On aging out, the Church, and the family of God
Every year in Arizona, hundreds of young people age out of foster care. Across the country, it is tens of thousands. On paper, it looks like a graduation. A case closes. A file is archived. A young person becomes, legally, an adult.
But here is what I have learned — first by living it, and now by sitting with it every week as a therapist: most of these young people do not simply leave a system. They join a new one.
The system of homelessness. The system of welfare. The system of single parenthood, of survival jobs, of social isolation, of courtrooms and waiting rooms. They exchange the people who were paid to be in their lives for no one at all — because the paid people leave the day the case closes, and there was never anyone else.
I know, because I was one of them.
I aged out of Arizona foster care at 18. That summer I was homeless, couch-hopping, trying to hold a job I didn’t know how to keep and an apartment I couldn’t keep at all. And in the middle of that unraveling, in Prescott, I surrendered my heart to Christ. It did not make me instantly stable. It did not hand me a home or a family or a map. But it anchored something in me that nothing else had ever anchored, and it kept me reaching.
So when I ask this next question, I am asking it as someone who has sat on both sides of it.
Where do they end up on a Sunday morning?
Some of them end up nowhere, because no one ever showed them the way to anywhere. But some of them end up in church. And when they do, they often arrive the way I would have arrived: lost, confused, watching every face, waiting to find out whether this is another place they will have to earn, perform, or disappear to belong. And sometimes — I say this gently, because I love the Church — they arrive and are judged.
The church rarely sees what is actually sitting in its pews. It does not see the difference between mental health and mental illness and complex trauma. It does not recognize that the young woman who seems guarded, or too much, or hard to reach, is carrying a nervous system that was trained on threat before she could speak. And here is the tender irony: everything she is carrying can be read in the pages of Scripture. Abandonment. Exile. The ache for a household. The God who sets the lonely in families. This population may be one of the most unreached — and most easily reached — communities in America. They are already sitting there. They are waiting to find out if it is safe.
People sometimes ask me what I needed at 18. They expect me to say a program. A service. A resource packet.
I needed a mentor. I needed someone to check on me between Sundays. I needed invitations — to coffee, to holiday tables, to ordinary life. I needed practice at being a person among people.
More than anything, I needed relationships with people who were not paid to take care of me.
Read that last line again, because it is the whole thing. A young person who grows up in the system learns that care arrives on a schedule, attached to a case number, and ends at a birthday. What heals that is not another professional. It is a family that shows up on a Tuesday for no reason. It is someone who remembers your name in December. It is love with no invoice behind it.
The answer sitting in front of us
This is what I want to say to my brothers and sisters in the Church: within months of aging out, these young adults are woven into the fabric of our struggling communities. They are the subculture hiding in plain sight — at the bus stop, in the ER, in the pew three rows back. We keep asking how to fix our broken neighborhoods, and one of the answers has been sitting in front of us the whole time.
We can stop the cycle one young adult at a time.
Not with pity. Pity is just judgment wearing a soft voice. Not with a ministry program that ends when the grant does — they have already lived that story. What stops the cycle is simpler and costlier: becoming family that is safe. Predictable. Patient. Present. The kind of family whose love does not have to be earned and cannot be lost by having a hard week.
I became a therapist because of the witnesses I did not have. But I did not heal in a therapy office alone. I healed in kitchens and around tables and in the slow, unglamorous faithfulness of people who stayed. Some of what these young people need does require a professional. Most of it just requires a person.
Emancipation is not the end of the story. It was not the end of mine. And if the Church is willing to open its tables and its Tuesdays — not just its programs — it will find that the family of God was built for exactly this.
Family that is safe. That is the assignment. It always was.
About Kristi
Kristi M. Estrada, LPC-S, NCC, SEP, is a trauma therapist, Somatic Experiencing Practitioner, and Arizona Board-approved clinical supervisor, and the founder and clinical director of a group trauma practice in Phoenix. She entered foster care as a child and aged out at 18 — a history that now shapes her clinical work, her teaching, and her writing on developmental trauma, attachment repair, and nervous system healing. She speaks and trains for churches, agencies, foster and adoptive families, and clinicians, and is the creator of The Patterns That Protected You, a six-week course on understanding the survival patterns we build and what becomes possible when the body learns it is safe. A mother of six and grandmother of fourteen, she writes at healingservant.com. She became the witness she once needed.
Booking a training or podcast conversation: kristi@healingservant.com