Why the Church Needs to Care About Refugees

Through Moses, God ordered the Israelites to care for the aliens among them. The Israelites and the apostles were told to care for strangers. Jesus told the story of the Good Samaritan. Every sermon you’ve ever heard should echo our world’s reality—that sin and suffering are present and Jesus is the eternal fix. As the Body of Christ, Christians are called to be instrumental in setting things right.

It may seem obvious, therefore, that Christians should care about the suffering of millions of people around the world.

And yet the Church has a hard time doing what it knows it must.

Because it is hard. Because it is scary. Because it comes at a cost.

And because it is hard, scary, and costly, we have talked ourselves out of it. We have heeded politicians and Breaking News reports flashing across our television screens, convincing ourselves that we don’t need to care, or that we need to care more about ourselves than others, or that our good intentions and good sentiments are somehow adequate manifestations of our caring.

Those are lies.

What is true is that we need to genuinely care about the uprooted, care for them as much as we care about ourselves, and let that caring inform our actions (James 2:15-17; 1 John 3:17-18).

Why We Care

We are each persuaded by different arguments. I wish all Christians would immediately acknowledge their privileges and responsibilities toward the stranger, but the condition of our world proves that this does not always happen. Something doesn’t compute.

We can resort to any number of reasons to inspire care for refugees, many of which are convincing enough: humanist morality, human rights, a plain gut feeling, natural law, and the fact that the problem of refugeeism is worsening and will only become harder to address going forward.

From a more theological approach, we can point to Church history, the Christian tradition of saints and servants welcoming strangers, and the need for a consistent witness. After all, how can Christians say they love people if they ignore them? How can we care for the downtrodden if we reject them? More practically, what does it mean for Christians to promote peace at the same time as it supports pumping the Middle East full with instruments of war? What does it mean for the Church to seek salvation for people, but leave them—or send them back—to conditions of war and persecution? It is not a consistent Christian witness to love people while abandoning them. It is not consistent to seek to save souls but not to feed bodies.

But beyond those reasons, we have the voice of God in his Word and we have our own experience.

God’s Voice in the Word

Scripture is bubbling over with words about the stranger and how God’s people should treat them. Do not oppress foreigners because you were foreigners in Egypt (Ex. 23:9). Do not mistreat aliens in your land (Lev. 19:33). Defend the fatherless and love the stranger by giving him food and clothing (Deut. 10:18-19). God provides a refuge, a fortress, a shelter, deliverance (Deut. 33:27; 2 Sam. 22:2-3; Psalm 9:9; 59:16; Is. 25:4; Jer. 16:19). He leads people out of deserts, wastelands, hunger, and thirst, into cities where they can settle (Psalm 107:4-7). Through his Church he feeds, quenches, invites, clothes, heals, visits, and provides for people (Matt. 25:25-26; Luke 3:11). Through his Son and now through his people, he opens his door to the traveler and suffers with those who suffer (Job 31:32; Heb. 13:2-3). The truth is revealed: “The Lord is good, a refuge in times of trouble” (Nahum 1:7).

Some might object that the verses above—and, perhaps, throughout this book—are cherry-picked for the purposes of abetting a pro-refugee agenda. “Look at these verses in context,” will be the clarion call. That is sometimes a legitimate, even wise, rebuttal. But it is also worth mentioning that with hundreds of verses to choose from in defense of the stranger, spread across the Torah, the Prophets, the Gospels, and the Letters, written by many different authors in hugely various circumstances, it hardly seems possible that, taken together, their most obvious meaning could be terribly off the mark. The context of Israel, the context of the Church, and the context of all of Scripture is one of being and receiving aliens.

We ought not to be lazy in our interpretation of Scripture, nor permit the bias of culture to dominate our bias toward Christ, but we ought also to agree from the outset that we will not run from the plain truth of the gospel. Even if it is hard. Especially if it is hard.

God speaks with such clarity about his place as Savior, our place as pilgrims and pathfinders, and our role in providing sanctuary for the wanderer. In that clarity, let us not say and do things contrary to the way of Christ. The Church must reject the cognitive dissonance of preaching one thing and doing another, of claiming the Bible says things it does not say or is silent in places where it speaks volumes.

Treating refugees fairly and compassionately is part of the biblical mandate. We cannot ignore or reject those whom God loves. Scripture instructs those of us who have much to become like Jesus, sharing ourselves and our possessions with those who have less. We have the model of Job, the blueprint of the apostles, the life of Christ.

We often describe hospitality as a particularly Eastern virtue. The call to hospitality however, is not restricted to the domain of any borders or peoples, but is the command to all Christians everywhere. It is not a cultural value, but a gospel one.

With the gospel as our lens, the theological arguments and moral exhortations for the Church to care for refugees are endless. Hundreds of Bible verses could be employed to prompt us to serve refugees. Stories of saints and servants could fill libraries. But the point is worth belaboring with yet one final reason—that we ourselves are refugees.

Christians as Refugees

Like Abraham, like Joseph, like Jesus, we are all refugees.

It’s not until we realize this simple truth—not as a metaphor or a bumper sticker, but as plain fact—that we can adequately and compassionately begin to address the most serious human issue facing our world today.

The entire Christian story—your story and mine—is one of the loss of a homeland, a wandering in a dirty and broken world, and a hopeful longing for the full and felt redemption of our eternal homecoming.

Our forebears fled Eden, then Egypt, then Judea. They sought refuge in caves and in foreign capitals. They knew the desperate need for shelter and security. They knew thirst and the feeling of being chased.

Our world is never quite home. A sinful planet was never our first address. Our hearts are here, but turning elsewhere. Toward a house of many mansions. Toward a King.

The Christian is in her very nature a wanderer, living between Egypt and Canaan, between her present condition and her future perfection. Christians as refugees of faith do not look heavenward in the way of those with Right of Return. Rather, we look to God who grants the Grace of Return.

And return, one day, we will.

Transformation out of Recognition

This displacement must transform us practically and spiritually, day by day. But in thinking about how to serve the poor and homeless of the world, we need to acknowledge our heritage and our reality. To say our story is the same as that of a persecuted ethnic group driven from their home in Southeast Asia or African farmers forced across borders by famine is, of course, a lie, and one that sanitizes and cheapens their tragedy. Today’s western Christians have not endured the hardship, the fear, the hunger, or the persecution that 65 million displaced people are experiencing at this very moment.

The refugee status of the western Church is mostly spiritual. The refugee status of so many men, women, and children around the world today is physical and geographic, and it is threatening to kill them.

But it cannot be overlooked that the history of the Church is a history of refugees.

We were expelled from the thrilling ambrosial perfection of pure creation, cast out by a righteous God responding to the whips and wiles of sin. We’ve resettled East of Eden in the camp of a fallen world, making our way as best we can, pilgrims and wayfarers awaiting a sojourn back to somewhere better. That waiting, that hopefulness and desire, is the key to realizing the truth about ourselves and why we must care about refugeeism today. Though no one alive has ever known the goodness of the world’s first days in the sun, all Christians—like all refugees—long for a far country, a fair Kingdom, a satisfying paradise, where for the first time we will say truly and wholeheartedly, “We are home.”