The wish that fostered a ministry

Passionate about helping vulnerable children grow up in families rather than orphanages, Mick Pease has spent decades championing foster care around the world. He told Chris Rolfe how God birthed a global ministry from one moving conversation. 

“If you had one wish, what would it be?” Mick Pease asked the children in front of him.

His Russian translator began to cry.

“They said, ‘I want my mum and dad, my family’,” she told him.

This moment – at an orphanage in Tajikistan – changed Mick’s life.

A social worker by profession, he had spent years supporting children in care. Yet hearing those children’s answers brought home a simple truth.

“If children have a choice, they want to live in families,” he says.

“And if they can’t go safely home to their own parents or family, they can live with another safe family through foster care.

“It took a trip to the other side of the world to make me realise that.”   

THE ROAD TO MISSION   

It was this moment that led Mick to found SFAC – a charity that works with organisations around the world to improve the care and protection of children.

Yet God had been forging the way long before that trip.

Having worked as a coal miner, Mick then studied at Birmingham Bible College in the 1970s, there forming a life-long friendship with New Springs pastor Phil Weaver.

After graduation, while Phil pursued his calling to church ministry, Mick – who now attends Bridge Community Church Leeds – sensed God leading him in a different direction.

“You’d make a great social worker,” a friend suggested, and the idea resonated.

story continues…