09/22/2025
James 1:27 says, “Pure and genuine religion in the sight of God the Father means caring for orphans and widows in their distress and refusing to let the world corrupt you.”
This week a team from Tyndale is in Costa Rica, visiting long-time Tyndale House Foundation partner Casa Viva. Casa Viva is an organization focused on caring for orphans and other children-at-risk by ensuring they are placed in families, not orphanages, to receive ideal care when they need it most.
Casa Viva founder and president Phil Aspegren walked the team through an exercise to demonstrate the importance of family-based care. You can do it with us. Close your eyes, and picture a child you love deeply. Maybe it’s your child, or maybe it’s someone else’s. Either way, if the worst happened, and you or the child’s parents were for whatever reason no longer able to care for that child, what would you want to happen? Would you want that child to be placed in an orphanage? Of course not. Even the best orphanages run by the most godly, well-meaning saints can’t provide the kind of personalized care, attention, and love that children need. No, you would want the child you love placed in a family that would love him or her with the kind of parental love every child craves.
That’s what the amazing team at Casa Viva is helping to ensure happens in Costa Rica and increasingly throughout Latin America as other governments and child-advocacy agencies see what’s happening there and ask Casa Viva experts to help them do something similar in other countries.
Their time here has been rich and rewarding and challenging and heartbreaking all at the same time. It’s a privilege to partner with organizations like Casa Viva who are acting as Christ’s hands and feet on the front lines of international ministry and living out “pure and genuine” religion by caring for the most vulnerable.
This update was provided by Jeremy Taylor, who is Chief Ministry Officer of the Tyndale House Foundation.
Please join us as we pray for their week of serving alongside the Casa Viva team in Costa Rica!
Learn more about the Tyndale House Foundation: https://www.tyndale.com/foundation
