The Boulton family. Photo courtesy of Lindsay Boulton.
Lindsay and Bart Boulton have dedicated a huge portion of their lives to their Christian faith—to the extent that they’ve opened their front door to children who need to escape a life in crisis.
One only has to look to their six-year-old daughter from Ethiopia, an HIV-positive girl who was adopted by the Boultons after she lost her entire biological family to AIDS, to understand their dedication.
“The devastation that comes with losing your first family is unimaginable,” Lindsay Boulton said, “It just became a reality that we had to help children from losing their first family, to help keep first families together—we knew we had to be involved in something like that.”
That something is Safe Families for Children (SFC), a Chicago-based Christian group with more than 2100 host volunteer families around the world.
Having established a chapter in the greater Long Beach area some two years ago, SFC aims for one thing: to connect and engage communities in the area with children and families in crisis. More specifically, the program provides distraught children temporary homes while their parents attempt to get their lives back together. Though the organization does not adhere to a mission of proselytizing, they do focus on strong faith-based communities—and they found it in the large coalition of churches spread throughout Long Beach, ranging from The Garden to King’s Church to Great Brother’s Church.
“We believe the church communities, particularly within Long Beach, can act as a passageway for building a prevention effort that will eventually end the perpetual cycle of crisis that occurs within these families,” Danny Sells, Director of SFC, said. “Churches are an organized group of people who are invested in responding to compassion in their community.”
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In this sense, churches have a unique identity that makes programs like SFC benefit and flourish. In fact, Sells notes that many of the churches approach them, not vice versa, even further adding to Sells’ assertion that compassion and empathy are contemporary Christian ideals. These ideals have been particularly influential in assisting families that otherwise are unable to get assistance through State or Federal means.
Lindsay Boulton emphasizes how her faith is not an auxiliary part of her work but an integrated cog—and that overcoming the discomfort with inviting a stranger into your home, even when that stranger is a child, is an essential part of being a Christian.
“We feel we are adopted by God—and that adoption makes us know what it feels like to be welcomed in and loved,” Boulton said. “As a Christian, we’re not called to be comfortable; we’re called to love other people. We don’t try to live our lives comfortably; we just try to live our lives giving love away.”
Her practice of “giving love away” is not just limited to children in distress. A lifelong resident of Southern California, Boulton has always loved Long Beach for what she described as a “total acceptance” of everyone from the LGBT community to the racially and financially marginalized.
“Lindsay and her family are amazing and the work they’ve done for SFC, to watch it in action is awe-inspiring,” Sells said, “But at the same time they’re not unique. There are 200 families throughout Southern California that are doing this… It is hard to take a stranger in, but there’s a movement.”
That movement is something that Boulton, as well as Sells, feels occurring both inside and outside the church: the taking in of children, children who have unrightfully been dealt a very uneven hand, and putting them at the dinner table as you would anyone else you cared for.
“There is a movement,” Boulton said. “And that movement is to move away from comfort in the name of compassion and love for others.”
For more information on Safe Families for Children, visit www.safe-families.org