The Teens Who Rewrote Family

What's happening

A bill called the Soul Act, short for Support, Opportunity, Unity and Legal Relationships, sits before the D.C. Council. More than two dozen people who grew up in the District's foster care system co-wrote it, with help from the Children's Law Center and Family & Youth Initiative. Among them: Marea, an 18-year-old college freshman; Dayar Brown-Gurowitz; Princess Simms; and Justice Thurston, who spent eight years in care.

The bill creates a fourth legal permanency option for older foster teens: a legally binding network of trusted adults, a teacher for college guidance, a different caregiver for housing, without forcing the youth to sever ties to biological family. Roughly 16% of D.C. foster youth exit without permanent family support, twice the national average. Kansas became the first state to enact a Soul law in 2024, approving 40 Soul families in its first year. D.C. could be the second jurisdiction. The framers are teenagers redefining what counts as kin.

What the Text says

The most consequential redefinition of family in the New Testament happens while Jesus's mother is standing outside trying to reach him.

Mark 3:31-3531His mother and his brothers came, and standing outside, they sent to him, calling him.32A multitude was sitting around him, and they told him, "Behold, your mother, your brothers, and your sisters are outside looking for you."33He answered them, "Who are my mother and my brothers?"34Looking around at those who sat around him, he said, "Behold, my mother and my brothers!35For whoever does the will of God, the same is my brother, and my sister, and mother."

In the honor-shame culture of first-century Galilee, the family unit was the basic ledger of identity. A man's mother and brothers carried his name, his obligations, his future. To gesture past them, in public, toward a circle of strangers and call that family was a social rupture so sharp it barely registers in modern reading.

The Greek verb here is esti, the simple "is." Whoever does the will of God is my brother and sister and mother. Not "is like." The fictive kinship language of the early church grew out of this sentence. Paul's adelphoi, the household codes of the Epistles, the assumption that strangers in Christ owe each other what blood owes blood, all of it traces back to a moment when Jesus widened the family without renouncing the mother at the door.

The reflection

It is worth sitting with the fact that a group of 18-year-olds, with no theological agenda and no church behind them, walked into a council building and rediscovered a category that Scripture has been working in since Ruth clung to Naomi.

They called it Soul. They could have called it almost anything. What they were reaching for is older than the bill, older than the foster system, older than the city.

Family, in the Text, has always been wider than blood and stricter than affection. It is what you bind yourself to.