Facing the Canon with Dr Krish Kandiah

welcome to my youtube channel my guest on facing the canon today is dr chris kandaya director of home for good [Music] chris candier welcome to facing the canon thank you john lovely to see you now what is krish short for chris you're short for krishna i grew up in a mixed race family my mom was from india my dad was from malaysia his dad was from sri lanka and my mom's dad was from ireland so complete mix of different races and places but krish is short for krishna and where did you grow up i grew up in brighton on the south coast yes going to a very dodgy comprehensive school but i made mates for life there and tell us about your own personal journey of faith well when i was 15 a lad stood up in a chemistry lab which was where we used to have our register at the beginning of the day and the teacher had nipped out for a quick smoke leaving 30 teenage boys in charge of a chemistry lab which is a terrible idea people are trying to suck the gas out of the gas taps and light it and do fire breathing and then this lad stood up and said look last night something amazing happened to me i became a friend of god and if you want to know anything about it come and talk to me and so i thought that was the bravest thing i'd ever seen anyone do and and that obviously transformed you it did yeah totally i started a journey i became like more than just a church guy i became a follower of jesus we stayed in touch i actually helped his wife become a christian at sixth form and then he's now a pastor up in hull doing great stuff and i do what i can with vulnerable children that is amazing now obviously you've done a variety of different things but the main focus of what you do now home for good just explain to us the journey that led you into that sure well it's an occupational hazard to every christian god started to speak to me through the bible and i don't know how i've missed it for so long but almost on every other page of the bible it's re-emphasizing god's concern for vulnerable people and particularly vulnerable children yes the widow the stranger and the orphan over and over again god tells us he really cares about these groups of people and so we started the journey to become foster parents and then adoptive parents and it was through that experience we realized there are thousands of children in the uk that need loving families when we first got started with home for good we found out there were 5 000 children waiting for adoption and there was around 9 000 shortage of foster carers yes and those are big numbers but then i did the maths and i found out there's at least 15 000 churches out there that love jesus that are passionate about the gospel that filled with the spirit care about justice so that means we just need one new family per church to become a foster carer or an adoptive family and for the church to wrap around them and we could meet the entire current need that was the kind of vision that started us off and that was six years ago okay so let's go back to when you and your wife uh okay started the process of fostering yes is that quite a difficult process because i've heard from some friends of ours yes it's difficult it's not easy sure sure well our initial phone call was difficult actually it taken me about a year to get ready to make the call and it was back in the day when well apparently young people don't understand what this is but you just have to dial a number sure absolutely so i'm dialing the number for our local authority and i said oh hello it's uh mr kandaya here we're delighted to tell you we're interested in fostering our adoption we haven't decided which but here we are we'll be useful to you and i expected there to be a little fanfare at the end you know maybe there's a little tape recording for such a moment as this but no it was like a really gruff voice at the other end going how many rooms in your house i'm going oh well we've got a lounge and a kitchen and a butt no no how many bedrooms you got in your house well we've got three bedrooms okay well how many children do you have we have three children oh you're no good to us okay what like you don't know anything about my parenting skills you don't know why i'm doing this that's not what i wanted to hear so put the phone down dialed again tried to get a different operator this time the problem was um we didn't have the rooms in the house question we had what's your ethnicity and i go oh i'm going to win this right yes so i'm my dad's from malaysia his dad's from sri lanka my mum's from india her dad's from uh ireland my wife's welsh um have you got any boxes left and she said oh you're no good to us we'll never find a match for you we but but the reality is though chris you're british so but they really they wanted your origin they did and i understand now why okay because a child's ethnic origin does matter it helps if a child looks like the parents that are bringing them up helps them for their identity and we couldn't get into fostering adoption because we didn't have enough bedrooms in our house that was a deal breaker and i understand why now but i didn't at the time and then we moved i got a job teaching theology at oxford university at one of their theological colleges and the house so the job came with a house yes and the house came with a dining room and who needs a dining room can eat it in the kitchen right absolutely so we turned the dining room into a bedroom and suddenly we were ready to make the call and we had four bedrooms and three children and