Each November, as I watch churches around the world participate in Pure Religion Sunday, I can’t help but marvel at the story of what God has done — and is doing — through His people. Children welcomed into loving homes. Families reunited. Churches wrapping around foster and adoptive families and coming together to create lasting change in their communities.
As we prepare for Pure Religion Sunday 2025, I want to share part of that story with you, in the hope that you can see yourself in it, too. God is moving, and we get to be a part of it.
A movement born of faithfulness
Orphan Sunday began as a gift from the Church in Africa. In a small Zambian congregation, a pastor’s passionate call to care for orphaned children in a community devastated by AIDS moved his people to action — offering food, shoes and whatever they had to help children in need.
An American visitor, Gary Schneider, witnessed this powerful moment and helped share the vision globally. By 2009, the Christian Alliance for Orphans had begun coordinating Orphan Sunday as a movement to unite churches worldwide in reflecting God’s heart for orphaned and vulnerable children. Churches in more than 100 nations began observing Orphan Sunday each year.
At the same time Orphan Sunday was being born in Zambia, a similar movement was forming in a small congregation in Texas. Stand Sunday began when a Texas pastor and foster father Bishop Aaron Blake stood before his congregation and shared about children in foster care. When he asked, “Who will stand with me?,” one woman rose and said, “Pastor, I will.” One by one, others stood beside her — launching a community movement to care for vulnerable children and families.
A unified call to holiness — and helpfulness
Through the shared efforts of Orphan Sunday and Stand Sunday, for more than 20 years CAFO had been inviting the Church around the world to set aside the second Sunday in November as a unified day to see, serve and stand for orphaned and vulnerable children, and to take active measures to live out the holy and helpful “pure religion” described in the book of James and demonstrated all throughout Scripture.
Building on the legacy of Orphan and Stand Sunday, today Pure Religion Sunday stands as a singular, unified banner under which churches around the world can come together to recognize and respond to God’s heart for vulnerable children and families on the second Sunday in November and throughout the year.
Under the Pure Religion Sunday banner, expressions of what Pure Religion Sunday might look like from community to community and church to church reflect deep creativity, diversity and contextualization. One church may be caring for vulnerable children in rural Uganda, while another may be supporting the foster care community in the city of Detroit. Both of them, in unified but distinctively focused ways, are living out a “pure religion” that reflects the heart of the Father to the most vulnerable children and families among them.
Much more than an event
Pure Religion Sunday has grown into a global movement that now spans over 120 countries and thousands of churches on one unified day. It is a catalytic outworking and expression of what we believe as the broader CAFO community: that we are more effective together than we ever could be alone.
And it leads us to look broader — finding encouragement from our brothers and sisters around the world — and to look deeper — finding avenues for tangible, long-term action in our own communities.
Indeed, Pure Religion Sunday is a sacred moment each year for us to lift our eyes and see how God is moving not only in our local churches and communities, but all throughout the world. His heart for the vulnerable drives His actions, through His people, in beautifully diverse ways. And each of us gets to play a small yet significant role in that. Being reminded of this in a real and tangible way is one of the highest purposes and priorities of Pure Religion Sunday: we are not alone, we are co-laborers with our brothers and sisters as we look to Jesus to accomplish the redemption and renewal of all things.
God’s redemptive work isn’t about a single event, and neither is Pure Religion Sunday. Each Pure Religion Sunday service is a tool to go deeper, launching long-term engagement on behalf of vulnerable children and families. To that end, the resource library for Pure Religion Sunday is a deep well of practical, tangible, turn-key guides and videos and design files and more that are all uniquely created to help you leverage the power of Pure Religion Sunday in sustainable and impactful ways.
So as we continue to lean into the power of Pure Religion Sunday, we do so with a laser focus not on how we can simply host effective, isolated services. But rather on how we can use whatever expression of Pure Religion Sunday God is inviting us to partake in as an incubator for awareness that drives lifelong action.
It is a means by which you can deepen your church’s understanding of James 1:27 as a calling rooted in discipleship and can provide on-ramps for new ministry involvement focusing on foster care, adoption, global orphan care and wrap-around support.
How will you be swept up in the story?
This is the power of Pure Religion Sunday. Inspiring, equipping, celebrating, calling, encouraging and supporting — in our local communities and together with the Church around the world.
What a joy it is to be a part of something so much bigger than ourselves; to be swept up by His grace into His movement of seeing every orphaned and vulnerable child know and experience His love in powerfully rich ways.
I can’t wait to see what God does through you — through us — as His Church embodies pure religion. What a gift to behold.
– Jason Johnson is the National Director of Church Engagement and Mobilization at CAFO.
Is your church participating in Pure Religion Sunday this year?
We want to hear your stories! Tag us on social media @cafoalliance when you post about your events. Tell us how you’ve seen God at work in your congregation and community this year using this Pure Religion Sunday 2025 Story Gathering Form and we may feature your church on a future blog post!
