”
Everyone brought what they could. Those with stuff brought stuff. Those with skills brought skills. And when everyone did their part, check out what happened:
They received from Moses all the offerings the Israelites had brought to carry out the work of constructing the sanctuary. And the people continued to bring freewill offerings morning after morning. So all the skilled workers who were doing all the work on the sanctuary left what they were doing and said to Moses, “The people are bringing more than enough for doing the work the LORD commanded to be done.” Then Moses gave an order, and they sent this word throughout the camp: “No man or woman is to make anything else as an offering for the sanctuary.” And so the people were restrained from bringing more, because what they already had was more than enough to do all the work.
(Exodus 36:3–7, emphasis added)
What the people of God did here was to reflect something of God’s very character: a capacity and a willingness (perhaps even a compulsion) to provide more than enough.
What the people of God did here was to reflect something of God’s very character: a capacity and a willingness (perhaps even a compulsion) to provide more than enough. We serve a God who, for whatever reason, likes to overdeliver. When the Israelites wandered in the desert looking for food, God provided manna. He didn’t provide less than enough. He didn’t provide just enough. He provided more than enough. When Jesus threw an impromptu luncheon for five thousand on the side of a hill, He didn’t provide less than enough. He didn’t provide just enough. He provided more than enough. And when Jesus came across some tired fishermen who had been out all night but had caught nothing, He told them to cast their nets on the other side of the boat. Yet again, he didn’t provide less than enough. He didn’t provide just enough. He provided more than enough. I believe we serve a God who desires to provide for hurting children and families in the same way.
This begs the question, “When it comes specifically to foster care, what does more than enough look like?” We believe it applies to four areas:
• More than enough foster and kinship families for every child to have an ideal placement
• More than enough adoptive families for every child waiting for adoption
• More than enough help for biological families trying to stabilize and reunify
• More than enough wrap-around support from the church for foster, kinship, adoptive, and biological families
For the Christian foster care advocate, praying and fighting for more than enough in every one of our country’s 3,144 counties and county equivalents is our dry ground. It’s time to choose this as our destination and go there together. Your community can move the barn and take foster care to dry ground—to a day when there will be more than enough well-supported foster, kinship, adoptive, and biological families for every child in your community.
The Bucket Approach vs. the Moving the Barn Approach
There are several differences between the “bucket approach” and the “moving the barn approach,” but here are a few of the more significant ones:
Working Alone vs. Working Together
I don’t know if you realize it, but the night before Jesus died He prayed for you.
When I first heard this from Pastor Mark DeYmaz in Little Rock over twenty years ago, it got my attention. John 17:20 records the beginning of this prayer: “My prayer is not
for them [the disciples] alone. I pray also for those who will believe in me through their message.”
If you believe in Jesus, you are part of this lineage. If Jesus prayed for you and me (and apparently He did), I want to know what He prayed for. If I had to guess what He might have prayed on my behalf in the hours before His death, at the top of that list would probably be obedience, faithfulness, or peace.
But those are not the things he prayed for. Instead, He prayed “that all of them may be one, Father, just as you are in me and I am in you” (John 17:21). Hours before His death, Jesus prayed that you and I would be unified.
And His prayer goes on to tell us why: “May they also be in us so that the world may believe that you have sent me” (John 17:21).
Unity not only makes us more effective when solving big problems, but it also helps the world believe that Jesus was, in fact, sent by the Father.
I have heard it suggested that competition among nonprofits is healthy because it spurs organizations to better, more impactful work. I’ve had to wrestle with what I believe about that. We all understand healthy competition in business and sports, but what place, if any, does it have in the nonprofit and church world? I do believe that when we see someone else doing good work, it inspires us to do good work. But is competition necessary for that to happen?
I don’t think so. I believe that, in the arena of helping others, competition has a far greater likelihood of doing
damage than doing good. The problem with welcoming competition into our work is that it necessarily begins with a misunderstanding of who our opponent is. If I compete with you for donors, church partners, families, state contracts, or recognition, we both lose in a couple of ways. First, I am trying to get things for myself that would help you help families (and vice versa). Second, it will take us a lot longer to accomplish our shared objective, which is to help as many children and families as possible. We can do that better together.
