Father's Day 2024: Local pastor adopts sixth child

This article appeared on the front page of The Independent on June 18, 2024

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Father’s Day 2024:  Local pastor adopts sixth child

Some dads are easily blessed with children.

Others have had to work at it.

Still others surprise and inspire us, especially when love itself wins.

This past Friday, June 14, Reverend Doctor William Hagenbuch of Kingsley adopted his sixth child. All his children are full siblings. The pastor of the First Congregational-UCC Church in Harford adopted his first five children on June 17, 2022. Hagenbuch’s oldest is now eleven. The toddler, who was just adopted, is two.

Judge Andrew Jurbala of Lackawanna County presided over both adoptions. At the first adoption, the judge leaned forward from his high seat. “I’ve never seen a man like this in all my years behind the bench. This pastor shows remarkable compassion, dedication, and sacrifice.”

At the hearing when the five were adopted just before Father’s Day weekend in 2022, the judge, who had assigned the case since its start, shared with those in the courtroom, “Most stories don’t go like this. The children are split up.”

Looking straight at Hagenbuch, he said, “You, sir, are to be commended.”

A children and youth caseworker Hagenbuch worked with before meeting the five older children for the first time said moments after the first adoption hearing, “A lot of pastors talk a lot. This one actually does a lot. When it comes to backing what he stands for, and in living the faith he was called into, this one is an example.”

Five is a lot.

Then came the sixth.

A month after the first adoption, Hagenbuch received a phone call from another caseworker. The newborn baby brother to the five was just placed into care.

“I will never forget that call,” Hagenbuch said.

Before these adoptions, Hagenbuch, a want to be dad, tried to adopt a newborn through a private adoption agency. After two and a half years, and a lot of heartache from mothers considering adoption plans, Hagenbuch’s $25,000.00 contract expired. “There were five birth moms over the course of time I was with the agency. There were five losses—all boys. Each loss felt like a miscarriage.”

The last connection was the hardest. Hagenbuch flew out to Iowa twice to meet and get better acquainted with a birth mom.

On the second flight home, I had the ultrasound in hand,” he said. “You can imagine that joy. Then she changed her mind.”

Entering the foster care system nothing Hagenbuch wanted to do. The profiles he had access to as an approved foster parent brought what is referred to as secondhand trauma.

Through the Statewide Adoption Network (SWAN), Hagenbuch attended a meet and greet at a sports center in Scranton and a Matching Event in the Poconos. These opportunities were the best the admittedly broken system could do, but they were incredibly heartbreaking to the man of God who, at this point, began his doctoral work at Lancaster Theological Seminary.

Then, after a message Hagenbuch says he received from God about five cats (that is five children), a profile of five siblings who could possibly be eligible for adoption came to him.

“Yes,” he said the moment the photo of the five was handed to him.

Hagenbuch didn’t hesitate. He didn’t think twice.

Because the children had such needs, the five had been split into three different foster homes prior to Hagenbuch learning of them. Over the span of three months which began in late December of 2019, all five children reunited under one roof—Hagenbuch’s. The oldest child was almost seven. The youngest child was eighteen months old.

Then Covid hit.

The needs of the five remained tremendous, particularly since four of the five were in pullups or diapers. One continues to thrive with educational and social delays.

Hagenbuch never could have done what he did had the demands of his fulltime career been what they were prior to Covid.

He smiles warmly. “There was my life before kids. Then there is this life with kids. This life with is better, way better. Oh, it’s crazy hard somedays because of my work schedule. Time is not always my friend, especially with six. So I do what I preach and teach, which is trust God.”

On Saturday, June 15^th, the day after the adoption, the family celebrated the baby’s baptism at the pastor’s historic church. This church has been a part of his family’s faith tradition since the area was founded by a group from Attleboro, Massachusetts, known as the Nine Partners, in 1790. Hagenbuch is a seventh-generation descendant of John Carpenter, one of the partners.

Nancy Burris of Nicholson, who is the Godparent to the oldest girl, says, “I love this family and I love this church. What Will does here, and what he does as parent and pastor with his kids and with each of us, his congregation, is remarkable.”

Kathy Brown of Hallstead once said of the then father of five what is even more true today. “This love story is Will’s mission, his call. This is the church’s call, too.”