we were in how did your other children react that's a good question so we we um we were approved to be foster carers and they said oh you know we'll phone you when there's a child in need and i got excited about that so i basically spent a lot of time looking at the phone willing it to ring and i always thought they should give foster parents like a bat phone you know when commissioner gordon phones it goes bright red because he's been called to action so yeah that's what it feels like you're like a fourth emergency service right if children are in need they call the foster carers so i think it was less than 24 hours in we get our first call and they said it's a baby just been born mum's got some difficult stuff going on in her life she can't look after her and so can you pick up this baby and so we we picked up a moses basket oh and we stuck it in the back of the car and i'm going moses oh first foster child in the bible this is this is my faith and my life coming together and then our neighbor comes out of our house she says look i know you've been in this process for a long time and i wanted to support you so i've made you a little blanket um you know just just hand made it and i didn't know if it would be a boy or a girl so i gave it an underwater theme because that'll work for anybody and i just wanted this baby or this child to have something that no one else on the planet could have and so we put that blanket in the moses basket and then we head to the hospital and when we brought this little one home our children fell in love with her how old were your children at the time so they must have been like four five and six yeah and how do you explain to them that you're going to have some other children come and live with you for a while yes okay they've been prepped and that they're part of the welcome team you know they're part of the team surrounding this child and to be honest with you john that yes that baby's still with us you adopted she adopted her yeah when she was two she had all sorts of difficulties in her life with her birth mom and and we were asked you know it's this child has been touring and throwing bouncing around the system a little bit could you adopt her and we thought well of course wouldn't it be great if there's services she did yeah yeah and so she's she's starting and the biological mother was happy for that well that's a good question we have met um birth mum and both mum's got a lot of challenges in her life and so she doesn't get that choice yeah the government and the you know the judges making that choice our job is not to decide who comes or doesn't come into care our job is to make sure every child in care gets a loving family so give us the facts sure in the uk what is the situation regarding children so sadly there are well nearly 80 000 children in england alone that are in the care system 70 of them have experienced neglect or abuse you know physical or sexual violence against them so they've been really badly treated and they're traumatized and most of those children will be in a foster care placement at least for some time until the authorities decide what to do and and for those christians that are not in a foster care situation where are they the other options are i suppose residential care homes yes and we normally use that in the uk if a family-based placement hasn't worked out so maybe a child had multiple foster carers and that hasn't worked out so they'll sometimes use a children's home we're trying to reduce that in the uk because we recognize that family is the best place for children to to thrive there are another group of young people who sadly are often put in what's called inappropriate accommodation yes so those are teenagers often kind of aged between 16 and 18 and it's been in our news sometimes yes out of desperation local authorities have used um caravan parts canal barges airbnbs and they're living on their own and they're visited by social workers we think that's totally out of order and these kids need loving families so that's where most of those kids are of those kids in care i think in the uk right now it's around 3000 children that are waiting and a lot of those kids that are waiting for adoption are older they're not tiny babies yes they often come from black and minority ethnic backgrounds they're in sibling groups the worst thing would be if the younger sibling gets adopted because people want a younger child and the older one gets separated and left in care and a lot of those children have additional needs so our job at home for good is to say come on church god cares about the widow and the orphan why don't we step up and be the parents that these children need us to be not driven out of a sense of self-interest you know i really want a child i want a child to look like this and have blonde hair and blue eyes and be under two but out of a sense of passing on the grace of gods and children absolutely and so that's what we've been seeing over the years at home food has been running we've met hundreds of christians that have stepped forward to foster many have stepped forward to adopt often willing to take children that are left behind in the system and that it seems nobody wants but christians have stepped up and demonstrated the love of god to these kids so so you and your wife um you had your own children yeah you started fostering adopted you're still fostering so you're a practitioner that's right and and and obviously um you taught theology and you've done various other roles over the years but then