Don’t get me wrong. Some organizations are especially good at particular functions, and some models are more effective than others. So, the natural process of certain programs expanding, contracting, or refocusing can be positive. But that doesn’t mean we ever need to have a spirit of competition amongst ourselves, viewing the pool of available resources as a tiny pie we need to fight over. The famous missionary Hudson Taylor once declared, “God’s work done in God’s way will never lack God’s supply.”
This is the difference between seeing someone as a member of another team or seeing them as a workout partner. When “they” are the other team, we think in terms of competitive advantage, of outrunning and outscoring them, of trying to do things better than they do. We think in terms of winning.
But what if “they” are my workout partner instead? That changes everything. Their success still drives me to be better, work harder, and excel, but in a completely different way. We start thinking about how to encourage each other. We think
about how to get our partner to do one more set. We think of both of us getting as strong as possible instead of just trying to get a little stronger than the other guy.
Unity is perhaps one of the hardest things we were ever commanded to do. Sin and selfishness lobby for our autonomy. We love ourselves and our own plans too much. However, it is precisely the difficulty of unity that shows the world God is real and that Jesus is the One God sent.
Having a lot of people working on a problem in a community is very different from a community working on a problem together. You can always get more people with more buckets, but this collection of frenetic individual effort is insufficient to make the barn dry. In contrast, the strategic, coordinated effort of your community’s churches, organizations, and agencies will make the difference. Organizations and agencies (private and government) are each doing good work primarily according to their internal quarterly and annual goals. When work is dissimilar between organizations, coordination of services sometimes does take place. But in places where work is similar between organizations involved with foster care, competition for families, funding, government contracts, and community partnerships (e.g., churches) occurs. Because regular communication among organizations is limited, duplication of effort is common.
However, suppose that churches, organizations, and agencies seeking to move the barn in foster care each recognizes that all of the resources to solve the problem already exist. In that case it becomes a matter of strategically
figuring out who should lift where so that duplication of effort can be eliminated and resources can be redirected to fill in gaps.
Looking Down vs. Looking Ahead
The bucket approach requires your head to be down, addressing the water you can see in front of you. But moving the barn requires looking up and across the farm, identifying dry ground, and going there together.
Local foster care programming is usually determined by the most pressing visible needs. Strategies, including campaigns, drives, programs, and events, are developed to address those needs. The goal of each strategy is to help as many as possible (which is good), but a compelling overall vision of a preferred future reality is missing. The result is the feeling that we are simply going from one strategy to the next without a clear idea of where we plan to end up.
Moving the barn requires understanding the landscape enough to know that, if we all head together 115 feet in a specific direction, the barn will no longer flood. Moving the barn in foster care is driven by a compelling vision toward something that is both difficult and doable. This vision provides a preferred future that everyone in the community embraces as their own.
The Structure You Have vs. the Structure You Need
Moving the Ostrys’ barn required adding a steel grid. While not necessary for the bucket approach, this additional structure was needed to strengthen the barn and provide
handles for those lifting it. This added structure was essential to getting to dry ground.
You will need to add some structure to what your community currently provides. Specifically, structures need to be established in your community to support sustainable and effective collaboration. We will discuss this in more detail later in the book (see Chapter 9). These added collaborative structures will strengthen your foster care system and provide the handles needed for your community to lift the barn and move it.
Your community can provide more than enough for children and families before, during, and beyond foster care. But to get there, you will need to move the barn.
UntilThere’sMorethanEnoughisafaith-basedfieldguide forcollaborativefostercaretransformationinyourcommunity. Thewords"NOTENOUGH"areheardeverydayinsideofour nation'sfostercaresystem...Notenoughresources. Notenoughsupport.Notenoughfamilies.
Butitdoesn’thavetobethatwaywhereyoulive.Ifyouweretofindandeffectively collaboratewiththerightpeople,yourcountycouldgofrom“notenough”to“morethan enough.”Thisbookwillhelpyoulaytheessentialgroundworktoseethathappen.
Gleaningfromtheexperienceofdozensofgovernment,nonprofit,andfaith leadersfromacrossthecountry,UntilThere’sMorethanEnoughrepresentsaset ofprinciplesandpracticesthatwillhelpadvocates,churches,andorganizations inyourcommunityworktogethertotransformfostercare.
Morethanenoughforkidsandfamiliesbefore,during,andbeyondfostercare canhappenwhereyoulive.Believeit’spossible.Doyourpart.Doittogether.
