General director Steve Clifford reflects as Home for Good becomes its own charity today…

Every 20 minutes, a child is taken into care. There are 9,000 children in need of fostering and a further 6,000 awaiting adoption.

Let those figures sink in for a moment.

I don't know about you, but I find the scale of this reality heartbreaking.

Each of these precious lives is important to God and so it's important to us.

Today – 75 years after the government of Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain activated Operation Pied Piper to evacuate children during World War Two – we have launched a rescue mission of our own as our Home for Good campaign becomes a charity in its own right.

It's a proud day for me and for the rest of the Alliance family. Because a campaign like Home for Good is just the sort of thing that evangelicals should be known for; and the fact that it was a joint initiative between ourselves Care for the Family and CCPAS demonstrates the unity to which we firmly believe we have been called.

During the initial stages of Home for Good two years ago, we as a leadership team felt compelled that rallying churches to be places of refuge, compassion and hope for so many of these children was something we were willing to pour resources into.

And we are so glad we did. As, along with the Home for Good team, we've been overwhelmed by the passion individual Christians and churches working together in their areas have shown. The Church in this nation takes seriously God's call on us to "look after widows and orphans" as we are told to in James 1:27.

It's not that Home for Good is leaving us. (In fact, they will remain based at our resource centre in King's Cross and we'll be able to celebrate their successes across our open space area.) But by becoming its own charity, we hope that we are giving Home for Good the space to become even more effective. And like with all of the organisations and members we work with, we will remain united in mission with them.

This feels like a landmark moment for us as an organisation. The potential for Home for Good is huge. In the same way that Tearfund was incubated and birthed out of the Alliance nearly 50 years ago, we pray that it will go from strength to strength – not for its own sake – but for the sake of those children desperately in need of homes for good.