there was this calling to focus uh on this um and home for good was was birthed that's right um so obviously that's a massive thing so it starts with your your family um in one home and then you realize hey there's all these children that need homes so when did you start home for good so home for good was started as a charity six years ago yeah and there was me a mate called phil and i think we had a part-time admin assistant and now there's about 38 staff and some in scotland some in northern ireland but most of them in england and they're doing a range of amazing things so we do work with unaccompanied asylum seeking children children who are separated from their parents and they need somewhere safe to live having fled war and terror and famine we do stuff to kind of get alongside adopted and foster families because you need all the support you can get yes um we do work really closely with the government the government starts phoning us up and saying look we love what you're doing um can you help us fix this problem and so one problem we're trying to fix is why is it that black children wait the longest to be adopted yeah so we get invited to kind of help host round tables at 10 downing street as we bring the church and bring the government together to say we can fix these problems together so so i remember in an earlier conversation that we had some time ago chris you were saying look this problem can be solved um because there are enough families that could take a child okay so how do you communicate this message to thousands of families to step up brilliant well great news there is a captive audience of people who are full of the spirit who often care about justice and the family each sunday morning or sunday evening whether they're gathering in face-to-face or online and so we get invited to share the gospel and the gospel that we believe is a gospel of adoption isn't it if you think about it every time i say the lord's prayer our father well wait wait jesus is the only true son of god right that's what we believe in the trinity god the father god the son god the holy spirit so how come i get to call godfather it's because god adopted me yes and he adopted you absolutely and he's given us an incredible privilege we get all the rights that jesus has i mean it's absolutely mind-boggling i managed to speak to a theologian called j.i packer who recently passed away yes and he said once that um adoption is the highest privilege that the gospel affords us there's nothing like it that we get to call god abba father absolutely so every sunday around the world christians are reaffirming that we're adopted children every time we say the lord's prayer so it's an open door to come into a church and say hey you know god adopted us well there's a way we could demonstrate in front of a watching world what that looks like every time a christian adopts a child we get to be a lived example of the grace that god has shown us so it becomes natural isn't it normal even that christians might consider this now you mentioned that the government often seek your council wisdom and advice um are they supportive at what you do or are they suspicious of what you do because obviously you're a practicing christian yes definitely does that come into play well what's interesting and i think this is an interesting time that there are certain christian groups that look at our situation and say oh i wish it could be like it was in the past you know when when it was normal for people to be christians and and you know being a christian was a thing of honor and and church leaders got kind of more saying things okay well i can't fix that but i can say there's a moment now when our nation needs us sadly because of coronavirus because of the economic crisis that comes with it because of the crisis in the care system the government needs all the help it can get yes and so they come to us not because we're christians but because we're effective yes and they go we see you making a difference you're you're making stuff happen never mind that you're christian come and help us anyway and i'll go i'll take that i'll come and work with you absolutely our calling is to care for vulnerable children and actually according to the law the government has a responsibility to care for vulnerable children so where there's overlapping opportunity let's work together so they they see your your integrity you know and the values that you have as a christian are good yes exactly and and home for good is good oh man that's what we want that's what we're aiming for tell us uh chris tell us a couple of um stories sure of children maybe that were in vulnerable situations and what's happened to them oh okay so there's a lot yeah i think of one lad that turned up at our front door he was taller than me and that that's not hard i'm vertically challenged but he was taller than me but he was all hunched over and he had a big pink suitcase which obviously wasn't his it was a social worker suitcase and he had a horrible scar on his face and on his arm it just come from a e and i thought someone had attacked him with a knife but it was worse than that one of his parents had used boiling water on him and so he was traumatized you know just come out of a he didn't want to be at our house he'd never met us before no he comes into the house and he's in our lounge and i'm normally quite good at speaking to people but i couldn't get a word out of him yeah you know i'm trying to talk about football or music or school or anything i can't get a word out of