Missions Catalyst 06.13.07 – Practical Mobilization

In This Issue: Learning to Love Refugees

  • INTERVIEW – Learning to Love Refugees
  • EXTRA – More Resources

Missions Catalyst is a free, weekly electronic digest of mission news and resources designed to inspire and equip Christians worldwide for global ministry. Use it to fuel your prayers, find tips and opportunities, and stay in touch with how God is building his kingdom all over the world. Please forward it freely!

Practical Mobilization by Shane Bennett is published once a month.

INTERVIEW – Learning to Love Refugees

By Shane Bennett

For years I have wanted to take a youth group on a short-term in which they’d hang out in the midst of an unreached group in a U.S. city. A few months ago I found a pastor willing to say, “Sure, let’s give it a try.” I began looking for someone working in such a situation and a friend connected me with Annette. Her help was just what we need for this experience to succeed.

Annette gives her days and nights to caring for refugees and immigrants, extending the loving arms of Jesus to the very kind of people Jesus liked to hug when he walked the planet. Now she’s also helping our rag-tag band of Pueblo, Colorado youth learn to love her friends as well. Before putting her on the flight home from our training weekend, I was able to sit down with Annette and ask her some questions about life and ministry. The conversation brought home to me the value that one person’s talent, insight, and passion can be to another.

How long have you been in your current role?

Since late 1999. About eight and a half years.

What is your mandate, your assignment?

The same as our whole organization: To work with the peoples of Africa wherever they may be. My role specifically is to oversee a team of workers scattered around the country, reaching out to foreign-born Africans in the U.S.

Our work varies. Some focus on English as a Second Language, offering Bible studies in English. One doctor reaches out by starting interest groups with Africans who work at the same hospital as him. A couple in Wichita raise goats and will roast one occasionally for African international students. The students feel like they’re back home and the couple helps them return to the faith they followed in Africa. A woman helps with the missions and children’s program in an African church, helping them in their efforts to be a blessing in India and other countries. One couple in Los Angeles lives among Muslims and is devoted to loving them.

What are some key lessons you’ve learned about caring for refugees?

I’m learning to move beyond rescuing toward development. I want us to do more than just give money. I want to build relational connection. So I try to help people move toward relationships with refugees so they can help refugees move toward self-sufficiency.

I’m also learning to allow reciprocity, to expect and allow relationships to enrich both parties. I’ve been touched to receive care and concern from the hands and hearts of refugees I’m connected to. And then I’m also trying to learn to discern which needs to help with, and which ones to let go. There are so many. It’s difficult for me to realize which ones I should respond to.

If you had two dozen people like yourself to deploy throughout the U.S., where would you put them?

Any large city is loaded with refugees: I saw five Africans just as we turned in the rental car in Denver this morning. Another example: Sioux Falls, South Dakota is home to 3000 Sudanese. I’d love to see someone focusing on refugees in Louisville, Kentucky. We have three people in Minneapolis, Minnesota, but could use more people to serve the 70,000 Somalis living there. I’d also send someone to Portland and San Diego to love the Somalis and Sudanese in those two towns.

(If you’re reaching out to refugees in the areas Annette mentions, I’d love to hear about it. SB)

This article is for mobilizers who are keen to release the talent and passion resident in the people they minister to, people who often don’t have a ton of time to invest – at least at the start! Can you tell me how a normal person can get involved in loving refugees if they have one hour per week to invest?

Apply at a World Relief office, if one is nearby, and volunteer in an English class. This builds respect and relationship that can bump out of the class into real life. Also consider in-home English tutoring. If World Relief isn’t near, check with International Students Incorporated.

I don’t recommend that people just try to do something on their own. They’ll be less frustrated if they have someone show the way. Much of what our team does ends up fitting the personality of the team members, so it depends on who the person is and what’s comfortable for them. Of course, we want to move toward a little bit uncomfortable.

What if they have one evening per week?

Try in-home tutoring, likely growing out of relationships built in a formal English class.

And if they have one day per week to invest?

Give rides to appointments, hang out at refugee apartment complex, and find ways to build respect and trust so that you’re invited to participate in life.

If a whole church wants to get involved in loving refugees, how might they start?

Begin by reading Externally Focused Church, by Rusaw and Swanson. Also take a look at Robert Lupton’s Compassion, Justice, and the Christian Life and Robert Lewis’s The Church of Irresistible Influence. Then get out and build bridges. Ask the community what you can do to serve. Strive to become a church that the community would miss if you left.

What are some of the greatest rewards in your work?

The relationships have been incredible. I’ve attended two births and am second mom to seven children! I’ve become part of the family, weeping with Sudanese friends when their president died in a helicopter crash. I like the combination of working with some Christians, where I see growth and change, and at the same time also hanging with Muslims, where things are slower. I lived overseas and came back to the U.S. against my plans. It helps to continue to have African relationships. In general, my life is richer for being around other cultures.

If you’d like more info on Annette’s work, send a note to me and I’ll pass it on to her. If you’d like to share about cool refugee work you’re familiar with, please do. If you know of domestic, unreached-focused short-term projects, please pass along some information about them. I’d love to highlight a few next month. Finally, if you live and work among unreached people in the U.S. and would welcome a bundle of wild-eyed kids who love Jesus to hang out with you, please write!

EXTRA – More Resources

Pat, our newsbrief editor, adds, “You don’t have to be in an urban area to help a refugee family. Check out local universities even if you are in rural America. Meet international students and ask about their country and the needs there. And don’t assume if you are outside the radius of the resettlement office that you can’t sponsor a refugee. All you have to do is show your church or organization has the capacity and will to help. My friend J. and her family will be arriving in upstate New York this summer, more than 100 miles from the resettlement agency in Syracuse! If anyone is interested in her story they can email me.”

Here are a few related resources members of our Missions Catalyst staff use and recommend:

Books

The Middle of Everywhere: Helping Refugees Enter the American Community, by Mary Pipher [not specifically Christian.]
A Beginner’s Guide to Crossing Cultures: Making Friends in a Multi-cultural World, by Patty Lane [includes illustrations of issues churches face as they host or partner with ethnic congregations.]
Serving With Eyes Wide Open: Doing Short-term Missions with Cultural Intelligence, by David Livermore [written with a short-term mission focus, but most of the ideas are relevant for any cross-cultural work.]

Web Site

Ethnic Harvest – Resources for multi-cultural ministry [and lots of free articles to download!]

All these have a definite American slant. Our publishing arm distributes a prayer guide called The New Faces of Europe – Immigrants and Refugees. Readers, can you suggest some resources from/for other parts of the world? Let us know!

Questions? Problems? Submissions? Contact publisher/managing editor Marti Smith.

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