him and then my boys came in they were 12 and 13 at the time and they used a therapeutic tool that i wasn't aware of it's called an xbox and they said hey how about a game of fifa and this lad was arsenal my boys i don't know what i did wrong they don't support the best team in the world liverpool they support arsenal but they let this boy be arsenal and they were manchester united and somehow arsenal won five nil yeah but my favorite bit it was just such a proud dad moment i listened to the language my boys were using with him well done mate good shot you're really good at this you've played before they're just trying to pour grace into his life and i thought that this is it it's not this is it they got it they've got it and you know then it was dinner time and we sat at the dinner table and that's often when you know our foster children meet everybody else in the household and my wife had cooked like everything we had in the freezer because it turned come up in an emergency and they don't come with a menu like what the kids like so we just cooked everything so we gave him chicken cubes and he goes these are amazing i've never had them before so we had chicken caves every day for a week he loved them but that night we um we realized he didn't have a toothbrush it wasn't in his big pink suitcase so we go down to sainsbury's and i'm like you know the mother hen going up and down the aisle with this lad and my two boys all following me and i couldn't find the toothbrushes like where do they keep toothbrushes in sainsbury's and he um this lad who couldn't talk to me at the beginning he cracks a joke yeah he says you've not been here very much have you chris i bet you don't even know how much a pint of milk costs and i thought wow what a transformation before he couldn't look me in the eye now he's teasing me and i thought god this is it i'm having a spiritual moment in a sainsbury's looking for a toothbrush and for me that that privilege of trying to pull grace into a child's life there's there's nothing like it so what what's gone on with him where's he got ended up do you know so he lived with us for about a month um it was interesting he came to us with us to some christian festivals that i was speaking at and we were allowed to take him along and he had a whale of a time and then he moved on to a long-term foster family we our situation didn't quite work for him but we got a letter from his school they said we want you to know this we did we did highlights of the year at the end of the school year and this boy had a traumatic life right he'd come into care separated from his parents and he wrote in his at the end of the year he said the highlight was staying with the candidates and i thought whoa wow what an honor just in however long we get to look after these kids we want to give him a taste of god's grace that's all right and is it hard i mean he lived with you for a month you grew to know him you grew to love him is it hard when they leave oh man it's like having your heart ripped out we had a little girl we looked after for four years and at the end of that we're saying goodbye right and the number of times i've been trying to keep it together until the car pulls away with the new adoptive family or the new foster family i'm just trying to keep smiling to the kids their picture of me is cheering them on at the end but when they leave we all break down so it's hard and some people say christian couldn't do it because of that yes and in that story there krish did you not have a choice about that little girl no no often we don't as foster parents you don't get the choice of who comes into care or when they leave yeah so will you like get a message on a monday that she's leaving on a tuesday sometimes it can be that short normally they give you better it is some people tell me krish i could never do what foster carers do because i would love the children too much to see them go and i'm going hang on we need to redefine love here because you're saying you won't get involved in this child's life because you're scared you're going to get hurt that isn't love we follow a a crucified savior who loved us enough to suffer for us so that we could be adopted into god's family absolutely and so our job is we should soak up the pain with the adults in this conversation aren't we so we need to do whatever is going to help these children and for as long as they're with us they need to feel as loved and supported and as cared for as every other member of your family and we don't have control about when they leave but we do have control about how they feel yes and if they feel better having stayed with you they're going to carry that that's right and have the children that you have fostered over the years become aware of your own personal faith yeah of course um you know we're really open about who we are as as christians you know we talk about jesus at the dinner table we you know we we go to church we pray it's a normal part of our life it's not a segment that we can hide from anyone that lives in our house but we're really careful that we want to make sure that children feel safe to be who they are i always think about it the other way around imagine that my children were in care and it was a muslim family looking after them how would i want my children's christian faith to be treated i want them to be free and i want them to be honoured yes so for me as a foster parent my job is to invite and be open about who i am and if they want to ask questions fantastic if they don't well they have the right to their own absolutely yeah i like i like it where we read about um in the gospels where when jesus got lost yes and uh obviously he wasn't lost but they thought he was lost and then it says he went back um with his mother and stepfather and he grew yes yes in favor with god and in favor with people and there's something beautiful about that that he grew um socially yes and that he grew physically grew emotionally grew psychologically and he grew spiritually um and you know it is easier to to raise healthy children than to men broken adults well yeah isn't it yeah that's right that's right which is what you're doing what what now i've got your book here krish kandir the greatest secret i i love that but no go on what made you give it that title the greatest secret there well it's weird uh as we've talked about jaipaka said that adoption is the highest privilege that the gospel affords us yes and yet we don't really talk about it very much we talk about getting rescued or forgiven or redeemed or justified very rarely do we talk about being adopted but being adopted changes everything it changes how i pray to god the lord's prayer and adoption prayer it changes how i think about church church are my adopted family i don't just get adopted into god's you know the trinity father son and holy spirit that family i get adopted into a church so church isn't something i just turn up to once a week it's a family i belong to so this book tries to look at the whole christian life yeah and what does it mean to think about that in light of our adoption it changes everything so if any of our viewers have felt stirred i mean i feel sturdy chris you know you know we are talking um about a generation of children that need love and care uh and guidance um but if if any of our viewers are kind of feeling wow i've been thinking about this or i feel stirred to think about this it'll be great to read your book of course and to read a bit of your own story but what other advice would you give them well the easiest thing to do is to visit the home for good website homeforgood.org uk loads of incredible stories and videos and blogs from christians who have adopted or fostered and some really practical stuff there to kind of help you if you're in the uk you can phone us there's a lovely christian person who doesn't say how many rooms in your house what ethnicity are you but they'll help you and guide you through the journey and this is a uk problem but actually it's a global problem too in america there are 125 000 children waiting for adoption right now in the foster care system and a lot of people think oh i've got to raise loads of money it's expensive to adopt no it's completely free to adopt a child out of the foster care system in america so we'd love to help you with that we don't work in america but again you can contact us through our website to ask more questions about the process and okay someone's interested they feel stirred uh they make the the phone call obviously as we've heard with your own story sure you know that that there is a system uh there is a process but how long would it take if say you know um green it was green light or yeah how long would it take from today what we're finding actually is it really varies so our journey took us about nine months from when we made the call in oxfordshire to start the process and we had the right number of room nine months um to be approved and then very quickly we were looking after a little girl and in lockdown in some areas it's actually happened quicker and they work ways around some of the bureaucracy yeah they're still as rigorous but they've been doing it in weeks rather than months so some of it depends on the urgency of the need and some of it depends on the i suppose the bureaucratic process behind but either way we're really keen that that process is thorough and rigorous yeah i know my son and my daughter-in-law um they got approved oh well congratulations and they've had a number of people come fantastic children and it's it's been great so we got an inside view yeah they're a foster grandparent no no it's really exciting actually so just to reiterate krish um for those in the uk if they want to know any more they can contact your website it's on the screen now follow through if the viewer is watching from another country in another continent what advice would you give them well there isn't quite anyone quite like home for good in america there's lots of smaller organizations and there is a group called christian alliance for orphans which is like an umbrella organization that might be helpful but hey you know with the wonders of modern technology we we still might be able to help so look us up on social media reach out to us if we can help we'd love to be in touch brilliant krish kandia you are truly you and your wife and your family are an inspiration keep on keeping on thank you joe appreciate your help well wasn't that uh inspiring and actually hugely heartwarming and if you've been stirred today then make a call visit the website home for good talk to somebody get some more information and ask the lord to guide you thank you so much for joining us today on facing the canon please join us again [Music] you

Channel: J.John

Views: 1,933

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: j.john, jjohn, philo trust, philo, Christianity, Christian, Jesus, God, Fostering, Adoption, Home For Good, Krish Kandiah

Id: DjZFcJ4nIFo

Length: 28min 30sec (1710 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 14 2021